Week 8: Structure and Symbolism

This Week's Classes

Since class was cancelled last Friday we're going to skip Achebe's "Dead Men's Path." The syllabus won't change in any way.

Please come to class on Monday having read Timothy Findley's "Stones", as well as pages 68-88 from the McMahan text book.

On Wednesday, please come to class ready to discuss imagery in Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." You'll find the story on pages 210-213 of our text book and a discussion about imagery and symbolism on pages 89-91.

Come to class on Friday having read Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls," as well as pages 119-121 and 142-146 from the McMahan text book.

Assignment

For this week's blog assignment, please write a review.  You may review anything: a story, a novel, a movie, a song, a restaurant, a piece of electronics, etc.

In your review you should evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your subject.  You should tell us both what is good and what is bad about the thing you are reviewing, but you should also come to a solid conclusion so that your review is a useful representation of your opinion as a tool for making recommendations to others.

As you're writing your review, think about whether you liked the subject, whether it is good, and whether your reader should see/read/buy/whatever that subject.  Those are, in the end, three different questions, and a good review answers all of them.

Announcement

Hi everybody!

Since class was cancelled today, your essays are now due on Monday. Take the extra time to further revise and polish.

Your blog, however, is still due today by the end of the day.

I'd also like to take this moment to remind you that the blog assignments are marks that are easy to achieve. If you haven't been blogging, do consider changing that habit--those marks will make a big difference by the end of the term. In times I've taught this class in the past the highest marks by the end of the term have always been people who blogged actively.

Have a good weekend, and I'll see you on Monday.

Week 7: Getting Ready for Fiction

We're leaving poetry behind and starting short fiction this week. We've got some very good stories on the horizon. All of the skills that we've learned for analysing poetry are useful to us here too. Even the work we've done on form is useful; although stories have a different form from poems (a study of the scansion or the rhyme scheme will rarely be fruitful) they are always written in a deliberate form, and that is something we can and will talk about.

For Friday, please read pages 62-67 in our text book, and Chinua Achebe's story “Dead Men's Path”, on pages 269-271.

Journal Activity

I want to help you shift your thinking from poetry to fiction by asking you to write some fiction.  Your journal activity for this week is to write that most scorned of all forms of fiction: fan fiction.

Have you ever read or watched a story and wished it wouldn't end? Or wished it had ended differently? Fan fiction is a way some fans of literature, comic books, movies, tv shows, and even real life have expressed this desire. Writing your own piece of fan fiction will likely encourage you to think about your chosen story in a new way, and to understand a little bit more about the process that went into writing the original.

Any story you choose is fair game, from classical literature to your favourite soap opera, but please note what the original story is and who wrote it. Your piece of fan fiction need not be a long continuation of the original--4 or 5 paragraphs should do--but feel free to make it as long as you like, or as long as you need to to do justice to your story.

If you'd like to see some examples, check out http://www.FanFiction.net/ where you'll find some good and some not-so-good attempts. Let the good ones inspire you and the not-so-good ones encourage you that there's no reason you can't do this too.

One more note about fan fiction: it is often used as wish fulfillment, and sometimes as erotic wish fulfillment. That's not the kind of thing I'm hoping for here.

Looking Ahead to Next Week

For next week going more in depth in our readings of fiction.  Please come to class on Monday having read Timothy Findley's "Stones" as well as pages 68-91 of our text book.

Week 6: Wrapping up Poetry

This Week

For the first half of this week we're looking at two poems by Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Please read "Pied Beauty" (417) and "Spring and Fall" (417) for Monday.

On Wednesday we'll be looking at some poems within a single poetic movement called Imagism.  Please read Ezra Pound's “In a Station in a Metro” (427), and Carl Sandburg's “Fog” (424), and come to class prepared to discuss them.  William Carlos Williams' “The Red Wheelbarrow” (426) is also an imagist poem, so you may wish to re-read that as well since we will briefly revisit it on Wednesday.

On Friday your second essay draft is due and we'll spend the day reading and editing essays.  Remember to bring your essay with a title and your student number, but without a name.  

Journal Activity

Canadian poet Gregory Betts explains Plunderverse in this online article. Betts writes "Plunderverse makes poetry through other people’s words." Here's how it works:

1. Find a poem you wish to plunder. It can be a poem we have studied together but it doesn't have to be. You will probably find that a longer poem is easier to work with.

2. Type up or copy and paste the poem you have chosen, and post it in its whole--credited to the original poet.

3. Make a second copy of the same poem, and take out bits and pieces to make a new poem. Don't rearrange anything, and don't add anything; only take parts out. Remove words, remove whole lines, remove parts of words so that you can use individual letters; it's all fair game. When you're done, you will have a new poem: a Plunderverse poem by you.

Here is an example in my Plunderverse of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias".

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.




Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


For more inspiration, check out these great plunderverse poems made by Austin Kleon out of street signs.

Looking Ahead to Next Week

Next week is your winter break, so we have no class on Monday or Wednesday.  On Friday the final draft of your second essay is due and we'll start reading short fiction with Chinua Achebe's "Dead Men's Path."

Week 5: Theme

This Week

This week we'll be reading John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud" (p. 406), Ben Jonson's "On My First Son" (p. 407) and Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" (431).  We are likely to also refer back to Dylan Thomas' “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” (438), so if you didn't read that closely or didn't understand it last week, read it again please.

We will likely focus on Donne's poem on Monday, Jonson's on Wednesday, and Owen's on Friday, but please come to class on Monday having read all three poems so that we will be free to compare if we want to.

Journal Activity

Please choose either the creative or the critical option.

Creative
All of our poems for this week are about death. Your creative writing assignment is equally morbid.

1. Write a poem about death. It doesn't have to be depressing, and it doesn't have to be profound. It can be flippant or funny or it can be personal and thoughtful, whatever you like. Although this won't affect your ability to achieve full marks on the assignment, my advice to you is to try to be surprising. Try to think about this assignment in a way none of your classmates will.

2. Offer a brief analysis of your own poem. This should not be a reflection on your experience when writing it; it should be an analysis of the poem as if it wasn't yours. You may wish to talk about the form, or the poetic language, or about the meaning, or any analytical strategy you choose. A suggested strategy for this is to write the poem and then go do something else for awhile. Come back to the poem later so you can analyse it with fresher eyes.

Sample

Here is my poem, written for this assignment.

Is it worth it?
My friend does his exercises every day
He doesn't eat red meat or fat
He watches his sugar and watches his salt
And he doesn't eat much of that.
He doesn't play xbox or watch the tv.
He doesn't drink (soda OR beer)
He won't listen to music if it is too loud
(He doesn't want to damage his ear).
He ends every day by making a list
of the people he needs to forgive
So he doesn't get angry and damage his heart
Geez! How long does this guy want to live?

And my brief analysis of the poem.
"Is it worth it?" is a twelve line poem with regular rhyme and rhythm composed of three quatrains. Each quatrain follows an abcb. The rhythm alternates between four and three feet per line. The combination of the sing-song rhythm and the close, almost careless rhymes give the poem a comic tone. This comic tone is somewhat undercut, however, by the implied message of the poem, that death is unavoidable.

Critical

The poems we are reading this week are all about death, but that isn't the only thing they were about.  Jonson's "On My First Son," for example, is also about fathers and sons, and so is Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."  Choose any two of the poems we've read so far in this course and, in a few paragraphs, discuss a shared theme between them.

Your discussion need not be structured as a formal essay, but remember that the more you practice the skills you will need to write academic essays the more you will develop those skills.

Some examples of possible themes include (but are not limited to) love, childhood, art, marriage, war, nature.

Looking Ahead to Next Week

Your second essay draft will be due on Friday of next week, February 15th.  Please feel free to come talk to me about your ideas as you prepare to write this essay.

Week 4: Voice and Diction

This Week

For Monday please read Shelley's "Ozymandias" (411).

For Wednesday please read Browning's "My Last Duchess" (413).

For Friday read Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" (438).

Every day this week, please come to class prepared to discuss the tone of the poem and the persona and character of the speaker or speakers.

Journal Activity

Both last week and this one we are thinking about persona and tone in poetry. Poetry is capable of an incredible amount of nuance and subtlety in its tone, and we as readers are capable of an incredible amount of disagreement. For this week's writing assignment I want you to think more about persona and tone in poetry.

Write the first two paragraphs of an imaginary essay about the tone of  one of the poems we've read together. Follow the style and tone of a formal essay, and try to make us feel that you have a whole essay written but we're only seeing the first two paragraphs.

Example

In Dorothy Parker’s “One Perfect Rose” the final stanza effectively subverts the expectations built by the previous two. The language of the first two stanzas follows a pattern that should be familiar to us—and certainly was familiar to Parker. This familiarity leads us into a false sense of security. We think we know what kind of poem this is, and we think we can predict what the conclusion will be. Parker’s abrupt shift in tone subverts these expectations and forces us to reread the entire poem. With the new understanding of the speaker’s tone that we gain in the final stanza, we are able to reread the tone of the first two stanzas as well, and to understand the irony that was at first inaccessible.

 Parker's first stanza begins with the line, "A single flow'r he sent me, since we met" (1).  Parker could expect that her readers would immediately recognize the symbolic meaning of a single flower.  When this line is coupled with the title of the poem, "One Perfect Rose", it immediately sets expectations of the reader.  We recognize the sentiment as conventional and even cliche.  The speaker is being romantically pursued by the "he" of the first line.  She is the passive recipient of gifts and he is the conventional wooer.  The use of an apostrophe in the word "flow'r" is a strange one here, however.  It is, in 1926, when the poem was written, an archaic device.  The language of the poem in its first line, then, is conventional, predictable, and even stale.

Looking ahead to Next Week

Next week we'll be reading three poems about death.  Though they're assigned for different days, and we will most likely stay with them in that order, please come to class on Monday having read all three so that we can feel free to compare if we need to.

Week 3: Poetic Language

This Week's Classes

For Monday please read Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" from page 374 and  William Wordsworth's sonnet "Nuns Fret Not", found on page 3940 of our text book, as well as McMahan's advice on writing about poetic language on pages 370-381.

For Wednesday, please read McMahan's advice on writing about persona and tone, as found on pages 352-364, and come to class prepared to discuss the persona and tone of Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" (354) and Parker's "One Perfect Rose" (357).

On Friday the 25th we will be writing our first essay in class.  If you want to talk to me about it before then--to prepare an outline or to talk to me about your ideas--please come by my office or send me an email.

Journal Activity

As you write this week, please continue to think about form and its relationship to content and meaning, but add to that a consideration of poetic language, tone, and persona.  Remember that all you need to do to get full marks is to try. Nothing will help you to understand the sonnet as a form like writing one.

1. Write an original sonnet. Keep in mind the rules of the form (iambic pentameter, 14 lines, a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g rhyme scheme).

2. Write a brief reflection on your sonnet. Do you think the form had an influence on your subject matter, mood, tone, or language? Why or why not? Did you deliberately use poetic language? Why or why not?

Example

Here is a sonnet written by me, about my daughters.

When Guinevere was born, the sun broke through
the clouds that had been raining all that night.
She opened wide her eyes, so small and new;
The sunshine bathed her perfect face with light.
I thought that must be how all babies are.
The world takes note, because the world has changed.
But Margaret went unnoticed by the stars
And I thought that it was strange.
She is as much a miracle, and as rare
As beautiful, as lovely, as adored
As was her sister. Why should the sky not care?
Why should her birth by nature be ignored?
"Because she is herself" the answer came
"she's not her sister. Don't force them to be the same."

As I wrote this sonnet, the constraint of the form definitely affected my content.  I wrote the first line first, and didn't know where to go from there, but the form of a sonnet--not just the meter and the rhyme but also the volta in the last two lines helped me choose a direction for the poem.  I knew I needed to change the thrust of the poem in the last two lines, so I decided to use them to answer a question I would raise in the rest of the poem.  I was probably also influenced by Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, in which he both uses and also undermines natural symbolism.  I tried to make the sun breaking through the clouds a symbol of my love for my daughters, but also to say that it's just the sun and clouds and the rain.

Looking Ahead to Next Week
For next week we'll be talking more about persona and tone, and about how poets create a voice.  Please come to class each day ready to think and to talk about the tone and poetic voice of each assigned poem and how the poet has achieved that tone and voice.