Instructor & Student ENL3 Notes - March 11th
(One complete post vs one post followed by reblog with comments)
If people don’t raise their hands, they learn to be passive
compared to people not asking for raises in their jobs when they should
make students feel important for themselves, recognize that what you have to say is important enough
even if don’t know the answer, can say “I don’t know the answer, but would like to know what ______ has to say”
End of Quarter Reflection
short writing about how we can make the most of the last two days of class
Counterarguments needed to make argument stronger — can be implicit or explicit
Reminder: job as analytical writer – make implicit meanings of text explicit; making counterarguments explicit is a bit different
For early writers, it may help to make explicit the implicit alternatives to our ideas, as this can confirm that we’re working on a deeper level (or prompt us to go deeper, if we can’t articulate any alternatives because we’ve not yet gone beyond direct content and conversancy)
Once we’re comfortable and confident doing interpretive work, it becomes less necessary to make alternatives explicit throughout a paper instead of, for example, in the introduction
Recognize patterns in your writing – where you stray from analysis; it can be more helpful in the long run to see patterns that we struggle with and focus on resolving the patterns, rather than trying to edit and revise one sentence at a time
Do this by using pitfalls doc and other resources
Use specific, critical questions, both to generate work and to take it to the next level
Connect small details of evidence to bigger picture; in textual analysis, remember to always focus on the language
The boat in Never Let Me Go
part of a larger scene which contains multiple strands, including words related to the boat, references to Hailsham, words describing the landscape, etc.
They wonder if the boat will still be there
Looking for the boat as looking for hope
They connected to Hailsham closing – looking like the marshlands
Turning point in relationships in multiple ways
Boat as symbol of freedom
Boat represents clones – forgotten, stuck on shore, limited
Boat is isolated, just as clones isolated in Hailsham
Symbol of hope and freedom
Alienation – takes them a while to get there, Ruth has a hard time getting there
Loss of freedom – boat was in ruins
Boat is something they can see but not touch
Boat symbolizes something that’s left behind – it’s hidden but can be uncovered, like the past (one can’t go back to it, but can be remembered)
Tensions / Contradictions / Unexpected Observations
boat represents both isolation and freedom, or stuck-ness/inability to move and freedom
Ruth’s attempt to fix the past, in contrast with her typical resistance to the past in favor of present and fantasies about the future
different because she’s active vs having been passive / she’s encouraging them to be active vs not active / not changing their future; they used to avoid topics about their fights, now they’re open
German words and phrases in “Vanadium” (a strand of evidence)
narrator talking to himself: “What language should I reply in, certainly not German, I would have made ridiculous mistakes, which my role would not permit?” What role does he think he does play? Why do the mistakes matter?
he’s trying to find some type of connection, gain perspective that Muller might have, understand Muller further vs staying with previous assumptions and his desire to resent him; looking for commonality
the words separate him from Muller; did the narrator mean to separate the readers from Muller, saying that he’s not easy to relate to?
Help to re-establish setting and situation of narrator, create distance between Muller and narrator, make Muller more of an antagonist, not necessarily a “good guy” the way the narrator is.
the opposite way – uses them almost interchangeably at first, or like a German speaker saying he would dream in German, as he gets close to almost meeting Muller, he starts to distance himself more – using “decency“ in German, - stops using German more toward the end; distance allows himself to retreat into his own identity; doesn’t wish to speak on behalf of the victims but then begins to represent his community more by using his connection, gaining more of an outside
He uses German, after he’s asked “why do you look so perturbed” in which he responded in German, using their language to insult them, to create a bigger impact using their language vs his own
Overall, a lot of German words are tied to negativity – they threatened each other, toward the end he uses a German quote and the word that refers to “redemption” in a way, goes into the root word that’s tied to violence.
Tensions / Contradictions: Isolation? Separation? Unification? All possibilities
Meaning / usage / intention changes over the course of the story
Specific Piece of Evidence – Bewältigung der Vergangheit (p230 / Reader p80)
“the past” – on one level, is rather general (vs “our past” or “the war” or “the Holocaust”), and thus could imply a kind of denial or euphemism as an attempt to gloss over painful histories
the euphemism also could indicate the centrality of the history of Nazism in German identity – that the specific past, including the associations with violence, has become the primary way of understanding the German past, so much so that rather than the word masking it, the word calls attention to its all-encompassing role
How do we move forward from these moments?
How will we ever know what we can do with the past
the impossibility of translation of language -examples of untranslation, most significant moments of these translations. Explore these ideas by this one specific moment of the story.
the work with “Vanadium,” which started with a focus on language, prompted much more specific, grounded responses; the work with Never Let Me Go prompted many responses that were broad, general, and/or focused on larger ideas without clealry relying on the specifics of the text
analytically speaking, these ungrounded larger ideas don’t carry much weight or communicate as much meaning as possible and may either come across as speculation rather than analysis or as general, reasonable possibilities rather than fully investigated ideas; further work with the boat would entail looking at how it’s described, the words used to communicate the different meanings we experience, etc.
