Response To Course Material

Fishing For Answers
That was the first time I have ever participated in a Fish Bowl discussion before and it was a refreshing take on our usual format. Beside from biting my tongue when I was outside of the "bowl", my biggest challenge was discussion the tape recorder. I will go ahead and pat myself on the back for being the first person (out of my little bowl of fellow fishes) to point out how Willy's inferiority to the recorder represented the idea of men being replaced by machines in the workplace. It took my group and I a long time to reach this conclusion, but it was sort of fun bouncing ideas of each other desperately trying to find out the device's significance.
The Century Quilt
I have been loving all of the poems we have analyzed in this class so far, and "The Century Quilt" was no exception. The first time I read this poem I understood that the women of this poem were connected (aside from lineage) because they had prophetic capabilities when under their favorite quilts. However, in the essay rewrite I focused mostly on the usage of color to represent the speaker's family members. I loved how the colors of the speaker's blanket reminded the speaker of her family and how she discussed ethnicity. That is not to say that I accurately depicted the author's intentions in my essay. Unfortunately, I misidentified which races the colors were supposed to represent and which relatives the colors belonged to. Whoops! I don't think my second in-class essay was much of an improvement, structurally, but I left that day understanding the poem better. I think often I get a pretty firm grasp of what the author is trying to say, but in my writing I fail to get them across.
Syntax Exploration
     On November 11th, the class looked at a series of photographs and had to agree on one photo that we would analyze. After a democratic vote, the class decided on a black and white photo of eleven men staring into the camera. Some of the men looked startled and others were raising a skeptical brow. A few students recognized the still shot from the film 12 Angry Men (1957). Next, the class had to select one word from a list that accurately described the photo to help us focus on a theme when we wrote a sentence that described the picture. The word we picked was tense. As a class we bounced rough sentences off each other and picked out specific elements of the photo that we thought where significant. This is the second time our class has done this exercise. Second hour is made up of many students who share the same traits to perfectionists and, like the last time we did this syntax assignment, we spent at least 30 minutes constructing our sentence. The point of this exercise is to help us understand syntax, however, I feel that it focuses more on diction. I understand how syntax can be used to adhere to the human sense to evoke feelings. In one of the earlier syntax assignments our class did, we learned that by using short sentences to create drama. The reader.Feels.More.Intensity. This would have been a good tool to use for our sentence, but I recall us focusing more on specific word choice.
Hamlet
     That same day we began reading Hamlet. I read the part of Gertrude, the Queen, and I was experiencing anxiety about how I should read her part. In past years when my class read plays, I was always bothered by the student who read in a monotone voice or read their lines with some bizarre accent. I think this is one of my snobbish pet peeves, but I do not think I am alone. Ms. Holmes mentioned this to us our first day of reading, that these plays deal with character archetypes and situations that can easily be paralleled to modern times. Therefore, I feel that no accent and "haughty" intonation was necessary to evoke the  Renaissance. In the end, I mixed my "haughty matriarch" voice with my normal one ( not that anyone noticed).
    
     As I listened to the tortured main character's soul, I felt that Hamlet represents many young men who are at odds with pleasing their father(literally or God) and following their own personal interest. Reading Hamlet, I tried to think of other fictional characters that had a desire to make their father proud, and in the process led to their self-destruction. Peter Parker's drive to avenge his uncle's death did not lead to total destruction, but his life did become much more complicated. After he got his "spidey powers," Parker could not shake Uncle Ben's motto from his head, "With great power comes great responsibility." If you think of Uncle Ben as Lord Hamlet, and Hamlet as Peter Parker you can see some similar parallels. Although Hamlet never experiences the ecstasy of saving lives, both characters make the decision to sacrifice their lives to avenge their fathers' muders. Spider-man might not be the best of comparisons, but I am encourage to look for more Hamlet-inspired characters.

    I felt I did not participate that much in our brief Hamlet discussions, but one observation I did make about the play was that Hamlet was a Christ figure. His father, who later became a ghost, represents the other two parts of the Holy Trinity. Hamlet (Jesus) was given a mission by his "invisible" father to avenge his wrongful death. If Hamlet were to successfully kill Claudius, he would probably sacrifice his own popularity and his relationship with his mother. If he chose not to kill Claudius, he would have sacrificed his integrity and self-respect. How Hamlet actually kills his evil uncle is very dramatic and involves a lot more casualties than original expected, including his own death. However, we discussed in the class that all the characters in the play had to die if order were to ever be restored in Denmark. Hamlet has transcended Antony and Cleopatra as my favorite Shakespeare play. I am always attracted to stories dealing with "troubled youth" and dysfunctional families. Reading Hamlet has made me aware or new motifs to look for when I read other literary works and films.