Writing About Plays

Being someone who comes from a theater background, this chapter was very interesting to me. Chapter 7 takes me back to an experience my sophomore year of highschool where my theater director told us we would be writing our own one-act play for competition. (Insert my freak out here)

The elements, "plot, character, and theme" (page 111), were what we first started with. We had to pick an idea, just as the Gardner book says you have to do when writing about a play.
On page 113, it is said that "drama is a livin art," I completely agree and I believe the best way to read about a play is to play it out in your head as you go along. Give some life to the words.

STAGE DIRECTIONS. A huge thing in theater and according to page 114, a huge thing in play analysis. "What kind of physical movement, blocking, or choreography would you see on stage?"

Overall, this is one of my favorite chapters and makes it clear that I'm writing my research paper on the right topic.

Cinderella and True Stories (but really just Cinderella)

I chose to write on Cinderella, it was the one that stuck out to me most and it wasn't a poem I enjoyed, regardless of the extra detailed misfortunes.

• Within the first couple stanzas, this seems to be a poem speaking of all types of Cinderella stories; "from toilets to riches (line4)," "from diapers to Dior (line 10), "from homogenized to martinis at lunch (line 16), "from mops to Bonwit Teller (Line 20)." I've heard about other forms of the story Cinderella and many other fairy tales that were originally nothing like the glamorous Disney versions. I guess I just didn't expect such drastic details such as the step sisters cutting off parts of their feet to fit the shoe (Lines 81-83 & 88) or the dove pecking their eyes out (Lines 97-99)

Flee from Song, Villanelle

Wyatt, They Flee from me
Rossetti, Song
Hacker, Villanelle

• They Flee from me

Okay, so my first thought from stanza one was birds. Then as I continued to read on I realized Wyatt was speaking of women, or one woman in particular.
From the footnotes, it seems as though Wyatt is toying with this woman and that his gestures are not sincere, which is a reason, I believe that they would "flee" from him.

• Song

This poem, to me, seems like a letter written to the loved one of Rossetti while she is on her death bed. It seems as though she is telling her predecessors not to dwell on her passing or to mourn her, but to forget her and live happily because she isn't going to feel the earthly things they do for her. "Haply I may remember, And haply may forget."

• Villanelle

Insanely confused by this one, I literally just felt like I was reading words on a page. I'm looking forward to talking about this one in class.

Dover Beach or the beach from Twilight or the beach from Icarus.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
p. 89-90

My sophomore year in high school, we wrote our own play based on the story of Icarus, called Icarus Flies, the second stanza in this poem, other than the fact that it's night time, reminds me of the shoreline that Icarus sees as he temporarily flies.

The entire description of the beach in the first stanza reminds me of the honeymoon beach in Twilight (sorry for my continuous parallels to Twilight)


Overall, I really enjoyed Arnold's way of describing the setting and the shoreline, it reminds me of a quote I once heard, "because there's nothing beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it is sent away," by Sarah Kay.

Feminists Unite

The Dead, James Joyce.
Feminist Criticism, pg. 175-208

The argument on page 182 caught my attention as soon as I got to it and it's a question i'd like to extend to you all, "Does feminism weaken or fortify itself by emphasizing its separateness?"

You could compare it to the Plessy v. Ferguson court case, seperate but equal, right?
We all know that seperate wasn't exactly equal at the time and it doesn't seem to be for feminism either. A good point for this arguement would be the amount of success from novels written openly by women and the amount of success from novels the public did not know were written by women. I think just as in the case mentioned above, separateness is strengthening feminism in the long run.

The [Walking?] Dead

The Dead, 3-59.

I could start talking about how I slightly expected this to be about zombies, but then I'd be giving nothing on how I felt about this section of the book.

My attention was immediately caught by the quote on page 16 and 17, so I decided to pause my reading and write about this. The quote by Joyce in his discussion of genre in Portrait begins on page 16 with "Art" and ends on page 17 with "human imagination". This quote stuck out to me because of my experience with the arts and I was able to relate to all three parts mentioned; lyrical, dramatic, and the epical form. The quote says that the lyrical form is the "form wherein he artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself", the epical form is the "form wherein he represents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others", and the dramatic form is the "form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others." Reading all of the descriptions, my first thought is of monologues and the ones I performed or saw others perform while involved in theatre in high school. The lyrical monologue reminds me of a monologue from the play The Fifth Sun that a boy named Preston did acting as a priest, speaking to himself but portraying his character to the audience. I did a monologue in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, that was both speaking to myself and also addressed the audience, as spoken of in the epical monologue. The dramatic monologue most reminds me of the improvisation shows my high school used to put on where the audience was directly spoken to.

To be or to not be a good reader, that is the question

Reading and Writing About Literature, Ch. 2

• Okay let me be "lame" and go ahead and talk about how I read and re-read all of the Twilight books four times each, except for the last one (I wasn't a big fan).

One of the first sections in chapter 2 talks about the power of re reading and I CAN ABSOLUTELY RELATE TO THIS. When reading the Twilight books again after the first time, I caught on to so much foreshadowing to the events that were later going to take place that I felt dumb that I was ever surprised by the plot. I cannot stress enough how beneficial re reading is. I especially like how the book states on page six that re reading allows you to "understand a truth". When you reread something, you don't just get the surface materials, you understand character development vs. just understanding the plot.

• I write for memorization therefore note taking is the bomb dot com in my case.

In my literacy narrative I talked about how writing things helps me learn and remember, so when I'm reading for class I like to keep an index card next to me with notes for the reading on it. This helps me remember important details of what I read and it also gives me something to look back on, just as it says in the book on page 11, "You might want to use the same notebook [in my case index cards] that you keep with you in class so that you can make reference to your class notes while reading at home[my situation is just flip flopped]."