This week we had all of the presentations on the elements of fiction. Going into the start of presentations I didn't know what to expect. I already had a base knowledge of what the elements were and I feared that the presentations would get really repetitive. However, I was presently surprised. The presentations enhanced my knowledge of each element and showed how they related to each other. Characterization, for example, is closely related to structure because the structure in literature is how the characters develop throughout the story. Humor works with theme in the sense of they both are used to highlight truths about human ideals. With these elements interacting with each other makes literary works of art possible. By allowing complex thoughts to be presented in humors, or disguised fashions, we gain knowledge without even knowing it. On the other hand, we had to also give our first presentations of the year this week. I felt as though the structure of our presentation was kind of open ended even though we had that video to guide us. In most all of my past presentation, I try very had to not put a lot of information of the slides and leave it to me to explain to the class. I just know from experience how much it bugs me when people read everything right off the slide. Therefore, I tried hard to do this in my presentation on the elements. I also took into account the idea of relating to the audience with your presentations. So we added memes in our slides that connected to the content as well as adding some humor. Overall, this week was full of new knowledge in a relax setting. Good presentations
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When choosing our elements of fiction, I was drawn to humor because of the titles of the short stories we were going to read. "The Drunkard" and " Rape Fantasies" already seem ironic without even reading with them. After reading both stories, I knew it was ironic, but narrowing down exactly what was ironic was a little tricky. I eventually got the hang of it once I gave it some thought.
In "The Drunkard" , the irony comes in because the son despises his father's drinking problem. But when the time comes, the son is quick to finish the whole pint of alcohol he took from the bar his father was sitting at. "Rape Fantasies" has the irony right in the title. Rape is definitely not something we are supposed to fantasize about. This story highlights the double standard we have in society. The women were appalled when rape was brought up in the conversation, but yet they all had their own fantasies about the "perfect" situation. "if the guy was good looking and rich" the women would say, "then i'd let it happen". These stories had obvious irony in them, like most stories do. Not only does irony help add humor to the story, but it presents lessons in a low key, satirical way. is that irony? This week we chipped away at the big project we got last week. Grace and I focused this week on the humor aspect. The informative packet talked mostly about irony and its different types. So I feel like I have a good idea of what irony is, but identifying it in the short stories is not as easy. I could tell the story was ironic, however, I couldn't pinpoint exactly how. I think another close read could help with finding the humor. For example, The Drunkard was one of the stories I read this week. I know the humor in it has something to do with the fact that the dad was an alcoholic and then the son got drunk, ended up hurting himself and embarrassing the dad. So maybe the answer is that the dad finally understood what his family feels about his relationship to alcohol? I guess that it's a good thing we have a partner in this project so we can toss around ideas The free write this week was a lot easier than the PoW's we normally do. I thinks that's partly because it was on a book we has spent 6 weeks reading and also partly because we got to choose the prompt we wanted to write about. We had more text to pull information from and it was text that was enjoyable to read. But like everything, it was a little rough since it was my first time writing one. So I expect the next 6 weeks free write to go better. Irony This week has been pretty difficult. The fog days made it impossible to dive into the project that you introduced to us. With the limited time, I felt as though the project wasn't explained as well as it could have. What exactly should our presentation entail? How do the short stories fit into the picture? The same is true with the poem of the week; I think I'm going to run into some problems writing my PoW because we didn't get to discuss it as much as we normally do. Also I am struggling with how to write the PoW's too; I know we went over how to do them the first week of school, but I still don't know what I'm doing. I feel like a refresher might be in order for me, and some others who have expressed similar feelings, to feel more confident when doing this week's poem of the week writing assignment.
One thing I did take away from this week was the apostrophe in the poem "bright star". The speaker was talking to the star, which represented his love, even though that star can't talk back. I felt like this allowed his emotions towards his love to be more clear since he was expressing them to her, rather than talking about her. It’s a concept I had never thought about before, but it seems like it would be very effective in all sorts of poetry, Poetic Apostrophes |
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March 2017
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