This past week was dominated by slide shows. Everyday we spent pretty much the entire hour preparing and presenting our presentations about the different elements of fiction. The presentations were supposed to teach the class what we learned about the different elements. Yet, I feel like this only partially of worked because nothing that was presented changed how I thought of the elements. It definitely made a couple of key things get strongly reinforced but there was not much new. After the first few presentations it seemed more like people just regurgitating the basic information of their elements. However, I don't think this week was wasted since the class got to practice their presentation skills. While I have not seen a greater understanding of these elements of fiction I do feel more confident with the classes presentation skills. It's always good to be able to see so many people try to present so you can see the good and the bad and learn from their mistakes.
Akin the to presentations we spent a lot of time getting ready for them. One of the things that we did was watch a TED talk about the basic structure of a good presentation. The speaker tried to convince us that they had the same shape but I am not entirely won over on that idea. I say this because this past weekend I listened to a speech given by president Obama (2012) that I did not feel like follow the format. He did not really bounce back and forth between the norm and the amazing potential of something new. I felt that rather treating his proposal like they were unbelievably awesome he tried to make it seem like it was silly that we were not already doing these things.
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This week was dedicated to finishing up our group presentations. To start out the week we had to finish up our reading for fantasy which was the Jilting of Granny Weatherall. Which after reading as a group we felt was very lacking in the area of fantasy. We began discussing that maybe it took a page out of Dickinson's book when she explicitly left out sight from her poem "I Felt A Funeral in My Brain" because a lot of the things we believed could happen. From our close read of fantasy the definition was more or less impossible scenarios to explain something. Which the "Jilting" seem all very possible. Granny Weatherall just seemed like a senile older woman who was loosing her grip on reality. Everything that is talked about in the story that appeared to be impossible we felt could have been explained through the fact that Granny was slowly losing her sanity. Which is what lead me to look at SparkNotes' analysis of the story to get more information and it did not help too much. Nothing in their analysis really had any answers to what I was looking for.
As a group we also prepared a slide show for the class to explain Humor and Fantasy and to address our big question. We finished up everything that we wanted to for the slide show in class. Now all we really have to do is flesh out how we want to present it to the class. Hoping to be all done with the project by early to mid next week if all goes to plan! The main focus of this week in class was reading and working on our group projects. We finished up the rest of humor this week by reading "The Drunkard" which was more of a fun read than "Rape Fantasies". I think that was due to the fact that as a group we gave each character their own unique voices. Which proved amusing later on in the story when Larry, the little kid, got wasted off of a pint of what he thought was lemonade. I think adding the voices really improved the reaction that we had for the story and definitely made it more memorable. Also the humor in "Rape Fantasies" was heavily based on irony in the sense that all of the women talked about these rape fantasies that were not what you would normally think of when you think of rape. The speaker in the story also plays on that idea for a lot of the text.
On a side note. For a bit of follow up research on the passage rape fantasies, I decided to read an article on why some women have them. The research done by some researchers at Notre Dame and the University of North Texas found that women who were very sexually open or felt desirable were more likely to have rape fantasies Another thing that I finished up this week was the Quiet American. Which turned out to be a lot better than I had expected. I crammed the last bit of reading I had to do on Thursday night after I got home from my game in Saginaw. After about page eighty the story really kicks off and I started to get into the guts of the story. My favorite part of the story was *spoiler* finding how Fowler was kind of sort of involved in the murder of Alden (A.K.A. Pyle). The way the story jumps around different periods of the past was a unique way to tell the story and I really enjoyed it in the end, even though it did confuse me a bit in the beginning. I can definitely see how this book is considered to have "literary merit" and I would absolutely recommend this book to other people. I feel like I can relate to the poem from last Thursday "Did I Miss Anything" because I have not really been here all week. Due to the school closing on Thursday and missing school of Tuesday because of the Slice of Life at U of M,.
Monday we did a lot of talking about our new poem "Bright Star" and we read our SSR books. We talked a lot about who we could relate to and identify with from "Bright Star" in regards to the speaker, the speaker's lover, and the bright star. Personally I felt more akin to the bright star rather than the other two for a couple of reasons. The first being I feel like I have been steadfast in my ways for most of my life. Also I am not like the speaker or his lover because I do not have the kind of affection or received that sort of affection from any other person. I checked out shmoop to see the analyze portion of the website. It I read a little bit of loyalty section which went into depth about the speaker's loyalty to his lover. Even bringing up the idea that the speaker is more concerned about himself rather than his lover. Tuesday we got into our groups and spent a large amount of time discussing which short stories we wanted to read for our project. My group decided to read the drunkard and rape fantasies for the humor section. We have not gotten a chance to begin reading however we were able to talk a little about what exactly is humor in a literary sense. However we were able to take a look at the passages about humor. I look forward to reading both short stories and talking about them with Sloan and Luco for out project. *Note* Sorry about the late post everything minus the last few sentences had been written. It's just a little difficult to do these blogs when you miss a lot of the week. |
AuthorHey! This is my top bunk, I do all of my sleeping here so chances are if you see me here I am about to go to hit the hay. Archives
March 2017
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