Happy Thanksgiving everybody! It’s Sunday and I’m still stuffed. (Laugh out loud, just kidding)
Hardest part about writing the paper: figuring out how to engrain the research I did into my paper along with my thoughts.
Easiest part: figuring out which story I wanted to write about!
Semester is almost over!!! I enjoyed this class much more than most the English classes I have taken, but i’m excited to go off and play baseball in Dallas.
I decided I am going to write on either A&P or Sonny’s Blues because these are the two stories I most enjoyed. Probably going to go the psychological route as well. Looking forward to the workshop! Hopefully I will get this one turned in on time as well, that really hurt me on the last one when I got very sick.
Fiction, fiction and more fiction! I love it! Well, i enjoy it. I think after this semester I am going to go buy a new book to read for the first time in a few years. I think the last ones I read were Friday Night Lights and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Both very good books, especially since I am a sports fan. Still trying to figure out which storyI am going to write my paper on. Will update later!
We have read quite a few stories and i could tell you all about them but it would take a VERY long blog to do so. In this case, I will just summarize the things I have been learning about fiction, as a whole. From religious themes to sad, sad, stories; the range of stories we have read is pretty broad. I really enjoy fiction and the discussions in class about the themes of the stories and what the author meant in each are very productive. Even though there are some different view points, it seems like at the end of the discussion we all end up in the same place. So thats’s good!
This week we read two short stories i really liked; A&P by John Updike and Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin. While they are not similar in the meaning of the story to the reader, usually the theme, I could still relate to each (even if it was in a different way). A&P is about a young man, or teenager, named Sammy who needed one event to pull the final string to help him take the step to become a different person. He did not like the situation he was in and could see how he would end up and wanted a different route in life. Sonny’s Blues was very touching in the fact that a brother learned to accept his brother and they became closer. It showed how we can open up to learning about a person and seeing who they really are. I enjoy fiction!
Drama essay workshop was today! I can’t believe there were only four or five of us…. anytime I can get one on one instruction on writing a good paper from my professor is a time I can get myself out of bed! I ended up turning my paper in very late but I felt like I did a good job on it so that is a positive. Im just hoping it doesn’t ruin my chance of making a B or A. We start fiction next week and I look forward to that. I think it will be more interesting than poems or dramas. But, thats just my taste… nothing against them.
Even though this post is a month and a half late, it is not hard to remember what we did in class this week. We spent a lot of time discussing the themes in three plays; Othello, A Doll’s House, and The Glass Menagerie. None of the three really ends in a special, happy kind of way. However, all three end in some sort of tragedy so it was easy to discuss parallels in the themes of the three plays. Drama exam is next Monday and it helps a great amount that we were able to have a review session in class. Thanks Mrs. Wood!
This week we began learning about modern theater! One major play we focused on was A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. It is a family drama and i enjoyed reading it. I learned a lot about central symbols in plays as well. The symbol in A Doll’s House is a Christmas Tree and it parallel’s to the emotional state of a character in the play; Nora. Parallels are drawn out between the two and as she declines psychologically, the tree declines in appearance. We learn more about dramas next week when we read The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. As I know now, these plays will relate in many ways.
Finding out which poem I wanted to write about! It took me a day or two to decide which one got to my head and confused me the most. I am not an English major so none of them were SUPER easy to understand, they all their own symbols and poetic devices. However, after deciding on the right one, it was all gravy from there!
First off, I use the 10th edition of the English book so page # may be incorrect. I am responding to the poem Riding into California by Shirley Geok-lin Lim.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to be an immigrant in a new country but Lim paints a great picture of how it would be. She adds in some humor in the fact that Bruce Lee becomes her hero; he was probably the most popular chinese man in america at the time and many people of all races could enjoy the movies he acted in. At the end she points out how nice it is to sit alone all the way home on the train (space wise, those seats can get very crammy) but how lonely it is at the same time. I could relate to these last few lines and fully understand the way she felt then, the main reason I felt this was a great poem.
