The choice project was really interesting. I thought it let me get into the heads of the characters better. Sure in my opinion Holden’s head is crazy, and Jane wouldn’t change a story if she had the original on hand to read, and Titus (from feed) just has a shortened expression of pop culture and movies to draw from. Since I had an earlier post on how fairy tales change I tried to explore this in my choice project. I wrote them as though years really had passed between telling and different cultures and different people had changed them. It was more difficult than I’d imagined getting into the heads of these characters would be. Also after hearing everyone’s ideas I really liked all of the creativity in the class and how many different things were done with mostly the same books.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Reacting To Persepolis
I really enjoyed reading Persepolis for my college literature class. I learned things I never knew about Iran and their culture. I liked hearing this girl’s story of struggling between her past/present/future and culture/beliefs/government. I thought it was fascinating to watch her grow up in pictures from a little girl in God’s arms to a woman leaving her family.
Speaking of the artwork:
I liked that we had to read this because it was a graphic novel from the beginning. However, I wasn’t sure I liked the style of art. After reading it I’m still not sure but it has grown on me significantly. I think her simple style actually accents her story where more realistic illustrations would have overpowered the story. These, however do not, tugging the story along at just the right pace in my opinion. And some of the slides are just so detailed and lovely and meaningful in their own way. For example pg 77 the illustration of their trip to Europe has a woman dancing in the wind. Why is she there? What does she mean? Why put the leaning tower of Pisa next to a run-down apartment? None of this would have been questioned from the text on the page “Things got worse from one day to the next. In September 1980, my parents abruptly planned a vacation. I think they realized that soon such things would no longer be possible. As it happened, they were right. And so we went to Italy and Spain for three weeks… …it was wonderful.”
Wrongs and Rights of Passage
In college literature today we read an essay called Wrongs of Passage and while I agreed with many of the author’s points I have a problem with some of the others. She has the structure correct separation, transition, and incorporation—that’s how a right of passage should be conducted and if it doesn’t it isn’t really a right of passage. She focused on a few examples: sweet sixteen, turning eighteen, turning twenty-one, marriage, the Navajo Changing Woman ceremony, and the one of boys in New Guinea America
As I already stated I think going to college is a right of passage and it is one that I will be undertaking quite soon and it scares me as well as makes me excited for the future as a right of passage should do.
Becoming The Feed
I thought Feed was a fascinating book, however it wasn’t the plot that I found compelling as much as the setting. Feed is set in a futuristic society, a cautionary tale if you will about where our own society might be heading. In the world of Feed most of the population has a computer chip implanted in their head from a young age, it grows to take over the basic functions of the human brain. You can play games, watch shows, talk to people, it’s like TV the internet and cell phones all rolled into one and you can see it in your head, like you’re there. The environment sucks, so horribly that people live in domes to keep them safe from the radiation that still keeps them from having children naturally. Corporations brainwash people through the feed. People are less intelligent because they don’t have to know things, the feed knows them. People use more primitive language because chat speak has evolved and just become the language. I loved this book because it is a window into the apocalypse that might become our future, not because robots take over or zombies attack but because technology will allow a select few to rule us all while making us totally ok with it. The technology to do these things is coming and I ask you if an apocalypse like the feed truly occurs what would you do? For me it would mean becoming a hermit, or something of the like, hiding from society because I couldn’t be a part of one where everyone follows blindly and silently. Let voice speak out let the human mind rise to its potential of greatness; don’t take over its functions with a machine. It would be a shame, a shame that I see as possible in the near future.
Jane Eyre
1. If you were in Jane's (very plain) shoes, would you decide to stay with Rochester or would you leave? Why?
If I were in Jane’s shoes I would have stayed with him. Granted I live in a different time and have very different morals than Jane. I unlike Jane don’t care about what society thinks nor am I as religious as she was.
2. What were your final reactions to the novel? What did you like or not like about it? What worked and didn't work?
I really liked Jane Eyre, it may not be the easiest to read but the prose was beautiful which I really enjoyed. I didn’t like the large areas where the plot didn’t seem to move forward much. But overall I thought it was a great book and a good love story.
3. Should this book be taught in College Literature? Justify your response, and try to look beyond your personal thoughts on the book to the larger goals of the class.
I think Jane Eyre is a good book to teach; however, I think that whenever you teach it there will be a large number of students who don’t read it, a larger percentage than usual. If people do read it though I think it has merit both as a piece of literature and an entry into what we might have to read in college.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Bluebeard and Fitcher’s Bird
So the other day in College Literature our teacher brought up an allusion that most of the class, including myself, did not catch in Jane Eyre. This allusion was to the story of Bluebeard (pp. 112), a French folk tale written by Charles Perrault, since none of us knew it we looked it up.
Here is a short summary – Bluebeard was an ugly aristocrat who had been married several times, each time his wife disappeared. He went to one of his neighbors looking for another girl to marry him and persuades the youngest daughter to marry him. After they are married she goes to live with him but he says he must leave awhile and he gives her the keys to all the rooms in the castle but stresses that she must not go through one door. Eventually her curiosity gets the better of her and she opens the door and finds the murdered former wives hanging from the walls. Their blood will not wash off the key so she runs to her sister. Bluebeard seeing the key and realizing what she had seen from the key is furious but her brothers arrive and in the end Bluebeard dies and the last wife inherits his fortune and goes to live a good life. Read it in full HERE or a fuller summary HERE.
This reminded me of one of the Grimm Brother’s Fairy Tales that I had read so I looked it up. The story is called “Fitcher’s Bird” and it follows very similar lines. Trade Bluebeard for a wizard who took the form of a begging poor man, the youngest daughter for the oldest, three daughters for two, set it instead just before the wedding (rather than after), and add and egg and you pretty much have the same story. Read it in full HERE or a summary HERE. (Side note both are really short stories, only a couple of pages long so I’d recommend reading the full stories they are interesting.)
The story of Bluebeard; however, is dated much earlier than “Fitcher’s Bird” so I wonder if what if the differences we see are the warping of time (about 115 years) and French to German culture or If the two stories never came in contact with each other at all. The first is probably more likely but I think it would be all the more fascinating if the two cultures came up with the same story separately.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Where is “out here”
As a final conclusion to The Catcher in the Rye as its own topic on this blog I want to go straight back to the beginning of the book, page 1 in fact, to this quote: “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.” Now that the class has read the book and found out what Holden’s “madman stuff that happened” is (which in my opinion wasn’t that crazy) I’m wondering were exactly is “out here.” We know that geographically “out here” is in California, that’s not what I’m wondering. What is he doing taking it easy in California? I have a theory and I’d like to hear yours if you have any, but anyway here it is…I think Holden goes to a sanatorium in California after the story ends. For those of you that don’t know a sanatorium is an insane asylum, a Looney bin (and lots of other nasty names but I think you get the picture). There are a couple reasons I think this. First of all I think the things Holden says and does suggest it. Holden is always calling himself a “madman” and especially near the end of the book he seems to be losing is more and more to the point that he is literally talking to his dead brother scared out of his mind (literally) of disappearing. That’s at least a little crazy. Not to mention he considers suicide and often declares himself depressed, people have ended up in sanatoriums for short periods for that alone. Now I’m assuming his parents find out about some of this and they obviously have the money and the stuck up desire to get him the best help possible, so he goes to a psychiatrist at least one. This line in particular all the way at the end on page 213 makes me think that they went farther than sending him to a psychiatrist and sent him to a sanatorium, “especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here.” First of all it says one guy like there are more than one and then “they have here” that means where ever he went they have psychiatrists (or as he calls them psychoanalysts) and probably more than one. The most probable place I can think of with more than one psychoanalyst is a sanatorium. It’s just what I got from the text and it was my theory from the beginning so unless someone comes up with something better I’m sticking to it. Tell me what you think, could I be right? Where is “out here”? Is Holden crazy?
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