Hello class! This post will be a kind of anchor of the five close-readings we did in class and the themes we discussed alongside them. Kind of as a primer to get you ready to see the themes of The Tempest echoed back at you in our newspaper headlines. 1. Full Fathom Five, Act 1 Scene 2Full fathom five thy father lies; In this section of the play, Ariel is singing charmed verses to Ferdinand that falsely describe the corpse of Ferdinand's still-living father. Ariel is acting as a mystical extension of Prospero's will and power. Prospero wants Ferdinand to do certain things (like fall in love with Miranda), and Prospero uses Ariel to twist reality and tell Ferdinand lies that affect his emotional state. In other words, power tells lies to manipulate the emotions of the less powerful. Emotions are the key to actions. 2. Nature versus Civilization, Act 2 Scene 1I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Here old man Gonzalo is pontificating on his perfect world. If Gonzalo were king of the island (a strange thing to daydream about aloud in front of your actual king), all the trappings of agricultural civilization would be stripped away and life would be better. Gonzalo is illustrating a point of view shared by Montaigne in his essay "Of Cannibals" that inverts the traditional idea that civilization automatically brings progress. Gonzalo prefers to keep his island as a hunter-gatherer or pastoral society. He believes that evil comes from the "progress" of society, and innocence can be restored to humanity by rewinding the clock of our own scientific and civil achievements. 3. Hell as a Place in our Minds, Act 3 Scene 3GONZALO Here, Prospero has executed his revenge upon Sebastian, Alonso, and his brother Antonio for the betrayal that stole Prospero's life away from him all those years ago. And the revenge takes place on the canvas of the victims minds. Ariel makes the three guilty parties mad, making their punishments invisible to innocent Gonzalo and all the more harrowing to those inflicted by it. In art and culture of the time, perhaps spear-headed most dramatically by Milton's Paradise Lost, the idea of hell was being redefined. No longer was hell being conceived as a physical place on a map, like it was in the Medieval conception of the world. Hell was now a matter of experience, and we humans no longer have to wait until after death to experience it. 4. This Rough Magic, Act 5 Scene 1Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, There will never come a time when these words don't move me. Here, Prospero reveals himself finally as the complicated, multidimensional hero of the play, instead of the villain corrupted by power that he teetered on becoming. He gives up his rough magic, his power over the island and his power over the minds of his enemies and friends alike. In just a few more acts, Prospero will drown his book and leave his magical island. Just as in a few more lines, Shakespeare will end his playwriting career and return to Stratford-Upon-Avon to his family and eventually his grave. Words have power, and here we have an intricate, compelling portrait of the writer as a magician. Who else do we give power over our emotions and minds? Who else is able to create worlds that we can inhabit? Writers, of course, the effective ones at least, spin worlds out of airy nothings. 5. Brave New World, Act 5 Scene 1MIRANDA Here, at the very end of the play, Miranda sees people. She has been raised in complete isolation. Up until this point, she has seen exactly three humans: her father, Caliban, and Ferdinand. The excitement and innocence that "admiring Miranda" (Shakespeare made this name up for this play, btw) sees in the society of people contrasts with Prospero's tired, weary, disillusioned perspective. 'Tis new to thee, not to me. The newness and the wonder at life have tarnished for Prospero. Even his triumph at regaining his title is tempered by his ambivalence at drowning his books and separating himself from his power. And, of course, it has become almost impossible to read these words in their original context without thinking of Aldous Huxley's appropriation (shameless magpie!) of the words for the title to his dystopian novel, Brave New World, which was just recreated into a series. Sometimes it feels like history and current events are buffeting us around. Like we have no power or agency over what happens to us, like we are just pawns on someone else's chessboard being moved around. What is the relationship between our choices and reality? To what extent do we get a say in what happens to us? How do we find our way out of the storm and back to solid ground? I have to tell you (again) that I love The Tempest. I love the ambiguity of Prospero, how he somehow defies easy labelling as villain or hero. He shimmers back and forth between being our protagonist and our antagonist. I love the idea that Shakespeare uses Prospero as a mouthpiece for his own farewell to the London stage before returning to Stratford-Upon-Avon to be buried in a chapel with his family. "This rough magic I do here abjure." Word magic is the most powerful magic, so of course Shakespeare casts himself as the greatest of magicians. As far as Shameless Magpie goes, Shakespeare's work has been a never-ending well of inspiration to generation after generation of writers and artists of all sorts. From The Tempest specifically, we have text from Ariel's "Full Fathom Five" spell-weaving poem planted in the first section of T. S. Eliot's great modern masterpiece, "The Wasteland:" (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Aldous Huxley took Miranda's earnest exclamation at the widening of her horizons and twists irony into the words by calling his dystopian novel Brave New World, a novel that many have seen echoed in our own newspapers. For those of you who were in here and on the ball in PreAP English 1, Dumas modeled the character the Count of Monte Cristo after Prospero. Like Aldous Huxley and Alexander Dumas, you will be connecting the language and plot of The Tempest to our world. The whole idea behind a classic is that it crystallizes something fundamental about human experience, regardless of the time or place. The Tempest is a classic, and we will be working on tying it's themes to our current reality, today's current events. What storms will you find in our headlines?
Welcome back, class! 2021, finally. Changes are happening: new year, new president, vaccines. As a nod to the hope that comes with a new year, especially this new year, we'll take a short but deserved break from honing our analytical skills to a razor's edge, which imho frankly the best defense against a crazy world. Critical analysis + mindfulness = better world. We'll temporarily focus more on the mindfulness part. Instead of analyzing the poems we look at for Unit 5, we'll reflect on them. As I discussed in synchronous class, this whole reflection business began when my friend Cynthia asked our book club the question, "But what are we supposed to get from this?" Which reminded me of something I'm surprised I needed to be reminded of: literature, including poetry, just like all other forms of art is a service to humanity. We don't exist to just interpret the art, the art also exists to give us something. Maybe it teaches us, maybe it widens the scope of our experience, maybe it makes us feel, increases our capacity for empathy, or whatever. But this much is true: good art gives us something back. (PS- In addition to being a lawyer, Cynthia's also a successful abstract artist. So she knows a thing or two about how the fine arts can enrich our lives.) So, now we reflect. Our reflections can include interpretations of the poems, but we have to go one more step and see if an aspect of ourselves rises to the surface in response to the poem. You know: reflection. Something that became clear to me during our Teams class is that this is harder for us than I thought it would be. Stands to reason, I guess. The study of literature typically boxes out the experience of the reader. It's just kind of how it's always been done. Time to relearn how to approach poems selfishly. I believe we are all up to the task, but to help us along, I'll lead the way with some good, old-fashioned, pedologically-sound model texts. How can I ask you to be selfish without being selfish first? "I celebrate myself, and sing myself" by Walt WhitmanI remember reading the Barnes and Noble edition of Leaves of Grass in my childhood bedroom back in Nesbit, Mississippi. The walls were painted butter yellow, "Queen Anne's Lace" the paint color was called. Somehow, somewhere, my imagination had gotten ahold of Walt Whitman back in my high school days and it never really let him go. Back then, the idea of celebrating myself was completely foreign and antithetical to everything I thought was true. Back then, (and still periodically, let's be real) I struggled with ideas of self-worth. These were big, gargantuan struggles that happened inside of me back in high school, and Whitman's words were like a balm. They still are sometimes. But what about this part: I invite my soul? How does a person invite their soul to look at the grass? Old school paper invitations? Does the soul RVSP? "Dear Human Home, Thank your for your invitation to look at the grass on Saturday, January the 9th. Unfortunately, the weather forecast includes rain, plus all the Saint Augustine grass has turned brown for the winter. Can we reschedule the grass-viewing for April? Thank you for thinking of me." Sincerely, Your Soul "I wandered lonely as a cloud" by William WordsworthI've definitely got a strong personal connection to this piece. I've been in Wordsworth's house in the Lake District. It's a museum now, and the curators had picked a bouquet of daffodils for the sitting room out of respect to this very poem. Cottage core is a thing now, and Wordsworth's house justifies it. The Lake District has all the sublime that a Romantic poet could ever wish for: temperamental weather, stone cliffs jutting against gray skies, fog, and mountains, which the locals refer to as "hills." If you "hill walk" to the top of one of these peaks ("hill walk" is British speak for mountain climb, btw), you find another world the locals refer to as "the fell." I'm still delighted when I think of the past tense irregular verb "fell" transmuted into a noun. What I get out of this poem is another way to consider the idea of wealth. "The wealth the show" brought to Wordsworth was the beauty of nature etched inside his memory. Just as the fell is etched inside my memory. I can call it upon when I need it or want it for whatever reason, which is usually when I need to be reassured that wild places still exist on this earth. I am rich. "'Out, Out'" by Robert FrostFrom this poem I take away the bluntness and the inevitability of death, the way that death is knitted together with life. How boy's death is taken in stride, with the same casualness that the rising of the sun elicits. Shrug, acknowledgment, adaptation. In the olden days, like the European Renaissance days, people had memento moris: reminders of death. Human skulls posed on top of books, skeleton paintings and medallions. We hide from death and shroud it in meat packing facilities and funeral homes; they met death head-on. It's the very definition of morbid, but I find it useful. For me, this poem (um, and the coronavirus) is a memento mori. When I go for a run, I think to myself, "I'm running because I can. At this very moment, my ankle isn't sprained, my lungs aren't riddled with holes, and my mind and my body still listen to one another." When I drink hot chocolate, I think, "This might be the last thing I taste before Covid symptoms kick in." And then I really taste it. To remember that I'm not promised anything more than what I have now, in this moment, and that everything I have is ephemeral, shifts my perspective and teaches me how to enjoy the present moment.
Hello students! This morning, Brevity (one of my favorite nonfiction publications) published a piece on their blog about how writers make their work better. Spoiler alert: it's basically just Shameless Magpies without the catchy name. You have finished writing your short stories. That means that you are all now creators of things. However you feel about your short story (proud, ambivalent, invested, uninvested, relieved it's over), you made it. It's yours. You wove it out of words from that mysterious place in your mind where your creativity resides. So you made a thing. Now what? I hope that some of you will consider submitting your work for publication. There's nothing quite like readying your work for submission. In some ways it's like preparing your college essays, I guess, because you know someone will read and evaluate your work. But the stakes are lower with a piece that you submit, and no one in the whole world is dictating to you what you must write. You are in complete control of your work, which is liberating and terrifying at the same time. If you decide you want to submit your work for publication, the first thing you have to do is find a call for submissions that matches your piece. Some calls for submission are very broad: basically the only requirement is that the writing be good and that your piece fits into the often unknown specs of the magazine or literary review a group of editors is preparing. Other calls are more specific and require a piece to explore a certain theme or genre or writing. Some calls for submission are for all writers, while some are specific to young people or people from a certain part of the world, or at least writing about a certain part of the world. Some publications have free submissions, some require the writers to pay fees that range from $3 to $25. My strong recommendation is to stick to the free ones. If you find yourself interested in submitting, here are some resources to help you start exploring publications:
After you submit your work, there are two possibilities. Your piece will either be accepted or rejected by the publication. Please remember that the majority of pieces submitted to any call are rejected for many different reasons. I recommend approaching the process with a kind of measured hope. If you receive a rejection, read it carefully in case there are any insights embedded within it about your work. Then shrug it off, and possibly revise and submit the piece to a different place. If you are accepted, I recommend dancing around your house in celebration. There's nothing quite like sharing your work with readers out in the world.
Well done on your short stories! Just take a moment to celebrate: where there was once nothing, there is something. You created people and stories out of thin air. What once was a blank page is now painted with a world that you created. It's kind of amazing when you think about it. Your second drafts are due Friday. We've already discussed and practiced the strategies for micro revision, now let's zoom out and consider your short stories from the macro angle. When we talk about macro, we're talking about structure. Do you have all the major elements you need for a successful short story? In this post, we'll consider three different macro aspects of your story:
1. StructureWhat even is a story, y'all? How can we define it? For our purposes, let's define it like this:
At each step of the way, you're piece must address each of these aspects of story. Another very helpful way to think about your structure is to ask yourself the question: What shifts over the course of my story? Usually, hopefully, there is a shift in at least one of your characters: internal or external or both. Also ask yourself this question: What causes the shift? In other words, what is the nature of the conflict? 2. CharacterConsider your people. Many of us didn't give our characters names. There were some exceptions to this, but in almost every case, the story could have been improved by simply giving the characters names. You want your characters to be unique, and names are the first, most easily accessible unique feature about us. Think about the ways we learn who the people are around us: the words they speak, the decisions, they make, the way they dress, the things they like, the place they live, the actions they take. Then ask yourself: What have I used to build my characters? What do my readers see when they think about my characters? At least one of your characters needs to be well-developed. 3. SettingOne of my writing teachers once told me that it sometimes helps to think about your writing as designing the stage for a play: if you don't put it there, it doesn't exist. For many of us, our characters are floating around in a non-descript place. Not paying attention to the setting is like not paying attention to one of the three dimensions. It's just one of the things that a story needs to come alive. A story needs space, time, problems, and people. Settings are developed through specific details, sometimes filtered through the perspectives of characters. Think about the "Yellow Wallpaper." Then reflect on this question: What is my setting built out of? ConclusionThe awake student will perhaps notice that these are all the same questions we consider when we analyze the literature of other people. Remember my analogy: if we were architecture students there's only so much we tell about Notre Dame by just looking at it from the outside. To really see the bones of the thing, to see how the building works, we have to go through the door and look at the inside. To have a deep understanding of how a short story works, we have to make one.
Heeeeeyyy class! I just finished grading a clump of your "Yellow Wallpaper" Dialectical Journals. I was struck by how much you've all grown as writers and analytical thinkers since the beginning of the year. If you want to check out your own development and give yourself a moment of celebration, go look at your DJs for "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and compare them to your DJs for "Yellow Wallpaper." Then take a moment to celebrate what you've accomplished. In this post, I'll be discussing strategies for revision. I'm dividing these strategies into two major groups: the micro and the macro revision techniques. For this revision, we'll start with the micro. Keep reading until the end for the big reveal of a SECRET REVISION WEAPON. The Micro: Revision on a Sentence and Word LevelIn class I discussed how some revision techniques are universal and applicable to any piece of writing, whether it be a short story or an analysis. These techniques are what I refer to as the "micro" revision strategies. With these strategies, you look at the fabric of your text: the words and the sentences. Then you see if you can locate opportunities to strengthen your writing. List of Micro Revisions:
1. Revise for VerbsStories are composed of action, and action happens in verbs. One easy way to increase the effectiveness of any piece of writing is to locate all the instances of the verb "to be" and look for places where you can turn the linking verb into an action. You can either highlight each instance of the verb on paper, or you can control "f" the difference forms of "to be." The first step is to gather data and see how many times you used the verb. Then try to make that number smaller. Here are all the forms of the verb "to be" you need to look for:
2. Revise for Sentence LengthDo you vary your sentence length? Do you use the different types of sentences as a way to enhance the meaning of your words? Or are all your sentences about the same length? Either using two different color highlighters on old-school paper or using the highlighter function in your word processor, highlight the sentences of your short story in two different colors. Then you will be able to see the lengths of your sentences and the texture of your prose will become visible to you. Armed with this information, revise the length and structure of your sentences for variety to enhance your prose. 3. RepetitionSome words seem to come out into our writing more than others. For example, in a piece I wrote a few weeks ago, I noticed I used the word "thrumming" multiple times. The first "thrum" was effective and evocative, but the second "thrum" was boring and redundant. Check your work for repeated words. When you've located them, revise to avoid repetition. SECRET WEAPONAll these revision techniques involve collecting data about your writing and using that to find areas where your prose can be strengthened. Since we live in the time of computers, there's actually a tool we can use to bypass the whole data collecting step. It's called ProWriting Aid, and you can find it in Google Docs as an add-on. Once you add it (you might need to use your personal email account), you'll be able to run the free "Summary Report" and see all kinds of data about your writing. Maybe even too much data. My favorite is the sentence length graph. Below is an example of a visual for "Yellow Wallpaper" sentences.
Hey class! In this post, I'm really just going to talk more about being a shameless magpie. If you missed synchronous class on Monday for some reason, make sure you watch the recording. It's one of the most important classes of the year. Here's a link to the Annotated Poe I talk about, and here's a link to the annotated Dracula in case you're interested. "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." For your short story (due the Monday after Thanksgiving), you are going to be required to steal something from one of the authors we've read. You can be a Structure Magpie and steal POV or plot design. Or you can be a Content Magpie and steal subjects and ideas. Or you can be both. You will take some aspect and recast it, remake it as your own. You know, build your nest. List of Things I Have Stolen/Collected:
PS: The process of writing that list was surprisingly fun and revealing. It left me with all kinds of ideas for writing. If you are having trouble coming up with a short story idea, I recommend that you start off by writing your own magpie list.
Students! We know who our next president will be! I reread the beginning of last week's post, and refelt all the stress and anxiety of the extended time of not-knowing, but now we know! In this blog post, I'll just be addressing one thing: I'll be presenting a model text for your Unit 3 Assessment, due next Monday. PromptIn the poem "All Hallows" by Louise Glück, the speaker describes the setting. Read the poem carefully. Write an essay in which you make a defensible thesis regarding how Gluck uses line and stanza breaks to create a portrait of a time and place. Harvest as Horror: |
AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
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