Goodbye!

The grades should be up by now.

Goodbye and good luck!

And for a last link, I just learned this.

EWRT1B-16: final time reminder

Just a reminder, our final will be on Thursday, June 24th, from 4 to 6. Meet in the same classroom, L22. See the final schedule here.

If anything goes wrong, we'll meet in the library.

EWRT1B-16: poetry terms

“A Poet’s Means” – Literature and Its Writers 709-726
alliteration
assonance
onomatopoeia
rhyme
- perfect
- near/slant
- end rhyme
- internal rhyme
end-stop
enjambment
caesura
rhythm


“A Poet’s Meanings” – Literature and Its Writers 727-747
tone
diction
denotation
connotation
imagery
figurative language
- simile
- metaphor
- extended metaphor
- personification
symbol
apostrophe
metonymy
- synecdoche
oxymoron
hyperbole
understatement
paradox
irony
theme

EWRT1B-16: reading response 8

Reading response 8
These are discussion questions from Penguin’s website (though edited a bit). Choose one on which to base your reading response. Keep track of the number of which question you respond to.

1. Readers sometimes find the reading of Ceremony a disorienting experience, in part because Silko frequently shifts scenes and time frames without warning. How does this technique help the reader to participate in Tayo’s thoughts, emotions, and experiences? Is its influence on the narrative consistently the same, and is it always effective?

2. How does Tayo’s status as a half-breed influence his choices, his thinking, and the way he is perceived by other characters in the novel? What tensions and conflicts does his mixed ancestry contribute to Silko’s story?

3. Ceremony has been described as a story of struggle between two cosmic forces, one basically masculine and one essentially feminine. Assuming this to be true, what are the images of masculinity and femininity that Silko presents? Is this gendered analysis an adequate way of understanding the novel? Are there important ideas that it leaves out?

4. One aspect of white culture that Tayo especially resents is the way in which its educational practices, particularly instruction in the sciences, dismiss Native beliefs as “superstitions.” To what extent is the novel a story of the struggle between technology and belief?

5. Silko’s use of symbolic imagery often makes use of contrasting opposites: dryness and wetness; mountains and canyons; city and country; sunrise and darkness. Choose one of these contrasts (or another one that you have observed); what values does each of the two terms represent? Do their meanings remain constant?

6. How do the cattle and other animal presences in the novel function to illustrate the traditional values of the Laguna tribe and their conflicts with the principles and desires of white Americans?

7. Tayo believes that Emo is “wrong, all wrong” in his attitudes toward Indian identity and other aspects of life. What is the nature and what are the causes of Emo’s wrongness?

8. Silko, who has suffered from headaches, depression, and nausea similar to those that plague Tayo in her novel, has said, “I wrote this novel to save my life.” How is Ceremony a novel of salvation, for Tayo, for its author, and for its readers? What are the limits to the salvation that it appears to offer?

EWRT1B-16: MLA handout for the research paper

I forgot to put up a pdf of the MLA handout I passed out last Wednesday. So, here it is. While I'm at it, here's a pdf of the first MLA handout I passed out, the one about citing literature. Both these handouts are intended to be supplementary to what is available in Literature and Its Writers.

EWRT1B-16: thoughts on the research paper outlines

Looking at the outlines, a lot of you seem to be on a good track, but some of you seem to be a bit unclear about what the purpose of a literary research paper is. Remember that a research paper is still an essay. Again, read chapter 28 in our book (it starts in page 1683). Here are a few of my thoughts based on the outlines.

• A few of the outlines are structured around the secondary sources; each body paragraph simply explains one of the secondary sources. If you were to follow this outline the end result would not be an essay. It would simply be a collection of summaries. An essay must have an argument, a unified argument. As always, structure your essay around points that progress your argument. So, what is your thesis?

• The research paper is still an analysis of the primary text. So keep thinking about character, theme, plot, and all the elements of fiction. How does your research affect your understanding of one (or more) of these elements? Your answer to this question should be your thesis.

Ceremony and the Bataan Death March

As you can see hinted at in the text–pages 11, 12, 40, and 44–Tayo was part of the Bataan Death March. If you don't know about it, you can follow the link to the Wikipedia page. What I wanted to point out is that for Native Americans, forced long walks that result in a large number of deaths is nothing new. In 1831, the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole were forced off their lands. This is what is now known as the Trail of Tears. Again, follow the link if you have never heard of it. As I mentioned in class, one of the themes in this book is that time and narrative repeat.