My evolution in literary analysis

Over the course of taking this intro to English course, I have learned quite a bit about analyzing literature.  For starters, I've gained a better understanding of the different critical approaches, such as Structuralism, Feminism, Freudism, and many others.  I've also gained a better understanding of analyzing dramas, films, etc., like when we did an analysis of "The Silent Child", or looked at different plays, like "The Doll House" or "The Death of a Salesman'', and the many things that different people focused on, even from the same clip of the same play.

Responding to poetry

I was looking at the poem "Poetry Makes Nothing Happen"? By Julia Alvarez

1) Listening to a poem on the radio,
Mike Holmquist stayed awake on his drive home
from Laramie on Interstate 80,
tapping his hand to the beat of some lines
by Longfellow; while overcome by grief
one lonesome night when the bathroom cabinet
still held her husband's meds, May Quinn reached out
for a book by Yeats instead and fell asleep
cradling "When You Are Old," not the poet's best,
but still... poetry made nothing happen,

which was good, given what May had in mind.
Writing a paper on a Bishop poem,
Jenny Klein missed her ride but arrived home
to the cancer news in a better frame of mind.
While troops dropped down into Afghanistan
in the living room, Naomi Stella clapped
to the nursery rhyme her father had turned on,
All the king's horses and all the king's men...
If only poetry had made nothing happen!
If only the president had listened to Auden!



Faith Chaney, Lulú Pérez, Sunghee Chen--
there's a list as long as an epic poem
of folks who'll swear a poem has never done
a thing for them...except... perhaps adjust
the sunset view one cloudy afternoon,
which made them see themselves or see the world
in a different light - degrees of change so small
only a poem registers them at all.
That's why they can be trusted, why poems might
still save us from what happens in the world.

That has made all the difference

Sitting in English class in middle school, looking over this poem, it’s always intrigued me.  Something about it always made me want to read it over and over again.  At first glance, there’s the obvious forest imagery, that always reminds me of my times camping, my time in boy scouts, and the friends I’ve made there, or of the times I went hiking, and times I came across my own two paths in the wood.                                                             

            http://ey.westside66.org/exploring-the-road-not-taken-by-robert-frost/

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as  could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

               

That has made all the difference (draft)

Sitting in English class in middle school, looking over this poem, it’s always intrigued me.  Something about it always made me want to read it over and over again.  At first glance, there’s the obvious forest imagery, that always reminds me of my times camping, my time in boy scouts, and the friends I’ve made there, or of the times I went hiking, and times I came across my own two paths in the wood.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

               

Thinking about this poem, one of the major things it’s talking about, is it’s a huge metaphor about the choices we make.  There are many times where we have to make a choice, but either choice is just as appealing.  When we have those moments, we sit there and just look at both paths, and can’t decide, thinking we’ll regret it that we won’t be able to see the other path that we could have taken.  We sit there, trying to decide how we can decide which one is the best, and so we sit there thinking, and doing nothing.

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

As life continues on, we have to make choices, and we cannot go back to these moments in time, and take another decision.  We’ve only got this one chance to make a decision, which can be hard, since we can only see so far, and our sight is really limited.  We can’t see around the bend, or through the trees themselves, we can’t see what’s lurking in the path.  But, we can move based on what we can see, and sometimes, we just need to pick a path, and move on, since either path might be just as good as the other.  There’s not always a good or a bad path. 

               

                                                And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized more and more about this poem.  For one thing, we all have so many choices that we have to make, some of them are less traveled, and some are so traveled, there’s hardly any undergrowth that can be seen, but as this poem states, it’s not always the most traveled of paths that make it appealing.  Sometimes, we need to discover, to have our own adventures, it’s not about conforming to others, but becoming your own person, and perhaps that’s why it’s made all the difference.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The poem seems really simple, yet it holds many ideas behind it.  Just like how nature seems simple, and is beautiful in its simplicity, yet in that simplicity, there is much thought, and there is usually much more going on than what can be seen.  Since, behind the two paths, there were many who were at the same crossroads, and both had been taken, which means that there are many stories that crossed at this same point, and came to different conclusions based on their experiences.  Although, in this case we can’t ask others for advice since we’re alone, but when we have our own choices, we can ask those who have followed one path or another, and we can find out which path seems to be the better one based on the experiences of others.

Growing up, going through school, I’ve come across many pieces of literature, many different poems, yet this one has always stuck with me.  It’s one that I think about from time to time, and sometimes I wonder why it has struck with me so.  On the one hand, it seems simple, and like it follows many standard things that make up a poem, for example rhyming, and the format it’s written in.  But then, I realized that the rhyming pattern is a little bit different than most, since it goes ABAAB, instead of ABAB, or ABBA, and has 5 lines, instead of the usual 4. They’re slight changes to the norm, but I think that made it all the more compelling to me, it seemed like any other poem, but then it made slight changes to make it something different.

This poem is a classic, and shows that something seemingly so simple, can be a masterpiece, and that poetry can draw in people from all walks of life.  It has a power that can relate to many different people, and mean a lot of different things.  It helps us to realize things about ourselves, and about life, and it really has made all the difference, at least for me.

Mother knows best

Recently, there was a short film that won an Oscar, the name of this short film is "The Silent Child".  This film is roughly 20 minutes long, and follows a little deaf girl, named Libby, that has a new social worker, named Jo-Anne that comes to help teach her to communicate via sign language.  Within this film, they use a variety of techniques to show that deaf people are treated as an inferior class of human, when they are just like regular people, but just lack an effective way to communicate with most people.

One of the biggest ways that they showed this was through some of the characters.  For example, Libby's mother, who was the one that has the most interaction with Jo-Anne, and Libby throughout the film, but at every turn, she makes Libby seem like an inconvenience, she basically wants Libby to be fixed, and doesn't seem to really care about her at all.  Throughout the film, the mother is always busy, running errands, always standing, or sitting away from Libby, except for 2 times, one where she tries to take the TV remote away from Libby, and of course Libby fights back, since she doesn't know what's going on, or why she's trying to take the remote, and the other is where she kisses Libby goodbye before leaving somewhere, and Libby naturally recoils from her.  Neither one of them are positive experiences, which shows how distant Libby's mother is from her.  There are also other characters that when conversing with Jo-Anne, show lack of faith in Libby, like Libby's Grand-mother, when she's talking to Jo-Anne, seems surprised when Jo-Anne says Libby is actually really smart.  Another moment is when Libby's father meets Jo-Anne, he expresses a lack of faith in Jo-Anne's help, saying they have low expectations, and only want her to have increased confidence.

Another way that they showed this is through the music.  In many scenes involving characters that can hear, there was music playing, but in the scenes that were focusing specifically on Libby, it was silent.  There was even one scene, where when the family was together having a meal, there was complete silence, just to show what it was like in her world all the time, and to emphasize the fact that nobody paid attention to her, since during this scene, no one even so much as looked at her.  The music helped to show that the difference between Libby's world and the world of the living.  But, when it focused on her, she was still able to enjoy herself, still able to do things that everyone else did, like swimming, going to the park, regardless of whether there was sound or not.  This helped to illustrate the difference, and that deaf people are still like everyday people, but are easily ignored by those that can hear just fine.

With the use of genre, they also helped to express a very interesting idea, since it was a fictional story put into a short film, and made it seem as realistic as possible.  They basically made it so that they could say that this is a common story, not an exceptional one.  While it is such a common story, it's still widely ignored nonetheless.  You could tell that they intentionally did this, and felt passionately about this, that they wanted everyone to understand what's going on, and make a change in the how deaf people are treated.  In their acceptance speech, Rachel Shenton, the writer, and fiancee to Chris Overton, the director, Rachel signed and spoke her speech, which showed how much this issue was important to her, since she could clearly speak, which implied that she can hear, but since she signed, she's also very aware of the deaf community.  This is why they chose to do a realistic fiction of a story that is much too common, and that needs to be changed.

BYU English Symposium

This past Thursday and Friday, BYU had an english symposium where they had many different panels, presentations, about a wide variety of topics.  I only made it to 2 of the presentations, the 3mp competition, and a panel called "The Range of Rhetoric".  The 3mp competition, which stands for 3 minute presentation, had 11 different presenters with a wide variety of topics ranging from feminism, to education, to even just our different portrayal and understanding of villains.  They were all interesting presentations, and I could tell that they had all put a lot of work in, and were very well put together. One that piqued my interest in particular though, was one by Elizabeth Young, who's presentation was entitled "Baudrillard's Hyperrealities: The Case for Living in a World of Simulations".  This one interested me, mainly because I basically did a literary review in my Technical Communications class about this very subject, which was how Virtual Reality can and is used in educational settings, for training simulations, and the like.

The second panel that I went to, which was called the Range of Rhetoric, as mentioned previously, had three presenters that each presented different uses of rhetoric in differing fields; one talked about religion, another Bio-genetics, and the third Statistics.  They each had their different approaches, and had some fascinating ideas.  The first presenter, Mitchell Holman, talked about Erasmus and Martin Luther's debate, and their different approaches, and talked about the importance of listening-rhetoric.  He compared the debate between the Catholic Church and Martin Luther to our political debates today, where there are 2 opposing, extreme viewpoints, that argue vehemently against each other, and refuse to compromise at all.  He spent most of his time talking about the viewpoint of Erasmus, who sought to seek understanding from opposing viewpoints, and seek a compromise that both sides can be happy with, yet no one listened to him, and the presenter talked about the importance of trying to use listening-rhetoric, and trying to understand other viewpoints than our own.  The second presenter, Alexis Polson, talked about how she transformed her literary review about cancer into a magazine article that could help those diagnosed with cancer to better understand what's going on, since many of them don't understand what exactly is happening to them because of all the medical and scientific jargon that goes on with explaining things to them.  And lastly, the final presenter, Brandon King, talked about the business model of pay what you want that has been happening in the video game industry, and the company that has found success with that model.

Fasting Forty Days and Forty Nights

In Kafka's short story "The Hunger Artist", is an interesting short story, which follows his style of writing strange, and somewhat disturbing short stories, like "The Metamorphosis".

When I first saw the title, I thought it was a bit strange, since I thought it would be more about an artist that was struggling to make ends meet, but then that would've been the hungry artist, and not the hunger artist.  After going through the story, I realized, it was an artist that was trying to use hunger itself as an art form, which is a strange idea, since hunger is usually not something that one appreciates, which can bring up the question, what is art?

While going through the story, I thought it was very peculiar that the man was able to fast for such a long time, considering the human body can only last a couple weeks without food, and merely only days without water, yet this man was able to last for months, maybe even years (since there was no count of the number of days he fasted at the end) without dying.  This makes the story a rather mundane fantasy, since the only incredible thing was how much a man could starve himself.  Even the extent of 40 days seems unbelievable, yet the character still wanted to continue, despite him appearing to be half-dead even at that marker of time.

With reference to the 40 days of fasting, which was set as the limit, I thought it was an interesting choice of number, since, assuming one has any knowledge of the Bible, that makes one think of the story when Jesus Christ fasted for forty days and forty nights, and was then tempted of the devil.  This might make one think that the protagonist is some sort of Messiah-like figure, but that turns out to not be the case, since all he does is fast for who knows how long before his death.

The McBeth Duo

I also saw the 2-man McBeth play performed that my fellow blog-peers saw as well.  And, this was actually the first time I've seen McBeth. 

To start off with, this play was done with only 2 actors, which certainly made things interesting, since there were some scenes with 3 or more characters on stage at a time.  This choice made it a little bit harder for me to follow what was going on, but it added for some funny moments.  I think that because of this decision, the actors decided to have more fun with it, to make it more comedic than it was originally intended to be.  That being said, they certainly did make it rather entertaining with their decision to also include audience members in the play.  There were several moments where they had the audience read lines for when messengers arrived, and reacted based off of what happened, which, made things a lot more interactive, a lot more interesting, especially the parts where they went up the stairs and into the audience.  

Now, the venue of the play wasn't the best for interacting with the audience, since it was a typical stage with rows of seats in front of it, but they made good use of what they were given.  They also relied very little on props; mainly just a table and chairs, curtains, and creative uses of light to produce different effects.  Overall, it was a simple play that focused more on the abilities of the actors to portray the story, instead of relying on props or costumes, or things of that nature.  They used minimalism in the materials so that the focus would be on the characters, instead of the things around them.  

The distance between us

Starting around 31:30 in this production of A Doll's House, when observing the relationship between the two characters, one can really see the tension between the two characters.  The lady, you can tell that she doesn't want to be around the man, since she keeps fleeing across the stage from him, and looks really tense when addressing him.  Then, at 38:17 the man comes in close to show the lady to show evidence that he has against her, and the tension can really be seen, since we find out why she's so tense, since it is at this moment that the man reveals that the lady forged her father's signature.

Drama Analysis

When watching this presentation of A Doll House, something that I noticed throughout the piece was the way the costumes that the actors/actresses wore made them much more visible and eye-catching.  When looking at all of the props, and the lighting, it's all very bright, very much the same color, but the actors/actresses are all wearing dark colors, except for the white cover the first lady wears until about 1:20 into the clip.  I think that helps to show that the play is very character driven, and not very prop based at all.  It's all about the storyline, and what the characters are saying, and not at all to do with the things that are around them.

My name's Devin. I typically enjoy fantasy/sci-fi novels