Outside Reading 4-2

Date: Feb 17^th

Title: Doctor Speaks
Author: Robert Isenberg
Type of reading: Reflective Essay
You can find the actual article I read from the website below:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/doctor/1doctor.html

The essay was written by an actor who acts at Medical Interview classes as a patient. The author has acted many different patients with different diseases and backgrounds, but this time he had to act a patient who had warts around his rectum. He was so unwilling to act such a person, because it is simply so embarrassing. There are many evidences showing how unhappy he was acting such a patient: when he was asked where the warts were, he hesitated like "They're... around my..." and then he answered in “a gravelly mumble.” By the way, I liked the diction of “gravelly.” By saying “gravelly,” it made me to think that the author’s voice at the moment would have been very “dry,” which I think is very appropriate for he is not at all interested. He said to himself “Let this end. Please let this end. I hate this fucking case,” not only the repetition but also the colloquialism shows how much he did not want to do that. Following was his list of diseases and pains that he had acted before, and he says: “But anal warts are by far the most annoying.” The syntax of those sentences, which can be characterized by its lengthy continuity, also shows his hostility towards the job.

             The tone of the author was an ordinary narrative for the most part. However, the conversations between med students and the author added some comic effects to it. Also one thing about the tone that stood out for me was that the author had a little bit of sarcasm in it. The author did not directly mention how much he thinks the Medical Interview classes or the med students are stupid, but rather he used some quoted terms and italicized words to create the effect. For example like "showing empathy" and "maintaining eye-contact" and “What kind of question is that?” obviously reflects the author’s sarcasm. Therefore, the tone would not be the most appropriate for AP essays, because it is sarcastic, and also the tone is a little too informal for an academic essay.

Outside Reading 4-1

Date: February 15th
Title: Once on This Island
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Type of Reading: Book Review
Found from New York Times


           The extraordinary title of the book “When the Killing’s Done” has indicated that the story is going to be a unique one. And even this review of the book does not seem quite ordinary. This book review starts with two very weird questions: “Who could love a rat?” and “What could possess a man to sail to an uninhabited island, in defiance of law, and throw out vitamin K pellets as an antidote to a government-sponsored rat-poisoning program?” The questions do not only catch readers’ attentions, but also reveal that the story is going to be somehow related to a guy, an island and rates. An island? The title of the article is called “Once on This Island,” and the readers may think here, “What island?” The writer quickly answers the question in the following paragraph. The author tells us that the island in this novel is an “impassioned portrait of a real place, the Channel Islands of California.” Through the organization of the information, which can be seen as a detail of the article, the reviewer relates the novel to the reality for the readers, the author may have amplified the curiosity of the readers of the review, and may have reached closer to one of the review’s purposes: advertisement.

The writer calls the island “an isolated cradle” and “the doorsill of extinction.” Using these two dictions, the writer has smoothly introduced the two main characters who despise each other unconditionally: Alma Takesue, the “habitat-restorer” and Dave LaJoy, the “animal-lover.” The introduction of these two characters and the contradiction of those two are very interestingly written in the review. The author calls Takesue “the saner half of this moral face-off” and described LaJoy as “a fanatic decked out in dreadlocks and vegetarian zeal.” The dictions that the author used are not formal but very lively and humorous. Moreover, the author also called the island “pre-human Eden” —which is obviously an allusion from the Bible—that is shown the “dramatic mercy” of human beings. By saying Eden, it should be meaning that the island was beautiful like a paradise when it was left untouched, but the author sarcastically wrote that it was touched by human with “dramatic mercy” that has destroyed the paradise completely.

The argument between Takesue and LaJoy is caused by the declaration of government that made the Channel Islands a national park. There were not so many rats on the island before, but somehow the rats got on to the island, and they started to reproduce uncontrollably. Takesue wants to protect the ecosystem by killing the rats, but LaJoy opposes it and tries to save it. That seems to be the basic plot of the book. No one can really determine which of them is right and which of them is wrong. The article starts with two confusing questions and ends without any answer for anything. However, the article closes with one line like this: “When will the killing be finished? Never.” Here the author gives out the only clear answer in the entire piece of writing, and this may be indicating that the author has the same perspective with LaJoy, who is the animal lover.

Class Notes 4-1

Class Notes

Jan 24^th - Feb 4^th

Topic 1 Medievalism and Allegory

1.      Trends in The History of Western Literature

(Classical Literature -> Medieval Literature -> Renaissance Literature -> Romantic/ Victorian/ Realist Era -> Modernist Era -> Postmodernist Era )

• Who is worthy of being a literary protagonist?

God, Nobility -> Nobility, Pilgrims -> Nobles, Lords, Everyman -> Lower class, Nobles, Lovers, Everyman -> Poor, Minority, Everyman -> Every”thing”, Everyman

• What themes and motifs does literature primarily focus on?

Fate, Mortality -> Morality, Religion -> Love, Loyalty, Family, Tragedy -> Nature v. City, Corruption of Society -> Rejection of society, Individualism -> Everything

• Who or what motivates the events in the plot?

Gods, Fate -> Religion, Chivalry -> Lover, Supernatural -> Love, Supernatural, Social status -> Self-discovery, Meaning of life -> Self-discovery, Meaning of life, No dividing force

• What are the acceptable forms of literature?

Oral, Drama, Poem -> Play, Essay -> Play, Poem -> Poem, Essays -> Novel -> Novel

• What narrative techniques are most in favor?

3^rd person omniscient narrative (epic tone, elevated) -> Indirect characterization, narrator is no longer so “God-like” or judgmental -> ? -> Object voice, like news report, 1^st person narrative -> 1^st person narrative (sometimes the narrator is not even the main character) -> 1^st person narrative (sometimes the narrator is not even the main character), Non-linear narrator, Multiple narrators, Stream of conciousness

2.      Allegory and Medieval allegory

• Allegory: a technique used to externally validate a text

• Medieval allegory: allegories are the hallmark of medieval literature

              Ex) TSTL(Too Stupid To Live) heroines

Topic 2 Everyman

• Everyman figure: the character is unnamed or given vague and general personal characteristics, especially when the setting seems somehow “mythic” or has a fairytale quality or is otherwise somehow “outside” of time

• Example of the type of Medieval drama known as the morality play

• Morality play v. Mystery play = composed individually v. in cycles

• Employed allegory to dramatize the moral struggle Christianity envisions universal in every individual

• The play shows the hero’s progression from despair and fear of death to a “Christian resignation that is the prelude to redemption”

• The play makes its grim point that we can take with us from this world nothing that we have received, only what we have given

Topic 3 Divine Comedy

• Written by Dante Alghieri

• Three-part epic: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso

• Written in Terza rima, and interlocked series of rhymed lines in sets of three

• Allegorical vision of Christian afterlife

• Beatrice, Dante’s “ideal woman,” whom Dante admired from afar in the then-fashionable tradition of courtly love

• Considered to be both emblematic of the medieval worldview and one of the greatest works of Western literature

Class Notes 3-2

Class Notes  

12/13/10 – 01/07/11

Lecture on Stoppard

Dramatic Horizons of Significance

• "Horizon of significance" is a world ordered by certain normative understandings which, even if they are not ours, enable us to understand what is going on as a coherent and accessible vision.

• The horizon of significance comes to us through what the characters believe and how the story establishes for us a sense of moral meaning.

Theatre of the Absurd

• It has become, in a word, absurd, without logic and without the comfortable reminders of a logical structure: a confidence about time and space and memory.

• It has no reliable meaning. Often, it is featureless.

• This, however, is not the only important criterion of this literary style. The other essential component is that the protagonists' attempts to deal with the world also register as absurd.

• Existential action will not bring us happiness; it will, however, confer human dignity upon us. The Theatre of the Absurd takes from us that dignity.

• Most of the major attention in Absurdist Theatre focuses upon how the protagonists try to cope.

• The emphasis on verbal humor is one of the major attractions of Absurdist Theatre. To acknowledge that these plays are often very funny does not mean that we should miss the desperation underneath the humor.

The Prufrock Connection

• Connection between Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and Stoppard's play: reliance on romantic irony throughout

• Romantic irony: the procedure by which apparently significant gestures or assertions or decisions are made only immediately to collapse. (A great deal of the humour in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead emerges from this technique.)

• At the end of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the persona acknowledges that he is, in effect, already dead to all intents and purposes. And in a sense we might, considering the title of Stoppard's play, say much the same about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern throughout the course of the action. In the world in which they inhabit, there doesn't seem to be a very firm line drawn between life and death; the latter is merely an exit, casual, unexciting, as insignificant as the details of the lives they live (far less dramatic than death in a fictional performance).

• In a very real sense, Vladimir, Estragon, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Prufrock are all extreme examples of what Nietzsche calls the "last men," the living dead, as inauthentic and non-human as it is possible to get.

A Reservation: The Question of Friendship

• Stoppard's play contains at least one very important element missing in Waiting for Godot and in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": friendship between the two protagonists

• Vladimir and Estragon have been together a long time, and yet they do not seem to express any particular friendship for each other. They need each other and are petrified at the thought of being alone. So their relationship is based upon a deep individual anxiety rather than upon anything expressing a positive value, such as friendship.

• Prufrock gives us no indication that he has any friends.

• With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, however, the emphasis is different (certainly in the film this is brought out). There is a sense of comradeship about them, a genuine affection and closeness (which is occasionally physical).

• Beyond this point, there is also a sense that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have more of a specific identity than, say, Vladimir and Estragon. They are Elizabethans, with a certain amount of money. So there is something of a historical identity, and the similarity between them and the people they encounter suggests something like a common cultural basis. In Beckett's play, by contrast, the characters have names which suggest that they have nothing in common (Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky, the Boy), and their clothes tell us very little about their specific origins, least of all that they share some common historical or cultural milieu.

Outside Reading 3-3

Date: Jan. 9^th
Title: Teacher Training, Taught by Students
Author: Winnie Hu
Type of reading: Newspaper piece
You can find the actual article I read from the website below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/nyregion/15metjournal.html?ref=education

Editorial columns, features, and other magazine and newspaper pieces with clear points of view and strong voices—how does the author craft a narrative persona and a “voice” here, and how do these elements impact your response to the content of the piece? If this piece were AP essay, would the speaker be appropriate? Why or why not?

             I really liked the title of this article; it was really heart-warming to me somehow.

             When I was reading the article, at first I thought that there was no clear voice in this article. However, I thought if so the article was saying something, then there should be a voice. And I found out that the author was creating the voice through other people. By “through others,” I mean that the author is not expressing his or her own opinion. Most of this article is about how people reflected to this issue and what actually people said about the issue, and through those the author is telling us how people felt about the new way of teacher training.

In AP essays, it is good to have some references to support our own opinions. However, the point of AP essays is to appeal our own thoughts about the literary works, so this kind of voice would not be appropriate.

As a fellow writer, to talk about the writing of this article, I felt it was a well organized article. Above everything, the opening line of the article arouses the reader’s interest in the first place. The readers would wonder when they read the line, why teenagers are so sleepy in the classes. And then they would keep reading to find the answer. And then it is transited into its real topic smoothly by indicating that the teacher, Ms. O’Bryant, found the answer for the wonder from her student. Followed by the “informal” introduction, the author “formally” introduces this new teacher training program and shares how the program is being spread out and how people feel about it. The organization of the information is logical and straightforward and I think it helped forming the voice. If the passage was not as organized, then the voice could have been unclear.

From a rhetorical point of view, the author’s quotation of actual speech of people increased the credibility of the information; the concise and grammatically perfect sentences made the article more readable but also more formal at the same time; author’s use of parentheses, quotation marks, dashes and rhetorical questions gave the readers more fun reading the article, but the author also limited the use of those “special” punctuations so the article would not lose its formality.

The language, not the voice, of the author, in my opinion, is applicable to AP essays for it is formal but not as hard to read through and also does not cause loss of interest of the readers.

Outside Reading 3-2

Date: Jan. 9^th
Title: Helpless in the Face of Madness
Author: Bob Herbert
Type of reading: Reflective Essay
You can find the actual article I read from the website below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/opinion/15herbert.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Reflective essays—what tone have the author adopted? How does the author create this tone, and how does this affect your response to the content of the piece? Would this tone work for an AP essay? Why or why not?

             It was short column, but it had a clear message: we need gun control. The author of the article is claiming that the society is going into a terrifying madness and that people are being helpless and irresponsible about the issue. He asserts that we need a proper leadership to oppress this madness to prevent any further tragedies from happening.

             The overall tone of the passage was serious and criticizing. The message, the examples, the concise sentences and word choices all help to create the tone and the tone makes the readers to reconsider the message from a more serious point of view.

             Firstly, it was the overall message of the article helped create the tone of voice. Because the passage was dealing with a serious issue, so the tone could not be light or humorous.

             Secondly, it was the examples. The examples provided were not only fitted well in the topic, but all of them were very tragic. From the opening of the column, the author applied the actual example of Virginia Tech shooting incident. And the description of the situation by a student who was at the actual scene made the article more convincing and even tense. Another example of Dallas Green also induced the sympathy of the reader, and recalled people’s sense of responsibility towards the community.

             Thirdly, it was the syntax of the article. The sentences are not very long and the word choices are also very simple. By being concise, the article became more formal and that helped the serious tone of the writing.

             And lastly, it was the details made the article more persuasive. For example, the actual numbers provided in the article about how many people die from gunfire every year clearly tell the readers how severe the problem is. Also, a detail like the word “warm” from the line “Goddard remembered being shot in his left knee and feeling the blood, warm, seeping down his leg” is a good device that made the article more effective on persuading readers. A word “warm” is a very simple word, but exactly because it is so simple and common the readers may actually imagine the “warm blood seeping down” the leg, and so they would be more able to sympathize with the victims about the terror.

             The tone, I believe, would work well for AP essays, for we need to deliver clear message and impression to the readers through our essays.

Outside Reading 3-1

Date: January 7th
Title: Woman’s Work
Author: Meg Wolitzer
Type of reading: Book Review
You can find the actual article I read from the website below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/books/review/Wolitzer-t.html?ref=review

Book reviews—what critical perspectives are at work here? What connections between this piece and other course material or readings (or course material/readings from your previous English classes) do you see?

             The article was a review for a book called “Being Polite to Hitler.” As the tile of this book review, the author of the book is a female. The first paragraph of the article summarizes what the book is about, and I really liked the paragraph for the reviewer could concisely put all important things about the book in it with a poetic language.

First of all, I don’t see any direct connections between the book and the materials we have learned in classes; however, for the book is analyzing much about human lives and human nature, I could see some similarities in personalities of characters. For example, one of the students of Agnes Scofield, Sharon Kuhlman, used to think that athletes were an anti-intellectual pursuit. But later, she fell in love with a college baseball player. People do not see the big picture of the future and many times they like to affirm some things. However, like Oedipus who has had no idea about who the man he killed is and has affirmed the prophet is lying; things can turn out the most unpredictable and the most dumbfounding way and make people be aghast. Another example I detected was that the protagonist, Agnes Scofield, is a widowed woman. Many female figures in the literary works we have read were widowed also even though most of them remarried very soon. Though, because I have not read the book (“Being Polite to Hitler”) yet, so I would not be able to compare them in details.

Secondly, the main perspective of the reviewer towards the book seems to be that the author’s ideas about the society, people’s lives and people’s ideas are well melted into the book. According to the reviewer, the author of the book is called a “quiet” novelist for she is an observant writer whose language doesn’t seem to be able to compete with the increasingly loud noises around her. However, according to the reviewer, the author is actually widening and tightening the views of the readers at the same time.

About this reviewing article, I thought there should be some more transitions between paragraphs. Even though I think it could be a higher level of writing to have no clear transition (the main idea should be clear for sure) but for me at least, it was slightly confusing and was hard to follow the flow perfectly. But I think it was a good piece of article in overall.