Quick Hamlet Update

British Literature

September 7th, 2010

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We read through III.i in class today. Your work for the evening:

Let me not burst in ignorance!

British Literature

September 1st, 2010

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Our foray into Hamlet has begun. Here is the plan for this work:

  1. We’ll watch 2-3 scenes per day, pausing when necessary for immediate clarification. As you watch, follow along with the text in your books or on the screen, recording questions, reactions, insights, and connections.
  2. Each night you should read back over the scenes, answering questions as you can, looking up information, asking more questions, recording more insights and connections.
  3. Come to class the next day ready to ask your questions about the previous night’s reading and help others answer theirs.
  4. Repeat.

You will write over Hamlet and the poems for your midterm (due tentatively by 30 September). While I will not give you a required topic to write over, it would be a good idea to start with those poems (3-5) that you feel the most comfortable with and find connections to Hamlet’s story as we move forward. I will give you guidance as I check your journals (at least once weekly from now on, but if you are uncomfortable with your grade you may come see me before or after school to ask questions or show me your progress) and we will be discussing these connections as we move through the work.

The writing process for my classes is as follows:

  1. Journaling (yep, you’ve already started your papers! How do they look so far?)
  2. Review of your notes, looking for patterns and connections. If more research is required, it is done at this stage.
  3. Outlining your ideas, ensuring sufficient support for your points and an appropriate thesis statement.
  4. Peer review, presentation of outlines. This ensures that your ideas and connections are clear to you and others.
  5. Revision of outlines, peer review as necessary.
  6. Rough drafting of the paper, watching for proper style, grammar, etc.
  7. Peer review of rough drafts followed by a one-on-one review with me.
  8. Revision of rough draft into final draft.
  9. Peer review, revise (last time!) then turn it in.

It seems like a lot of work (and it should), but if you have thoroughly journaled a work (plenty of quotations, answered questions, and connections), the outline only requires organizing your thoughts and information, the rough draft entails making the information clear and engaging, and the final draft is a run-through for grammar and punctuation.

So, what’s the punchline? Journal well, my friends, and ask plenty of questions.

Journal Grades

British Literature

August 26th, 2010

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With the exception of the final paragraph, his post applies to both 3rd and 5th hour. All should have a solid journal section over Donne’s “Meditation #17” by Monday. Third hour: I’ll be checking your journals then as well, so learn from those who went before you.

In an effort to make the gradebook mean something to you, I’ve broken down the “Journal” assignment into five skills, each worth five points. The following is a list of the five with explanations and examples from our readings.

Record Personal Connections—reactions to the text, parts you think are interesting, etc. It’s always a good thing to remember cool stuff you read, and gives you plenty to discuss in class.

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim (Kipling 9-10)

A warning against losing sight of the things in front of you, of thinking without discovering ideas, perhaps?

Record Literary Connections—thematic connections to other works, allusions to characters or themes in other works, etc. These connections are the bread-and-butter of literary analysis. As you begin writing, you can use the theme in another work to help you understand the work you’re reading, or vice versa. Plus, looking for thematic connections will help you write papers over a topic (like Isolation) amongst several works.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” (Shelley 10-11)

Ramesses II? Watchmen? Seems like Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida”

Record Questions and Answers—parts you are confused about, possible answers. Ever get stuck or frustrated with a complicated reading only to drop it and realize in class the next day that you still don’t know what is going on? Recording questions as they pop up allows you to set them aside for later (either in class or after you’ve read further). Once you’ve found the answer (after discussion or insight through further reading), record it and you’re good to go.

I see the boys of summer in their ruin (Thomas 1)

Who are the boys of summer?

Record Vocabulary—words you aren’t familiar with and definitions. Because learning words is good.

Record Synopses—recount the story, line, or passage in your own words. This will help you work out difficult passages and remember what you are reading. I do this for all the characters, too, ‘cause I have a hard time keeping them straight at times. It is also helpful to record the tone or theme presented, as you might come across a shift, or be able to make connections to other works with similar ideas.

WE wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties. (Dunbar 1-5)

We hide ourselves (our personalities? our beliefs? our fears and shortcomings? our pain?) in a deceitful world while our speech is distorted and circumlocutionary.

You’ll notice that most of the responses here are questions or tentative answers. The reading journal is a place for experimenting, for making guesses about a work and finding counter-evidence, revising the hypothesis and finding more support. It is for prewriting. Once you have a solid grasp on a work, you are ready to organize your ideas and share them in an essay ((Why checking the etymology of a word is the best thing ever: essay.)). I emphasize the journals so heavily not only because they will make you better writers and readers, but also because they will make you better students; this reading strategy applies to all types of study, regardless of field.

So. If you feel that your grade isn’t what it should be, take the advice I gave you in class today go back over the poems more closely and record your thoughts. Bring your brilliant new insights to me before or after school (or during lunch) Monday and I’ll give you some feedback and make your grade reflect your awesomeness.

A Defense of Poetry and Connotative Discrepancies

British Literature

August 14th, 2009

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Yesterday I called poetry a “misunderstood creature.” This stemmed from the fact that few people read poetry, and even fewer consume it. ((This is based on a completely un-scientific sampling of people I’ve known. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who read poetry on a regular basis.)) The question that arises, then, is “why do we need to learn about it?”

Here was my answer: ((I know that there have been hundreds of defenses of poetry written—a colleague recently recommended Edmond Spenser’s “the pleasure of poetry . . . inculcates forms of profitable pleasure,” which, I just Googlearned, comes from Horace.))

Poetry : absurd thinking : : Math equations : logic. To put it a different way, poetry helps us define our associative muscles, helps us better make metaphorical connections within our world. I’ve been saying for years that we think and communicate in metaphor. In order to explain something to someone else, we usually compare the unknown to something known. The example I gave in class is that a plantain is like a banana, but brown or green, less sweet, and more starchy. I relied on your understanding of what a banana looks like, then modified it to help you imagine an unknown fruit.

Poetry works the same way. When Wilfred Owen ((Who, I just learned, was killed in battle one week before the end of the war…)) tosses image after image at his readers in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” he is setting a scene that contrasts greatly with the common understanding of war. By comparing soldiers to “hags,” he undermines his audience’s image of the great and proud British soldier, and delivers the final blow by following a painfully descriptive account of the death of a soldier with “the old lie” that “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

There is a psychological term for our image of “war” and “bananas”; it is called a schema. While mathematical thinking helps us to better think on the literal, logical level by manipulating variables and such, poetry and literature allow us to improve our metaphorical thinking. We are building schemata by vicariously experiencing new events and ideas, then breaking them down and rebuilding them as we analyze.

So what’s the point? I recently read Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, and they gave a solid explanation of what they call “generative analogies”:

Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years. It’s easier to define how a computer works than to define how the brain works. For this reason it can be fruitful for psychologists to use various, well-understood aspects of a computer—such as memory, buffers, or processors —as inspiration to locate similar functions in the brain.

Good metaphors are "generative." The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." ((Heath, Chip. Made to Stick. New York: Random House, 2007. 60. Print.))

Thinking metaphorically, even absurdly, allows us to come up with novel ideas, with new ways of thinking. ((See John von Neumann’s The Computer and the Brain)) Mathematical equations allow us to better comprehend the world as we know it within the boundaries of logic. Poetry and literature help us better understand ideas an concepts that aren’t logical—emotions, relationships, inventions “that just shouldn’t work” (think DaVinci or Escher, as much artists as they were mathematicians), innovative ways of looking at the world—that, my friends, is why we read poetry.

The Assignment

Find two words with nearly identical definitions in two separate contexts (or write two different contexts around similar words) that emphasize two different connotations.

For example:

Today I told the story of Joe from Johnny Got His Gun, which presented a terrifying vision of what it means to be isolated. The connotation comes from the main character’s terror, helplessness, and inability to communicate.

In Pablo Neruda “Unity,” however, gives us a very different view of what it means to be isolated:

I work quietly, wheeling over myself,
a crow over death, a crow in mourning.
I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons,
centric, encircled by a silent geometry:
a partial temperature drifts down from the sky,
a distant empire of confused unities
reunites encircling me. ((Neruda, Pablo. “Unity.” Poets.org. 2005. Web.))

Better example

From Shelby:

She chose the color blue. Colors are not something I considered for this project, but would work very well. If you are having trouble finding a word that works for this project, try a color, an emotion, an element (earth, fire, water, wind).

I found “Goodbye Blue Sky” from Pink Floyd and I think it works. When it refers to "blue sky," I think it means goodbye to peace and normality not necessarily a pretty blue sky.

Did you see the frightened ones
Did you hear the falling bombs
Did you ever wonder
Why we had to run for shelter
When the promise of a brave new world
Unfurled beneath a clear blue sky
Oooooooo ooo ooooo oooh
Did you see the frightened ones
Did you hear the falling bombs
The flames are all long gone
But the pain lingers on
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye blue sky
Goodbye
Goodbye

 

Alright, my second one is Elvis’ “Blue Christmas.” In this case the word blue is used as a synonym for sad or down. Elvis does an interesting thing in this song, when he uses the colors red, green and white he means the actual color but when blue is used it could be removed and replaced with sad or depressing.

Ill have a blue Christmas without you
Ill be so blue just thinking about you
Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree
Wont be the same dear, if youre not here with me
And when those blue snowflakes start falling
Thats when those blue memories start calling
Youll be doin all right, with your Christmas of white
But Ill have a blue, blue blue blue Christmas
Youll be doin all right, with your Christmas of white,
But Ill have a blue, blue Christmas.

Post your examples below. If you have any questions, post them below as well or email me.

Poetry Redux

British Literature

August 13th, 2009

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We discussed two poems today: “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” I was glad to hear that a number of you were familiar with Dunbar’s poem (from Jan’s class?), as the historical background helps clear up his references to the artillery and gear of a WWI soldier. The poem’s link above has explanatory notes if you are still unsure about a few things.

While the site I pulled the text from seems to be down at the moment, I did come across a video of Plath reading her poem:

Do you think of the poem differently after hearing the author read it?

I was greatly impressed by your interpretations today. This is a very complex piece, and it’s great to see that you are able to tackle it so early in the year.

We will continue our discussion tomorrow with hope that you will gain a better understanding of this misunderstood creature we call poetry.