Reflections

Wow! It does not feel like a whole semester has gone by, let alone a year. My freshman year is drawing to a close and it feels like it never happened.  So this last blog is an in depth reflection of this course (well second to last, I think I have one to make up.)

The class was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed the books we read. The books are not novels that I would have chosen to read on my own. I usually do not read modern literature. The PowerBook was a huge eye opener to sexual references, sexual orientation and roles that gender play. I had never read a book about lesbians, but that is not what the book focused on. The books overall theme was risk in relationships. It showed that not only by showing Ali and her female lover together, but other couples in history and the risks they took. Many risked life, health, wealth, and trust to have a fulfilling love. So the book made me think about relationships and risks on a whole instead of just focusing on the controversial lesbian couple. After reading the PowerBook I was not as surprised at The Bloody Chamber.

The Bloody Chamber was a fun book to read because of all the twists on fairy tales. I always loved fairy tales growing up, but as I got older I hated the message they send to little girls. They say that life will always, ALWAYS turn out perfectly. No matter what situation you are in you will always live, rise above your situation and live happily ever after. They also promote the fact that you will find a perfect, handsome, funny, tall, wealthy, family-oriented, awesome man who will marry you and make you a princess.  Real life does not happen like this and girls have to work hard to earn anything in life and just being a beautiful virgin will not change your circumstances in life. The Bloody Chamber changed the message of many of the fairy tales and made them different in some fun, usually sexual way. Like for instance Little Red Riding Hood changed in many ways by having the Grandmother stay dead and Red Riding Hood was able to inherit the cottage and make a life of her own and thrive. I liked this message so much better than, “Oh everyone survived and lived happily ever after.” In this story Little Red Riding Hood was strong and survived and was rewarded for her work and bravery and had a good life by making it so herself.

                The writing we did correlated well with the three books. I wrote about images for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I felt that the images were very important to the story and I eventually was not happy with my essay so I chose to rewrite it. The theme of risk was a great topic for my second essay. Risk is such a driving theme in the books we read and I wanted to explore that topic further. The Bloody Chamber essay was by far the most fun. I loved taking an already twisted fairy tale and twisting it more and making it my own. My only complaint about that essay would be that it is EXTREMELY hard to do a creative essay with another person. He Ma and I were able to work through it and combine our different ideas about details and how the plot should go. I think that essay was the best I had written all year and it finally gave me a chance to be creative instead of just regurgitating text passages and using analysis we had in class.

                The writing was very effective because it drew together the books and really made the theme of risk almost palpable. The writing got me thinking about the books even more and how they could apply to my life in a broader sense. I became so much more aware of risk in my life and was able to focus on the desire behind the risk and what to do about it.

                Questions that the writing and reading left me with was, “How does risk operate in other areas of our lives, including education.” I mean this was for a Miami Plan English course, so I wondered on several occasions how this theme applied to my education here at Miami University.

                This has been a great semester and I loved the class. I hope you enjoyed teaching it as well.

Thanks,

Kristin

 

 

Julius Caesar–Extra Credit

So I was planning on going to see Julius Caesar on Thursday evening but I had the directions wrong so I ended up on going on Sunday evening. The play was in the Oxford Community Arts Theater which was a really old historical building. Once there they served cookies at the play, which made me very happy. The first thing that you saw when you went into the room was bright blue walls with a giant blood red sign that announced ROME. Other than that sign there were no set pieces to speak of. The cast came out and they were all dressed in very modern clothes and they had a hint of corporate style (ties, heels, button up shirts ect…) The next thing I noticed was the girl who play Casca, Katherine Hawthorne, was in my other English class (124 Introduction to Fiction.) I had no idea she was into acting and was very excited to be able to see her in class and tell her I went to her production of Julius Caesar.

The actors themselves did very well. They spoke the script well (and we all know that Shakespearean dialect is not easy to master.) They were also very good at acting and were very passionate about the tragedies that occurred in the play. I have seen a few productions of the play, read it, and watched the movie and I have never seen a modern take on it. The artistic value was there to make the story more modern and more applicable to the lives of college students who are probably not Shakespearean scholars. I noticed that many of the words were changed and substituted with more modern words that we have in our vocabulary and in many ways make the story more interesting to understand. An example of this would be after they murdered Caesar they are talking about letting Marc Antony speak at the funeral and they changed the word for pulpit.

I was thrown by the changes they made in the gender roles for the characters. For instance Marc Antony was a female. This was very different than what I am used to because the traditional role of the hero who leads to the defeat of the people who killed his mentor Julius Caesar. It was a cool gender empowering selection and made women a more integral part of the play and was good for the quirkiness of the play.

The play was very different and almost a dumbed down version of the play. I personally appreciated the idea of making changes and giving the play a unique, artistic quality, but I liked the original Julius Caesar as it was and was hoping for something more like that. I was also confused at the lack of setting and props, yet they wore business attire and did not change the rest of the setting. They could have put it in modern Roman times (which I would have loved because I was just there!) As a lover of history and a great admirer of Shakespeare I was slightly disappointed in the changes but applaud the people who participated because they did a great job memorizing the lines and acting because I know they worked hard and should be proud of the performance and I had a lot of fun attending the play and supporting my fellow classmates in something that they are interested in!

 

 

 

The Erl-King

The Erl-King is a thing (really unsure if human or animal) that lives in harmony with the forest and nature, and this allows him to thrive in the forest. The Erl-King is also dangerous, “Erl-King will do you grievous harm.” He lures young girls into the forest, has sex with them and then turns them into birds. The narrator is a girl who is lured by the Erl-King and she comes when he calls. They have sex and she loves him but relates him to a “tender butcher.” This connection shows that he loves, but will be harmful. So in order to keep herself safe and become powerful she plots to kill him with his own hair while he sleeps. The story ends with a weird transition to third person and the fiddle comes into the story again.

The significance of the fiddle is that it is what he used to lure the girls to the forest so that he could turn them into lovely birds that he could possess. This relates to the idea that males oppress females and that in the end the narrator opposes it and plans to strangle the Erl-King with his own hair and then use the hair to put on the fiddle. I think that this means that the oppresser and the “instrument” of oppression become one in the same.

“New Message”

I wonder why Fairy Tales always end in happily ever after and true love forever. At this point in my life I realize these two things do not exist outside of Walt Disney’s little dream world. Love fades as quickly as it comes, marriages dissolve in messy divorces, and both men and women are disappointed by the lies spun by the Grimms brothers and Disney. In the real world Cinderella would have remained a servant while her eldest step-sister married the prince. If you want to be optimistic Cinderella might have married him only to realize he only wanted a wife for the sole purpose of giving him an heir to the throne. Sleeping Beauty would have stayed in her coma, Ariel would have never regained her voice, and Beauty would realize that life in a secluded castle is not a dream but a nightmare.

I want to give a “new message” to the story “The Tigers Bride.” This story loosely mirrors Beauty and Beast. I want to change the ending to make it more realistic. In my new ending the girl would resent the fact that she is turned into a beast and cannot go back to her old life. Instead she has to live as an uncivilized animal. She would never be able to show herself into society again and would be secluded in the castle with only the Beast and the valet for company. She would come to resent this arrangement because she would feel trapped. She would get sick of the Beasts company (which would eventually happen when you are stuck together for a long period of time) and eventually come to resent him because she would see him as the reason for her present unhappiness. She would maybe runaway but would have to live alone in the wild, or she would remain and be miserable at the castle and eventually die of boredom or unhappiness (anything to get away.)

This is how I would make the story more realistic and more fitting for what happens in real life. There are many other options to make the story more realistic. Mind you I chose the darkest and most dramatic to make a point about Fairy Tales not turning out with a “happy ending.”

Fairy Tale Fun with Rapunzel

http://www.authorama.com/grimms-fairy-tales-16.html

I re-read Rapunzel for the fairy tale blog and as I was reading it I have not heard the story of Rapunzel since I was very little so it was like reading the story for the first time. While reading, I realized the simile when the King’s son talks to her. The story says that “He talked to her quite like a friend.” This had a very larger impact on how Rapunzel began to trust him and eventually agree to marry him. He treated her as an equal even though she was a woman and he had never met her before he was very kind to her. Judging by the behavior of the enchantress she had never had that kind of treatment and respect before. This goes a long way in showing the oppression that Rapunzel felt by the situation that the enchantress had set up for her. Rapunzel was constrained and unable to lead a normal life. The King’s son treated her well and this lead to the climax of the story when the enchantress finds out about the young lovers. Everything ends well and they live happily ever after just like in other fairy tales. 

I also never really wondered why she was named Rapunzel. I soon realized that it was after the vegetable that her mother desired so much that she literally traded her daughter for the vegetable (turnip possibly.) 

I loved re-reading this fairy tale and found a few new and interesting ideas that I never picked up on as a small child reading the toned down version in her book of fairy tales (in that she never had children and the King’s son did not have his eyes violently torn out by thorns!!) I actually had a fun time doing this blog because I love to read fairy tales and look at the meanings.

PB essay, no not the peanut butter

As always, I had a lot of problems with my first draft of SEARCH. This is essay has so much information in it because all the stories relate so much. Issues that I mainly had were-

–Not linking my essay enough with Paolo and Francescas story

–Transition sentances between paragraphs

Lastly,

–Having too much info, quotes, and textual evidence in one paragraph.

All these problems are similar to what I have with other essays and I hope I can clear this up with my future revisions. Thanks to my group for the helpful comments!

just kidding

I was mistaken on the directions for the paper and the last outline is outdated. I am actually doing my paper on the sub-story SEARCH.

Thesis: The story is about a high stake romance which mirrors Ali’s story. In my paper I will argue that risk is an integral part of the sub-story because Guinevere’s and Lancelot’s love puts their lives, Guinevere’s present marriage to King Arthur, and the peace of their countries, France and England, in jeopardy. The story of the ruinous love of Guinevere and Lancelot mirror Ali’s story because of many of the same risks involved with love.

Outline

I am doing my paper on the sub-story Help. This includes the story about the Red Fox/Hunter and Princess.I see risk in telling the sub-story to her lover, the idea of risking life in the chance that death may come. Also, the hunter risking everything he has for the love of the princess. He even risked his own life in hopes to make her realize her love and spare the fox (she didn’t in the end because of her own selfishness.) So that risk the hunter took failed just like many others in the book (the Everest climber and Paolo and Francesca) Also in the story the risk of love is the main theme and doing whatever you need to make the other happy and fulfilled.

Thesis: I argue that risk is important to my sub-story because the hunter had everything to lose and gain by sacrificing himself for the princess. If the princess chose to save him, then he would have gained her love, but what happened was that she chose to kill the fox and in doing so, sacrificed the hunter for her own personal benefit and the hunter lost his life.

Intertextuality with ELIC

This passage 71-74 mirrored ELIC in a couple of ways. On page 73 the author talks about finding stuff (like Atlantis) and this was a Major theme in ELIC. In ELIC Oskar spends most of the book trying to find the lock that matches his key and a person with the last name Black. This search was the major plot and motivation in the book and we are unsure of the plot and motivation of the PowerBook. In the PowerBook this passage is talking about buried treasure, buried things on the computer, and how we are all looking  for something in life and for answers.

I think that this is looking very deep into this passage and that even though I do not think this intertextuality was intended it was still effective and fun.

???Question???

So, we started reading The PowerBook this week and so far I am already extremely confused. I cannot keep up with the dialogue and I am having a hard time trying to figure out the characters and what they are doing. My main question for the blog will be

What is the purpose of the metaphor on page 49? The story reads, “I had been out on my own, looking for a particular shop where I could buy a snare. I didn’t realise it would be set for me.”

 Why was he shopping for a snare?

What is the trap that he is getting into and why? Is is unavoidable?