The Poverty Draft

This is an article from 2007 that appeared in Sojourner's Magazine addressing some of the issues that we brought up today concerning why people join the military. I thought it would be good to have some facts to supplement some of the conjectures that we made today. Please feel free to comment with your thoughts and/or post other links you find that might be useful.

The Poverty Draft

Blog 4 Due Mon 2-27 What would you do?

This week I thought it would be nice to do something more creative. Here's two choices.

1.)  A lot of our conversation in class today centered around the question the narrator poises to the reader on page 56 of "On the Rainy River", "What would you do?"  For Tim, the decision he had to make was for moral, ethical, social, and legal reasons literally undecidable, so he did not make a decision at all.  In our discussion in class today, we saw that any decision one would make in that scenario would have very real and very unpleasant consequences.  So, for your blog for this week, put yourself in Tim's shoes and write about what you would do.  Be sure to weigh the implications of your decision and consider how you would deal with them

2.)  On page 57-58 the narrator gives a list of the "chunks of [his] own history" that floated by after he resigns himself to going to war.  Make your own similar list.  Who and/or what would comprise the images you would see when faced with a decision that got to the core of what you were made of?

Blog 3: Metatheatricality in Hamlet Due Wed. 2.22

In class today we talked about the concept of metatheatricality.  You can review the concept here, but essentially the term is used when a play is self referential about being a play.  We talked about how, in Hamlet, the metatheatricality of the play helps to convey how stuck Hamlet is.  He is literally and figuratively an actor stuck on a stage with a specific role to play.  His success and failure as an actor are to be determined by the audience.  In the end, Hamlet's only method of escape is through death.  Thus in Hamlet, death is literally the only escape from the roles one has to play in life.

For your blog, watch chapters 7 and 8 of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2008 production of Hamlet I've embedded below. You can find the whole play here. This is a mash up of Act II Scene ii and Act III Scene i. Write about the ways in which Polonius sets up the meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia as though it were a play and the ways in which the scene is filmed so that it seems like Hamlet is being watched and evaluated in the way an audience member might watch and evaluate a play. At what point does Hamlet know that he is but an actor in a play written and staged by someone else? What does the way this scene is performed say about the extent to which an individual is in control of his or her own destiny?

Watch Hamlet on PBS. See more from Great Performances.

Watch Hamlet on PBS. See more from Great Performances.

Writing Prompt for Blogs due 2/6

We've spent quite a bit of time this week "listening" to poetry by trying to discern the way that poets write so that we can hear the rhythm of their poems. In this way reading and writing poetry is linked to performance. When we as readers try to find the voice in the poem, we are in a sense performing.  When we read a poem we are in a sense present at a performance.

Read each of the poems below first then listen to the performances of the poems linked below. Choose one of the poems and describe how the poem sounds.  How does listening to the poem contribute to or change the way that you understand it.

Allen Ginsberg "America" p. 471
Rita Dove "Parsley" p. 303
William Wordsworth "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" p. 257
Amiri Baraka and the Roots "Something in the Way of Things(In Town)"    (Poem is Here)