King Lear turned out to be very different than I expected it to be. It was like they had two different time periods going on with their elizabethean style clothes, and their guns. Once I got over that, It was just trying to understand what they were saying and watch the characters interactions that was a little tricky. I was trying to watch the movies, understand it, analyze it, and then relate it to the deconstruction theory. However, I think that when we take our notes on the movie and put them with our notes on our theory they'll contect better; especially after we've had a week to digest what we watch. I'd like to take this time to have a funeral my dude the fool, his death came out of nowhere. These men barged in, the noose came out, he failed and was dead. His death is the one that impacted me the most. He was the only one who was truthful to the king, and he did it in a hilarious way (although the head on a stick was a little creepy). Next on the list to dicuss is Glouster. First of all, I want to mention that if someones eyes were ripped out of their head, I'm pretty sure they would die or at least pass out from pay. Whatever though. Glouster got screw over by his some, But I guess that's what you get when you say the only good thing about him was the sex glouster had when he was received. He trusted his son to not tell the daughters that he was aiding the king. But good ole Edmond went and told them because he wanted to marry them to gain power; Overall; the whole play boils down to King Lear trusting the wrong daughters which leads to everyone he cares about dying. Modern Text
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Deconstructing was the theory my group chose to do for our shakespeare project. And after researching information on it, I think I have a pretty good understanding of what it is; but I think we'll have to wait until we try to apply it to King Lear to really see if it sunk it. So far I gather that deconstruction is all about breaking the story apart and looking deeper into the meaning it. Especially looking at the author's intention of writing the way he did. The thing is, is that Shakespeare probably didn't write down what he made cordelia refuse to play her father's game of "how much do you love me", and that could maybe do a good thing or bad thing, I haven't decided yet.
In addition to that project, we also had to poems of the week. Both sonnets and both pertaining to life after death and what's important for you to leave behind. Shakespeare's poem went right over my head the first time it read it. But after talking it over with my group, I started to understand what he was trying to get at. Basically, don't waste your life collection material things and focus more on your character because that's what lives on after your bodies in the ground. Ozymandias on the other hand was a little easier to understand of the first read; however, everything is better after discussing it with my table. So this dude Ozymandias was not a very nice dude, but he was a really powerful leader, the "king of kings" as he called himself. But here we are a long time later and his statue is crumbling in the desert. Moral of the story: be nicer to people and maybe your legacy will live on a little longer. I was presently surprised at whole easily my PoW flowed out this week. Although, I'm still a little unsure of the style and such the college board is looking for on these types of writings. Deconstruction This week in general is a struggle-new class, food coma hang over, and the first full week of school in a long time- so it was very nice that we took it easy in this class. I am excited to see what everyone;'s topic are for our SSR projects. I chose the topic of love at first sight and how it changes people. My books are Pride and Prejudice and A Winter's Tale. I was drawn to these books because of the time eras they were written in. I love the victorian age with all of the balls and odd social norms that occurred, and also the 1920's with the flappers and secrecy. I think it will be very interesting to work on the presentation since it is in the pecha kucha style, it will take some practice to get the point across in the short 20 seconds per slide.
In addition to the SSR projects, the AP practice test was quite a surprise; it wasn't like I expected. I got frustrated on some of the questions because it was asking how I interpreted the literature, I thought this was strange because people can interpret things in all different ways. I think I had beginners luck in this practice test because I made quite a few educated guesses and get a pretty decent score.My favorite poem from the test was the one about the war survivor visiting the memorial. I understood the poem at face value and on a deeper level, which is a rarity for me. I think I had beginners luck in this practice test because I made quite a few educated guesses and get a pretty decent score. AP TEST STRATEGIES Oedipus, at first glance, is a tragedy that seems very unrelatable. However, as we read it and look between the lines, we realize that it might not be completely irrelevant in to us. Oedipus does everything in his power to avoid the prophecy given to him, but in the end he it still comes true. This is the lesson that we can take from the tragedy; no matter how hard we work towards something, we can't always controls what happens to us.
Besides the moral hidden in Oedipus, we also learned about the meaning of tragedy, or should I say meaning(s). Tragedy is one of the harder forms of literature to define. Most all of the explanations talk about a great suffering felt by the main character, which is normally brought upon themselves. In addition to the suffering, there is always a catharsis or happy feeling the audience feels by the end, which I think is the most important element to tragedies. For example, In Romeo and Juliet, even though Juliet dies at the ends, she is able to feel and understand what true love is before she goes. Oedipus is shown mercy by Creon which gives the readers a sense of hope for him. Catharsis is what makes tragedies plausible, there has to be something to hope for to overcome all of the bad events occurring through the story. Catharsis I've read plenty of tragedies in my english career. Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Iliad and The Odyssey just to name a few. All of those are clearly tragedies with all of the deaths that occur in them. As we dove into the definition of tragedy, my idea of what a tragedy is broadened. Especially when we looked at the tragedy of commons. The idea of when someone doesn't contribute to the good of the community, something bad is more likely to happen to them is very interesting. It ties into the way literature teaches values and lesson that are hidden within the words.
I also enjoyed when we did the "save the last word for me" activity. It gave us the chance to explain our thoughts while hearing everyone else's opinion on our choices too. I thought it helped us get a broader understanding of tragedy by hearing the others in our groups choices. It was reassuring to hear that what they others chose I also had highlighted in the reading. So after doing that activity I felt that i had a really good grasp on the idea of tragedy. Tragedy 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 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 Now, I know all of my blog posts have talked about how I've never done something before until this class, but that's this class is for. College is so different from high school and this class is the bridge. And I think this week was the biggest breakthrough yet in my quest to become stronger in my Literature skills.
Our poem of the week was I felt a Funeral, in my brain. Normally I hate poetry. I can never find the deeper meaning and it frustrates me so much. This week however, after the second time we read the poem in class I finally had the connection. I understood that there was no taste or smell imagery because she was dead, and the poem represented an actual funeral. and then when we talked about how it also represented the speakers battle with depression I was able to follow along with that part of the poem as well. I believe that the line "And then a plank in reason broke" was the key to success, it has such a literal meaning and a symbolical one.It helped me connect the feeling of losing the battle of depression to the lowering of the caskett. This week has me thinking that I stopped trying to find the deeper meanings; and hopefully as I keep trying and gain confidence, I will be able to make more connections within our poems in the coming weeks. how to connect to poetry |
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March 2017
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