Synthesis of Course Material: Literature

Literature

“The American Dream”: Especially being the first work we read, this plot and symbolism in the play was a bit of a shock.  The play focuses on the life of a mid to lower class family, consisting of Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma.  The Young Man and Mrs. Barker enter the play later on.  The relationship between Mommy and Daddy is strained and lacks passion.  Mommy is presented as childish and materialistic (part of Albee’s comment on American culture).  Grandma is somewhat of a spitfire, and the only character who realizes the absurdity of her surroundings.  She represents rural values and the “old” America.  The Young Man represents the “new” America, which is attractive on the outside but hollow on the inside.

“Death of a Salesman”: This play, like “The American Dream”, makes a statement about American culture.  Willy Loman unsuccessfully attempts to achieve the American dream (money and popularity) only to drive himself further from it.  His sons, Biff and Happy, who originally looked up to him, have become jaded, especially Biff.  Willy has an affair, and upon discovering this, Biff loses all respect for his father and their relationship becomes strained.  Linda tries desperately to hold the family together, but her efforts are futile.  According to Miller, this is the definition of a tragedy.

Ceremony: Tayo is returning to his reservation, Laguna, after a damaging time spent in the war.  He is caught in between American culture and Pueblo culture, and tries desperately not to end up like his fellow veterans, who have turned to alcohol and women to ease the pain.  Tayo has frequent flashbacks to times of when his cousin and uncle were alive.  After seeing a medicine man, Tayo begins the track toward completing the ceremony that will ease him of the pain.  One of the more significant steps in his ceremony is meeting T’seh the female character who is representative of nature.   

Pride and Prejudice: Austen’s novel focuses on the Bennett family, which consists of Mr. and Mrs. Bennett and their five daughters.  Mrs. Bennett is focused on marrying off all of them to wealthy men, and when Mr. Bingley moves into town, she is ecstatic.  The eldest daughter, Jane, begins a relationship with him despite the warnings of his sister.  Elizabeth is slighted by Mr. Bingley’s friend, Mr. Darcy, but their relationship quickly changes from one of hatred to one of attraction.  The novel dissects the relationship between sisters and the societal expectations of the time. 

“Hamlet”: In this famous play, King Hamlet has recently died, and his brother married his wife, to the dismay of young Hamlet.  Hamlet has a secret relationship with Ophelia, although she is a commoner and this is frowned upon by Ophelia’s father.  Most characters in this play die in the end; Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, his mother, Gertrude, mistakenly drinks a poison, and the new king, Claudius, Hamlet, and Ophelia’s brother, Laertes, are killed by a poisoned blade meant for a duel between Hamlet and Laertes.     

Synthesis of Course Material: Technical Subjects

Technical Subjects

Multiple Choice: There are different types of questions, including rhetorical function, tone, antecedent, style, and context.  We learned to approach each of these types different and rule out the absurd ones first.

Comedy: We learned many different types of comedy, including low comedy, high comedy, burlesque, farce, lampoon, parody, satire, slapstick, and travesty.  We also learned about the “Comedy of Manner” which consists of love affairs in the upper class.

Tragedy: In Aristotle’s idea of a tragedy, the tragic hero is a man of significant stature who falls from a high place as a result of a certain tragic flaw.  He recognizes this flaw (called an epiphany) but it is too late.  Arthur Miller had a different idea of tragedy, in which he believed that a common man refuses to give up his place in society even though moving forward is hopeless.

Critical Lenses: The different lenses consist of Formalists/New Critics (literature is only exactly what is written on the page), Post-Colonial (relationship with the colonizers and the colonized.  This includes terms such as exoticism, alienation, hybridity, and appropriation), Psychoanalytics (focus on Freud’s theories of the id, ego, and the superego), New Historicism (a reader should look at literature in the context of where it falls historically), Feminism (focus on the roles of women), Marxist (power of the masses and economic power), Literary Darwinism, Reader Response (how the reader feels about the text), Mythological (symbols), Structuralism (the structures existing in a culture) and Post-Structuralists (like the Reader Response lense).

Synthesis of Course Material: Writing

Writing

Closed Prompt: There is always a hidden “so what?” question in every prompt, asking the writer to draw conclusions about how this contributes to the overall meaning of the writing.  This is one the goals included in the prompt, and your writing must achieve all of the goals.  Techniques create effects, which then create meaning. 

Open Prompt: The main point that was driven into us about the open prompt is to avoid plot summary.  Because we don’t have the work in front of us, it’s harder to think of specific textual examples and quotes.  However, we learned to use specific scenes and the characters’ actions in order to provide evidence for how an author creates meaning.  We worked on the introduction paragraph a lot, which is the same for the closed prompt: introduction to subject, key background information, thesis.  

Synthesis of Course Material: Reading

Reading

Close Reading: We learned about DIDLS, the techniques an author uses to create a tone or emphasize the meaning of the piece.  Through many close reading practices, I began to better understand some of the concepts, such as diction and imagery, and learned for the first time why some of the concepts mattered, such as syntax. It was hard at first to understand why DIDLS mattered so much, but after picking apart an essay and finding examples of each element of DIDLS, it made more sense and was easier to use in my own writing.

            DICTION: the words a writer choses.  A reader should look at the difference between connotation and denotation, and why an author would opt to pick one word over the other.

            IMAGERY: the picture that the writer creates through descriptive language (or lack thereof)

            DETAILS: the specific elements included in the writing (the author must have chosen these for some purpose)

            LANGUAGE: the devices the author uses, such as alliteration, similes, metaphors, etc.

            SYNTAX: how the author forms sentences (devices such as asyndeton and polysyndeton fall in this category)

 Analyzing Poetry: We learned to use SSTIFS (Situation, Speaker, Tone, Imagery, Figurative language and the rest of DIDLS, Structure) to analyze poetry.  There are different types of sonnets, the English/Shakespearean sonnet and the Italian/Petrarchan sonnet.  The English sonnet has 14 lines, is written in iambic pentameter, has a heroic couplet at the end, and has four quatrains before the couplet.  The lines are rhymed abab cdcd efef, and there is usually a “volta” (or turn) at the couplet, in which the sonnet turns on itself or shifts the way in which the subject is being treated.  The Italian sonnet is composed of octaves in the rhyme scheme abbaabba and the volta occurs in line 9.