Response to Course Materials (Mar. 10)

Ceremony has been an interesting read so far, though rather difficult to follow. The story jumps around in time without warning and uses pronouns without antecedents, making it hard to know what exactly is going on. Often, when Silko dives into a flashback, it takes several sentences to realize there was a change. I think, so far, I've read the first forty pages a total of three times, and I still only barely understand it. Nevertheless, I'm finding Tayo very easy to relate to. Both he and I are trapped between cultures and ostracized by both cultures we belong to. Either direction we turn, we face expectations. All the white people treat Tayo like a Native American while all the Laguna people see him like a traitor who sides with the whites. Likewise, without ever talking to me, hearing me say anything in class, or knowing my grades, I'm assumed to be brilliant in math by many non-Asian students. When I come across one of my mother's friends from China, however, they always assume I don't understand a lick of Mandarin and want to know what "typical Americans" like me do on a daily basis. There was one time I was sitting with a person from each race, and they were trying to decide what race I belonged to. The Asian insisted that I couldn't possibly be Asian while the American swore I was from the continent itself. Like Tayo, the not-white side of my family expects me to live just like them, and basically consider me a disgrace. Like Auntie, they treat my mom like she had failed somehow because she didn't marry a person of their race (and/or someone from a rich family).

I'm getting increasingly worried about my essay writing every time we have a practice essay in class. I have no trouble finding things in the pieces of literature, but connecting them into some statement about meaning can take me much too long, resulting in a short essay that sounds unfinished. I hope we keep practicing and get more tips because, as it is, this doesn't bode well for the AP exam.

Response to Course Materials (Feb. 10)

Finally, we're done with Hamlet...nope. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play we are studying now, is supposed to be some sort of offshoot of Hamlet where we learn what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are thinking (or not thinking). So far, these two buffoons have done nothing in particular, talked about nothing really, and remembered nothing specific. Everything has been vague, at least until we related parts to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Basically, we all know they are going to die because that's what happens in Hamlet and the title says so, so nothing really matters, right? Wrong. When we're done, we still have to annotate the heck out of this play--an absurdist play--whose very definition states that it means nothing. What? That's not to say there was nothing to annotate, because we're supposed to be taking note of techniques. I'm just not sure how I'm going to show how the author "uses literary techniques to create meaning" on the AP exam, should I ever be put in that situation.
Multiple choice was as frustrating as ever. It's always some tiny detail that turns the answer on its head completely because the detail indicates an ironic tone or something of that sort. I suppose that is the reason for our practice, though, so I will, however grudgingly, refuse to complain.

Response to Course Material (Dec. 2)

This time around, things went a whole lot more smoothly. For one, The Death of a Salesman was a lot less abstract than theater of the absurd. Nobody was stripping just for the sake of stripping, and nobody was hiding a blind dog in a box. Perhaps the most helpful thing for me was that we followed the movie in our copies of the play. When I read on my own, I have the attention span of a goldfish with ADHD. After about fifteen minutes of careful reading, I get impatient and skim through the rest, missing all the symbolism and picking up only the overarching plot. Following the movie really helped me hold a steady pace and see all the details.
We've started our first read of Hamlet. Reading it through kindle has been quite helpful to me (you can get Hamlet for free on gutenberg.org). Being able to conveniently double-click words to see definitions helps a lot. Otherwise, I'd never bother searching the dictionary and would end up making shaky guesses off of context. Besides...free is cheaper than a six dollar paperback plus shipping.

Response to Course Materials (Nov. 4)

This has been the single most stressful, discouraging class of my life. Who knew that many things could go wrong in two weeks? If only Literature were like math where there are definite answers. In math, you don't add numbers because they are not given, you just label them as unknown and move on. Here in Lit, however, if something doesn't look like it is supposed to mean anything, it probably means something and you have to make your best guess based on the comma in the last sentence (ok, I'm exaggerating a little bit...).

For example, I had a completely different interpretation of Mommy's relationship with Daddy The American Dream from everyone else. Instead of Mommy emasculating Daddy, I read all of Daddy's lines as if he were bored or annoyed with Mommy. I thought he found Mommy to be ridiculously petty and he made fun of her lack of common sense. The whole thing with the "tubes instead of tracts" went way over my head. How does that imply Daddy had his manhood replaced with a lady-part? Tubes may occasionally be used as a euphemism for the ladies, but tract? I've only ever heard that used for internal organs, specifically the digestive tract. Everyone agreed about both of those points, though, so I don't know if I'm simply doing something wrong, or if people just agree with the first thing they hear. Or maybe it doesn't matter and I can have whatever interpretation I want as long as I have a good reason for it. Either way, I'm thoroughly befused and confuddled as well as frustrated.

The Death Of a Salesman was quite a relief after my bout with the Theater of the Absurd. At least something happened in the story, so I have something to work with. I'm actually ready for it this time, too, so hopefully, I'll have time to sleep at night this time around.

The vocab quiz was disconcerting. Somehow, I ended up with a lower grade than the first time around, correcting some of the errors I made last time and second-guessing myself on a whole bunch that I had right. Luckily, it appears Mrs. Holmes has made adjustments to the quiz grades, so I don't have a 60% in the grade book. I almost beat the adjusted grade my first try...what a great way to end the quarter.

Response to Course Material (Oct. 7)

So far, this class has been fairly challenging, though it isn't (yet) as much of an overload of material as I had previously expected. The number of terms to remember is horrendous, but with two classes dedicated to making students memorize loads of terms, I'm getting accustomed to it rather quickly.

Things are looking up in this class. As I stated in my post on poetry study goals, I have to use what I learn, otherwise I'll quickly forget it. It has barely been a month since school started and we are already looking for applications of what we have learned within texts, which my brain detects as an acceptable use of information, resulting in proper storage of the material.

DIDLS was a new concept for me. It had never occurred to me that literary techniques could be summed up in a single acronym, so I had always thought literary techniques were complicated and annoying; but with just five letters, techniques have been made manageable. It almost makes me want to go back and rewrite a few essays where I could have used DIDLS to make things easier for me. Almost.

After some thought, I have realized that many comedies have an elements of "theater of the absurd" in them. Any time you come across a running gag, it is a reflection on how theater of the absurd has affected modern literature. Humans are so circular that they can laugh at the same thing multiple times. It's all so pointless, yet we laugh. Additionally, some jokes are intended to make you think, "What in the heck of a world did I just watch?" The best example I've seen of this phenomenon is the video, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The entire movie is a horrific mess of running gags like skipping 3 and 4 while counting, riding invisible horses, airspeed velocities of unladen swallows, etc. and the viewer has no idea what will happen next because it is all nonsense. In the end, the knights have made a massive circle back to the French castle where they started, only to be taken away by the police before they begin their invasion. The whole thing turns out to be pointless and, to put it simply, absurd.
After the timeline activity, I started thinking about the trends we noticed. Literature has, over time, moved from discussing people as a group under the rule of gods to smaller and smaller institutions until it becomes "all about me." The human race has decided life is short and pointless, so while we're here, we should do anything we can to benefit ourselves. Gods, monarchs, and upper-class groups have fallen out of favor because, in order to provide for the lower classes, they require large contributions in return--something individuals don't like to do if they feel they are the center of the universe. Instead of a large community, the human race has split into selfish individuals, desperate to grab all the personal gain possible before they die. We as humans have become exceedingly like animals, without a sense of morality because we are so self-centered we no longer care about each other.

There was so much more we learned, but these were the ones I wasn't already familiar with or hadn't thought about much in the past. This has been a rather interesting semester so far, and, honestly, I'm interested to see what things will interest me in the near future as well.

Response to Course Material (Sept. 9)

Until now, I had always been taught to use complex sentences and use "descriptive" (a.k.a. long) words in my writing. The more complicated the writing was, the better. It had never occurred to me that, perhaps, the whole purpose of writing is to communicate, as explained in presentation, "The Rhetoric Situation." Rather than spending my time trying to spew out as many twenty-cent words as possible in one paragraph, it is much more valuable to make sure I am understood. It is true that descriptive words are valuable as well, but there is a fine line between "description" and what The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing describes as "pompous writing.

In addition, I have never truly understood the scope of symbolism. After reading Foster's How To Read Literature Like a Professor, it seems everything in literature symbolizes or reflects something else. To make matters worse, Foster even says that it doesn't matter whether or not a symbol is intentional. Even if the author merely needed to kill a character and drowning was the most convenient method, it is a symbol. Symbols are integrated into our subconscious. Authors add symbols to their stories unintentionally as well as intentionally. To us humans, so many aspects of life have some sort of meaning to them, even if we know it or not, so we cannot help but integrate it in our writing. That said, instead of whining about how I think an author simply wanted to write a story and all these symbols are adding too much unintended meaning, I can no longer help but notice such symbols everywhere in the culture around me.