Oxford Comma
Here you go: Oxford comma humor: An Oxford comma walks into a bar, orders a gin and tonic and ponders the need for existence in a world of unambiguous sentence construction.
trying on a metaphor
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Oxford Comma
Here you go: Oxford comma humor: An Oxford comma walks into a bar, orders a gin and tonic and ponders the need for existence in a world of unambiguous sentence construction.
Martín Espada Examines Life Through Verse from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Digital Journal Post 12
During Monday’s discussion, we touched on the topic of character foils in August Wilson’s Fences. We began to discuss Troy and Gabe as possible character foils. (Remember that character foils are 2 characters whose differences are highlighted by or through each other. These characters are not necessarily at odds in the text.)
For this DJP, please consider the characters of Fences. Which 2 characters do you feel might serve as foils to one another?
Consider 2 characters in Fences whom you see as character foils. Remember, look for textual evidence.
Describe how you feel these 2 characters serve as foils for one another. How does this emphasize or highlight traits of one character or both? (Use textual evidence. Cite properly.)
Write at least 3 paragraphs. (Consider the structure of your writing. You might structure your writing by the traits you see as highlighted by these characters difference, paragraph by paragraph. OR you might structure your 3 paragraphs by character and then discuss their differences.)
This digital journal post is due by Friday, April 29 at noon.
African-American playwright August Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for his play Fences, and earned a second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson. Learn more at Biography.com.
Filmed on the set of TWO TRAINS RUNNING, one of America's leading playwrights traces his work back to a troubled childhood in a Pittsburgh ghetto. His ongoing project was to write a play on African American life set in each decade of the 20th century is one of the most ambitious endeavors in American theatrical history. In this program, he describes his award-winning plays JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE and MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM as passing down the wisdom of the African American community. "It's almost as if I'm connecting myself with something larger than myself and I trust that. It's part of what I call the blood's memory."
DJP 11
This Digital Journal Post is due by 2:15 pm on Wednesday, April 20.
In “The Things They Carried,” the narrator tells us, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and needs to be told that way” ().
In many parts of O’Brien’s short story, there is a heavy element of metafiction, or story telling that waves present, past, and future together, much like early sections of Tayo’s story. Neither story is a linear telling. The beginning may be the beginning and the end, the end, but the journey between the two points is not at all a straight line. There is an element of metafiction that is used in both stories. Metafiction is fiction that brings attention to the fact that it is a story being told. This sort of story is not conceived as fictional reality for too long, because of the fact that it breaks out of “character” often, becoming self-reflexive. The quote I offer above typifies this. The narrator breaks from the story to tell you about the war story. In Ceremony, one might argue that the 2 different types of story-telling (”Hummingbird and Green Fly” and the prose section or Tayo’s story) makes this affect occur for the reader. The story brings attention to its storiness. How does this affect (not effect, but AFFECT) the reader’s experience of the story?
Consider the way that you, as the reader, is made to feel as you read a story that has this metafictive quality about it. How does it affect your understanding of the story? How does this breaking away from the narrative line affect your reading?
Find a particular section of either story to exemplify your answer to that question.
Offer us the quote or section and explain the experience. In and out. What does the narrator mean when he writes, “What seems to happen becomes its own happening and needs to be told that way”?
DJP #11 is due before Wednesday, April 20 by 2:15 pm.
Not only do they struggle with Silko's disruptions of linear temporality and her collapsing of binary oppositions, but they also struggle with the novel's geographic and cultural location, which is wholly unfamiliar to most of them; because the novel takes place on the Laguna Pueblo in west-central New Mexico, students have trouble understanding the unfamiliar landscape, cosmology, and social conventions integral to the narrative. To help students better understand the novel, I offer them a variety of multimedia artifacts, including video, audio, static images, 360-degree panoramas, and traditional texts. Because Ceremony is so integrally connected with landscape and location, I use Keyhole Markup Language (KML) to attach these artifacts to specific geographic loca-{26}tions--using longitude and latitude--that correspond to places and events in Ceremony. (scroll down for Mott's piece.)
DJP 10
Your task for DJP 10 is outlined below in multiple guidelines. Please be sure to include them all in your process for this post.
Consider the two woven stories within the novel Ceremony, Tayo’s story and “Hummingbird and Green Fly,” the tale/song sung throughout the novel.
Do you find that the two stories connect in particular places? Find 1 particular instance where you feel there is connection.
Quote the 2 pieces of the text in the beginning of your post. Don’t forget to give us page numbers in an in-text citation so that we can follow along.
Explain how you see them as linked. How does the “Hummingbird and Green Fly” story/song connect to Tayo’s journey? Or vice versa?
Please write at least 2 paragraphs.
That’s it. Click post. Done.
As detailed in the announcement sent to you on Wednesday morning, this post is due by Sunday @ Noon.
Week 13 and 14: beginnings, middles
Warning to the student: If you have not read past page 167 of Ceremony as assigned, return to your text, get to page 167, then return to this post and to your directions for DJP 10.
Paula Gunn Allen, a writer, poet, and scholar of indigenous ancestry, identified as a Laguna Pueblo. I turn to her to help me to urge you all to understand the gravity of Leslie Marmon Silko’s inclusion of both the ceremonies that take place in this novel and the tale, “Hummingbird and Green Fly,” that she weaves throughout the novel. In an essay titled, “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony,” Gunn Allen writes the following about her personal journey and considerations of the complications that arise when she teaches Silko’s Ceremony. She writes of the “sacred,”
The protectiveness of native people, particularly Pueblos, toward their traditions is legendary, but the reasons for that protectiveness are perhaps not so well known. Among the Pueblos, a person is expected to know no more than is necessary, sufficient and congruent with their spiritual and social place. One does not tell or inquire about matters that do not directly concern one. I was raised to understand that "street smart" around Laguna meant respecting privacy and modesty, and that to step beyond the bounds of the required propriety was to put myself and others at risk. One did not inquire about or tell about matters that were not hers or his to know or discuss. As my grandmother deftly phrased the requirements, one was to mind her p's and q's as well as her own beeswax. (379)
Gunn Allen goes on to quote another scholar, “the white folklorist Barre Toelken,” who struggles ethically to represent Navajo traditions without appropriating culture, because as you will see below, for many indigenous tribes to record is to appropriate,
"The Navajos believe that language does not merely describe reality, it creates it" (p. 390). Toelken comments, and adds ‘Since words and narratives have power to heal, they may also be used to injure and kill’ (qtd. in Allen 380).
Gunn Allen then writes specifically about Ceremony and Gunn Allen’s decisions in the novel,
Ceremony is a novel that I find particularly troublesome, and I tend to non-teach it, if you can picture such a thing. I focus on the story, the plot and action. I read the novel quite differently from how it is read by many. I believe I could no more do (or sanction) the kind of ceremonial investigation of Ceremony done by some researchers than I could slit my mother's throat. Even seeing some of it published makes my skin crawl. I have yet to read one of those articles all the way through, my physical reaction is so pronounced.
I teach the novel as being about a half-breed, in the context of halfbreed literature from Cogewea on. Certainly that is how I read the novel the first time I read it--as a plea for inclusion by a writer who felt excluded and compelled to depict the potential importance of breeds to Laguna survival. The parts of the novel that set other pulses atremble largely escape me. The long poem text that runs through the center has always seemed to me to contribute little to the story or its understanding. Certainly the salvation of Laguna from drought is one of its themes, but the Tayo stories which, I surmise, form their own body of literature would have been a better choice if Silko's intentions was to clarify or support her text with traditional materials.
Tayo is the name of one of the dramatic characters around Keresland. Perhaps in some story I am unfamiliar with, he is involved with Fly or Reed Woman. But the story she lays alongside the novel is a clan story, and is not to be told outside of the clan.
I have long wondered why she did so. Certainly, being raised in greater proximity to Laguna village than I, she must have been told what I was, that we don't tell these things outside. Perhaps her desire to demonstrate the importance of breeds led her to this, or perhaps no one ever told her why the Lagunas and other Pueblos are so closed about their spiritual activities and the allied oral tradition.
Two instructive events were used as a reference to convey to me what behavior was expected with regard to passing on Laguna materials. I was told that an anthropologist, Elsie Clews Parsons, had come to Laguna to collect material for her study of Pueblo religion and social culture. They had given her information readily enough and everything seemed fine. But when Parsons published the material, Lagunas saw how she treated their practices and beliefs, and they were horrified. In accordance with her academic training, she objectified, explained, detailed and analyzed their lives as though they were simply curios, artifacts, fetishes, and discussed the supernaturals as though they were objects of interest and patronization. Her underlying attitude for the supernaturals, the sacred, and the people who honored them didn't evade notice. The Lagunas were "red-haired" as my mother would say. Coincidently (or not so coincidently) the terrible drought deepened--the same drought Silko depicts in Ceremony--and in its wake many other ills visited the Pueblo. Personal horrors and society-wide horrors ensued; the discovery of uranium on Laguna land, not far from where the giantess's head and her headless body had been flung by the War Twins, the development of nuclear weapons near Jemez, the Second World War, jackpile mine, water and land poisoned by nuclear waste, the village of Paguate all but surrounded by tailing-mesas almost as perfectly formed as the natural mesas all around. It's hardly any wonder that they shut it down. All entry by non-traditionals to dances and stories was cut off. They witnessed first-hand the appalling consequences of telling what was private for reasons that far exceed simple cultural purism.
While Silko details these horrors in Ceremony, she does not attribute them to security leaks. She is poignantly aware of the closure of village life to outsiders and depicts the pain such exclusion brings; she is aware of the discovery of the uranium used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she is aware of the devastating drought, the loss of self that the entire Pueblo suffered in those years, yet she is unaware of one small but essential bit of information: the information that telling the old stories, revealing the old ways can only lead to disaster.
Gunn Allen ends her essay in the following manner,
For make no mistake, many students come to be titillated by Indian lore, seeing--however unconsciously--native spiritual life as a curious artifact, as they've been conditioned to see all things Indian. They will find themselves disappointed, but then that's not new. Perhaps they will find themselves ever more aware that native people are people, and their ways are not a spectacle but simply and significantly, a way of life.
I offer you Paula Gunn Allen’s struggle in teaching Silko’s Ceremony to illustrate the gravity of the material and the story you are reading. Considering the tradition of the Pueblo that Gunn Allen depicts, “one was to mind her p's and q's as well as her own beeswax,” does that affect your reading of Tayo’s story at all? How do the depictions of Betonie’s ceremonies affect the story? Would this be the same story without them?
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Digital Journal 9
At the end of Toni Morrison’s answer to the question asked of her on Faulkner and “effect,” she responds, “The point is that with Faulkner one was never indifferent” (”Writers on Writers: Toni Morrison on William Faulkner” 1870).
As we discussed last week, in this week, Week 12, we move back into fiction. Therefore, the tools of fiction we used earlier in the semester to better understand the short story again apply. I’m speaking of character, plot, setting. The three short stories you are reading for Monday’s class can evince quite different reactions. What are yours?
For this digital journal, you should:
Choose one of the stories, preferably one that you are other than indifferent to. Whether a reaction of enjoyment, anger, or otherwise, choose the one that connects.
Tell us in at least two paragraphs about the plot of this story. Use direct quotes from the story to exemplify your summation.
Then in a last paragraph (a third), explain your reaction to this story.
This digital journal is due by 2:15 pm on Monday, April 4.
Digital Journal 8
Your assignment for this Digital Journal may seem easy on its façade, but give yourself some thinking time before you post. You will appreciate the learning.
First things first. Yep, we are reading poetry this week, its on poetry. Look to the poems you have read and are reading for this week: Week 11. Choose one that either you feel connected to or one that elicits a strong reaction in you. Choose a poem from our Week 11 list that speaks to you in some way.
Read the poem aloud. Then, annotate it as you read it a second time. Underline the words that stand out for you. Circle the sounds that are interesting (remember, you will only hear the sounds if you READ IT ALOUD.)
Open a new document in the word processing program of your choosing, and set a timer on our phone, on an egg timer, on your computer for 10 minutes. 10 minutes. Don’t press go yet. Type the poem into your document. (If it is a long poem, type a/the section you underlined or circled.) Don’t press go yet. Think about the section or words you have there. Why is this communicating to you? What interests you here? Why are you drawn to it? Is it a puzzle you must understand or do you see it clearly? (You need not answer all of these questions. I’m offering them as beginning prompts only.) Press GO! Type for the whole 10 minutes, free-write. What is it about this poem or that section? Go!
Copy and paste your writing into a post. Hit submit. Do not revise or edit it. If you feel unsure about it, title it “A Free-Write: Digital Journal 8.” This way anyone who reads it will understand they are looking at improvisation and raw thinking.
Week 11: middle beginnings. ;-)
This is a tricky week. I realize that many of you are not excited about poetry, and in a course like this one, there is not much time to delve as deeply into the poems as is warranted. I feel like we end up breezing through incredible intricate work that needs time to steep and then and only then will offer you, the reader, its beauty. But, we CANNOT study American Literary Masterpieces without studying Dunbar, Eliot, Hughes, cummings, Frost, and many, many others. What is a fractured dialogue or a narrative told through stream-of-consciousness if we do not first travel through Eliot’s The Waste Land? It’s difficult and it’s a cipher, but it has immense purpose. So, we read it. We read The Waste Land to understand the shifting that happens at the outset of modernity. We read it so that we can understand better why Hemingway and Bukowski loose faith in the human project, communicating nihilism. We read it because it represents chaos and fractured consciousness in a manner that many, many followed after. The Waste Land is arguably one of the most read and widely argued poems. Why? Because it still talks to us and it still reveals truths. Why do we still read Shakespeare or Dante? Same reason.
Langston Hughes writes about an America that he experiences, an America he not unique to him, but an America he uniquely sees. He writes with the rhythm of the blues - “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune” (”The Weary Blues” line 1). He writes in conversation with Whitman - “I, too, sing America/ I am the darker brother.” (”I,too line 1-2). He writes of the “soul” of a people - “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” (”The Negro Speaks of Rivers” line 4).
e.e. cummings plays with language. He moves it around. He uses stream-of-consciousness. He makes one word from three: “and eddieandbill come/ running from marbles and/ piracies and it’s/ spring/ when the world is puddle-wonderful” (”[in Just-]” lines 6-10).
Countee Cullen uses the strict form of the sonnet to write “Yet Do I Marvel.” He, like Hughes, portrays his unique perspective on his world. But, unlike Hughes, Cullen looks back for his form rather than forward. Why? Why would he do this? Both celebrated poets within their own time, they were friends and wrote to one another often. But, looking at their decisions-made in the poems I assigned, you can see that the work is quite different. And so, it should be. But, why? What do we learn from them separately and what do we learn from them in conversation with one another?
So, we read on. Please take the time to read closely. Please take the time to read these poems aloud. I hope that you learned in today’s class, it DOES make a difference.
Digital Journal Post 7
During our week before Spring Break, we began to read and to discuss works that exemplify the Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism movements in American literary history. You read Mark Twain’s “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” We talked about humor, frame tales, and tall tales (Thank you Marissa). You read Kate Chopin’s “The Storm” and it’s prequel story “At the ‘Cadian Ball.” We talked about dialect, The Cult of True Womanhood, sex and orgasm in a story written in 1898 and the imagery depicting/describing them. We talked about colorism and racism as depicted in the stories. We talked about traditional and changing “expectations.” For Monday, you are reading Charles W. Chestnutt’s “The Passing of Grandison,” Edith Wharton’s “The Quicksand,” and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”
For your Digital Journal Post 7, your task is to pull one of the themes mentioned in the “Introduction” to this section (pp. 1131-1139), define it, and use it to delve a bit deeper into one of the readings. (readings: Chopin, Twain, Chestnutt, Wharton, or London) For example: Pull something you know little about and look it up. I might read about Naturalism and “social darwinism” on page 1137, research the concept of “social darwinism” an then write about Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”
Guideline 1: Find one theme or concept (from the “Introduction.”) and research it a bit so that you understand it’s meaning better.
Guideline 2: Connect this theme/concept with one of your readings (listed above).
Guideline 3: Write at least 2 full paragraphs summarizing your learning and connection.
This digital journal post is due by class time on Monday, March 21.