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)

Follow up thoughts on prosody

I know that scansion isn't the easiest thing in the world to do.  It's even harder to talk authoritatively about it.  I'll wager that it's hardest of all to write a poem in metrical feet and still have it sound like normal English.  

Or maybe it's not that hard.  Keats probably wasn't that concerned about counting lines or whether or not opiate had two syllables or three.  Rather, he could likely hear the way the poem was supposed to sound as he was writing it--poets have a knack for not having to think about it.  I think we can hear the way the poem sounds, but when we try to dissect each line the rhythm tends to disappear.  Also if we think too scientifically about it, it takes all of the life out of the poem--like dissecting a live frog.

So, when we do prosody, what are we looking for?  Why not just enjoy the rhythm?  I'm not sure.

Helen Vendler says, "You can experience a poem with great pleasure as a general reader; or you can also learn how to explore it, to gain the more experienced pleasure that a student of architecture feels inside a Renaissance palace, or that an engineer feels looking at the San Francisco Bay Bridge.  In every case study adds to what you are able to perceive...[Poems] keep you company in life."

I bet she has had to convince lots of students of why prosody is important.  I agree that sometimes paying attention to prosody can lead to a greater appreciation of a poem.  I think  "Ode to a Nightingale" is one such poem.

Writing Prompt for Blogs due 1/30

In class we talked quite a bit about aesthetics--what Helen Vendler calls analytical shapes.  Pick a poem from the anthology section of Poems Poets Poetry (starts on p. 370) and comment on the aesthetics of the poem.  Include some thoughts about why you think the poet made the decisions regarding aesthetics he or she did.

Blog Assignment Sheet

Blog Assignment

English 210.003

Due Mondays in hard copy at the beginning of class starting 1/30

Lowest two (2) grades to be dropped

Your weekly blog is designed to help you reflect on a week of class work as well as to hone your thoughts about the readings we are covering.  This is not solely a summary or a rehash of what we covered in class during the week, or a paraphrase of what we read in a given week or how we read it.  Instead, it should consist of your own unique insight into the topics covered during the week.  Because our class work will depend largely on close reading of specific texts or specific passages from texts, your assignment should exhibit your skills as a good close reader—that is a reader who is able to derive an interpretation of a piece of literature based on close examination of the form and content of the work and not based on the reader’s own biases or the biases of the author.

One good strategy would be to concentrate on a passage or text that we didn’t fully cover in class and use the strategies we practiced in class to conduct a reading of that passage or text.  For example, you might choose a poem from the end of one of the Vendler chapters that she doesn’t discuss in the text or that we didn’t discuss in class and perform your own close reading on the poem or a portion of the poem using the strategies she or we used on a different poem. This doesn’t mean that you need to make decisive statements about what the poem means, but you should at least be able to come up with provocative observations about the most important features in the poem.

I will post optional writing prompts for each Monday’s post by the Wednesday of the week prior on my own Blogger blog which you can find at http://nelsenglish210.blogspot.com/

Keep in mind that you do not have to write on these prompts.

Your response should be between 350 and 700 words (1 to 2 double spaced pages with one inch margins).