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My experiences with drama are actually pretty intense. In high school I went to se the show Wicked on Broadway in New York, while marching in the Macys Thanksgiving Day parade with my high school band. I also worked with the theater department for my high school I helped build props, stage setting, lighting and many other aspects on the production side of drama. Not only have I worked or prop building, but I also played in the pit orchestra for three years. I was never an actor in the plays our school did but I was always a part of them. I played the French horn in productions such as In to the woods, Les Miserable and Evita. It was always fun but really hard work because you always had to play exactly the same because people were depending on you to play it the same because they were singing along. It was extremely frustrating working with a perfectionist director who kept wanting to do the same scene over and over again until it was right because we would sometimes play the same three lines of music for about an hour sometimes.
Drama to me is extremely versatile and interesting because there are many different kinds of drama. There is serious drama, musicals, Shakespearian, and even comedy. There is no way to hate drama because there is a sub drama out there for everybody. Even though I love musicals (who doesn’t?) my favorite is dramas are the more funny ones, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead and a midsummer nights dream. Simply because they are funny and not serious such as Death of A salesmen or Hamlet. Those are good drams, don’t get men wrong, but I like funny dramas just a little better. Also Romeo and Juliet is way over quoted, used, and referenced, it is a good story about teenagers “falling in love instantly” then killing themselves but come on use something else for a change.
What have I learned about poetry so far? Well so far I have learned that poetry is infinitely full of meanings, deep to simple. Within a single poem people can find, as many meanings as there are people to read the poem. I have learned to look further into the deep meaning and intricacies of the poems. Every word in a poem is put there for some reason; every word has a purpose not just to fill space.
Words are very important in poems because poems are generally shorter than other works of literature, such as no fiction, dram and short stories. These types of literature can be as long as books some times and have pages or even chapters to a variable amount of time to evoke feelings. Poems however are generally much shorter and don’t have the space or the time to go into lengthy detail like a novel, but yet they still evoke deep and sometimes even complicated feeling in less than a few pages and even in a few lines. The power, order and even lack of words are what is key to poetry. What novels do in chapters, a poem can do in a single line and some time in a single word.
I have come to the conclusion that because poems are so much shorter that other works of literature, that is what gives poems more room for interpretations. Writers of poems choose words that specifically have more than the obvious meanings so that people can choose what to take away from the poem rather than just describing, poetry works hard at evoking feelings. I have learned that if given time and intelligent thought poetry can be fun and enjoyable to read. Although one can find deep meaning in a poem it is a lot harder to find and one must go searching to find it when reading poetry.
Poetry, to me, is an infinite number of subjects and ways they maybe expressed. Poetry, I think is more open to debate than any other form of literature, because the words an author uses maybe completely different from their intended meaning. Again there is an infinite number of ways to write and present poetry. Poems come in many forms, from rhyming and the organization in stanzas to the long epic poems to the simple, such as the Haiku poems come in many shape and sizes. Which makes them more relatable in turn, because there is a type of poem out there for every one.
Poems are more relatable than other forms of literature because at one point or another through our schooling career we have written a poem for a class. Even thought they might not have been the best poems ever written, to a kid it meant something. Poetry in itself is a blank canvas because one must choose what to write about, Love, peace, war, pizza, then they must choose how to write it, and whether it should rhyme or not and how it will look on the page.
Love is the most common poems we would think of because there is no shortage of love poems out there. There are many other poems out there thought that could have the same or even a great impact at telling a story, or painting a picture or expressing sorrow. There have been poems about war, peace, space, trees, seasons anything that human beings can think of there is a poem for. This is why It is my favorite form of literature because there are so many ways it can take form and manifest rather than be limited to the categories of fiction, nonfiction, novel, or short story, poetry can transcend them all. And here is my favorite poem William Ernest Henley.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be,
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Myself as a writer, I have written many papers, some really good and some not so good. Since high school I must have written enough papers to add up to a book. I like to think that my papers have improved over the years and have slowly gotten better.
As for literature, reading it is just fine and my ability to read literature has improved as well. However my ability to interpret the meanings of the author and transition them into my own ideas needs improvement. I can get the basic stuff but the deeper meanings I still have trouble with.
As for my writing process I follow the process but there is room for improvement. I write drafts and edit them but the intensity and focus that I put towards them needs a lot of improvement. I think it maybe because I have never liked writing and I have trouble expressing myself through writing. I can imagine that a person who is good at writing enjoys doing it, at least to some extent. I however never really liked it, which is probably why I need to improve my writing skills. My skills at writing are improving thought it is a lot easier writing now than it was in high school even though the topics may be harder.
The thing I think I need to improve on most is my editing skills. Catching my own mistakes and changing and rearranging my writing to make it more coherent and so that it makes better sense. I have a stubborn and bad habit of once I am finished with a paper it is done a very little is needed to be done to it. I guess that is also a thing I need to improve on is time management. I simply just need to spend more time working on the writing.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman first published “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892 in the New England Magazine. During the time that Gilman lived woman’s suffrage and equal rights was a popular topic. During this time Perkins was a follower of Woman’s rights activists such as Susan B. Anthony, and Harriet Beecher Stowe who was Gilman’s great-aunt.
Gilman was an advocate for equality and woman’s rights; leaving and confining woman to the confines a home and house work deprived women of their creativity and intelligence and the potential for a positive public, professional career and education.
In 1886 during her first marriage Perkins was stricken with post-partum Depression after the birth of her daughter. She was stricken with “unbearable inner misery” and “ceaseless tears” that were only made worse by her husband and child. She was then referred to the Dr. s. Mitchell, who at the time was the counties leading specialist in nervous disorders. Mitchell believed that in the case of a female who needed treatment for a nervous disorder it was because of over stimulation and not enough attention to domestic work (Very sexist). So his treatment was “rest care” where the patient would be forced to do nothing and be void of any stimulation. It proved to be a disaster for Gilman; she soon had a nervous break down. She went completely mental and was crawling into closets and under beds and clutching a rag doll.
The Yellow wallpaper is almost a direct account of her experience of a rest home. The woman in the essay is not being helped by the “rest treatment” it is only making matters worse for her and she is slowing losing the mental game. The woman in the story is controlled directly by her husband who is also her doctor; instead of getting better she becomes obsessed with the room’s yellow wallpaper.
Exactly what happened to Gilman who was not helped by the treatment only when she left the home and her husband was able to recover and write. She eventually would send Dr. Mitchell a copy of the yellow wallpaper.
Citation
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on The Yellow Wallpaper.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2006. Web. 20 Feb. 2012.
Flannery O’Connor was an American writer that wrote two novels and about 34 short stories. She was raised in the American south “the Bible belt” as a devout Catholic; religion is often present theme in her writings. Along with religion playing an important role in her writing she often brings up questions about morals and ethics.
When O’Connor was fifteen her father died of lupus, leaving her extremely devastated. The loss of a strong parental father figure can influence anybody at such a young age. Often in her writings she questions religions, or at least her writing might suggest that she does. Losing her father might have attributed to this because she could think that it was all in Gods divine plan.
O’Connor was also very fond of birds which she incorporated into her writings. She also wrote an entire essay devoted to the peacock called “The King of Birds”
Many of her books and essay were written while she battling Lupus. She was dying while she was writing which is evident in her morally flawed characters. Growing up in the early nineteen hundreds, in the American south meant that she was surrounded by racial tension. The Jim Crow laws were in full swing and she would have seen how unfairly the black communities were treated.
In her essay “a Good man is hard to find” the stories setting is in the Deep South where there are very large black communities. Through the main character of the grandmother she conveys the ignorance a stereotypical view of the old south that she grew up in. Where a lady was a lady and black person was second-class citizen and they knew their place. O’Connor parallels the grandmother with the old south and the grandmother eventually dies at the end of the story, in a sense the way that O’Connor wanted racism to die.
Ernest Hemingway’s the hills like white elephants this is an example of fiction retelling a real world situations because many people face the consideration of abortion when dealing with untimely pregnancy. However if one were to look past the basic notion of the abortion problem, one would notice the problem between the two main characters. They have a communication problem they talk to each other but their point of view never gets across to one another. Also the drinking they do, from the moment they arrive at the station they start drinking to occupy their time with anything but conversation. This is a very real world situation trying to avoid talking to somebody or talking about a certain subject.
In our society teen pregnancy is a very hot topic, either keep the child and try to finish school or drop out and find a job. On the other hand the young lady faces the dilemma of abortion, for some that question is easy, no. For some thought it becomes a very real and difficult answer to find.
The couple has a very real communication problem; the man tells her that he “loves her and everything will be back to normal after the operation” all she states that she said yes she will have the operation just to shut him up. The two characters dance around each other in a frenzy of talking but not communicating. Many people face this problem where they talk but may not feel as if anybody is listening. Like teachers sometimes talking to a room full of people and it seems, sometimes’ that nobody is listening but they are taking notes and they are there physically but not mentally.
The situation where the couple starts drinking immediately show that they are not read to talk yet or they were trying to avoid it. This “Elephant in the room” could be about anything in real life that people don’t want to talk about. Such as the death of a loved one, a bad test grade that you don’t want to tell your parents about, or that you are thinking about an abortion because you are actually pregnant but not ready.
After learning about how in depth literature really is, one can look back and realize that many literary devices can be applied to all works of literature. Going through works, especially ones that I have read before you realize stuff that you might have missed the first time, like parts of a plot or the realization that flashback or forwards are integral parts of the story line rather than more words on a page.
Knowing literature terminology gives one a different perspective on the interpretation of literature, because instead of just going and trying to interpret the deep meaning of the work, you can work from the outside in, towards the deep meaning. For example in a story that uses medias res, the author must use flashback and flash forwards to explain how the characters develop towards the overall plot. When an author uses foreshadowing, you could not even know it was in use until the foreshadowed event happens in the story, then one could realize that the author used foreshadowing in the story.
Literary terms could help one realize the intentional uses of the point of view of the narrator by the author. By choosing a certain point of view the author limits or expands what the reader knows about the story. If the narrator is limited then the reader is limited leaving the reader to speculate about the other characters. However if the narrator is omniscient then the reader has more variables in the characters thoughts and feeling, the reader could form a completely different opinion about the story.
I fell that many authors use these literary devices on purpose because it leads to better story telling. However if the author uses literary devices to try and manipulate a certain interpretation from the reader it might not always work because my interpretation of foreshadowing may lead me to a very different conclusion than it would someone else.
Knowing literary devices are good in all but it does not make the story any more entertaining. Authors may use literary devices but sometimes they might just write a story to have fun. I think people overanalyze, looking for meaning in literature, trying to find what the hidden meaning is behind the author’s words, but sometimes I think they might mean exactly what they say. Besides what is more fun, reading a story to analyze and categorize it or simply to read and be entertained?
The video I decided to use for this blog is a Pixar animated short entitled, lifted. It is a pretty simple clip and also it also makes one look at this situation in a different light, even thought it is most likely never to actually happens. The exposition of the clip is a farmer who is asleep in his house and everything is quiet. Then from his window, a beam of light appears as he starts to get abducted, one could argue that this is the inciting incident but I think that it is when he hits his headland does not easily go through the window. This moment foreshadows the rest of the clip because it creates the conflict. The rising action is when the scene cuts to inside the alien ship and you see a small alien looking at a vast table of switches, that control how the abducted gets moved around and you realize that it is a test. The young alien is nervous and has no idea what he is doing and just flips out and presses as many buttons as he can. The climax of the clip is when he finally is able to get the farmer out the window and in to the alien ship but then he drops him only to be saved by the mentor. This I would consider the climax because it is a release of tension as the more experienced alien takes control of the situation. The falling action is when the mentor alien takes control and puts everything back together and gets the farmer back in his bed. The resolution is the when the little alien realizes that he really did his job badly and probably wont be allowed to abduct someone for a while. The conclusion is after all is set right in the house of the poor farmer the two aliens start to get ready to fly away and the little alien begs the big alien to let him fly the alien ship. This is the conclusion because even though the alien made a few mistakes he is allowed one more chance. The moral and theme of the story is that everybody goes through hard ship and trials even aliens.
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