Transcript English 126 - Green River Community College

(Or, as I like to call it, the warm and fuzzy place where
you can feed your heart and mind.)
Tips for Class Discussions
 Remember, each day is worth 5 points.
 Be attentive. If there is something you don’t
understand, ask.
 Speak up. Be articulate and don’t be afraid if I ask
clarifying questions.
 Be courteous. Listen to other people’s opinions and
don’t dominate the discussion. (Leave that to me.) 
 Take notes. Moments of brilliance occur during class
time. It’s not cheating; it’s called using every available
resource.
The Basic Building Blocks
The Librarian Lied . . .
 Read the text once through without making any
marks, notations, or comments. Then walk away for
24 hours.
 Read the text for the second time making the text
yours. Then walk away for another 24 hours.
 Read the text again for the third time on the same day
as class discussion.
 Read it for the forth time for your journals.
. . . You will not go to Hades
 Making the text yours:
 Mark up the text Underline phrases and key words
that are important. (Don’t highlight everything or
nothing will stand out.)
 Flag key sentences Create your own short hand system
in the margins.
 Talk back to the text Write questions and comments
in the margins.
 Look it up Circle the unfamiliar words and write the
definitions in the margins.
 When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her
funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen
monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside
of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a
combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.
 It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white,
decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the
heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once
been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had
encroached and obliterated even the august names of that
neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its
stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the
gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss
Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names
where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the
ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate
soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
Positionality
 Reading is a sense-making activity.
 It is a three-way transaction between the author, the
text, and the writer.
 The writer is a person with knowledge, attitudes,
assumptions, values, and a moral code.
 Sometimes the author deliberately tries to hide these
positions and sometimes he doesn’t.
 We, too, have our own knowledge, attitudes,
assumptions, values, and a moral code.
 These two positionalities interact with each other
when we read texts.
Lenses, Windows, and Microscopes
 Lenses. A metaphor for “putting on” a specific POV to
view a text in a different light.
 This is the first step.
 We will almost always start with a biographical lense.
 You are required to do a simple search on the author.
 Holiday Wish List: Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia
 Windows. A way of looking at something from a
particular perspective.
 This is the second step
 The text is a window looking into a specific time, place,
or culture.
 Microscopes. Beginning to examine the text closely,
paying attention to specific words and phrases.
 This is the third step.
 Unlike the other two which approaches the text
holistically, here we begin to break down the text into
it’s parts.
What to Look for
 Watch for what’s happening
 As in movies, some stories are filled with action and excitement.
Others, often ones that deal with inner struggles, move more
deliberately and with less external action.
 Watch for who it is happening to
 Pay attention to the characters – their appearances, personalities,
values, attitudes, struggles, weaknesses, strengths, and so forth.
 Watch for “why”
 What happens that leads to the situations and actions? What
causes the action? What motivates the characters?
Breaking Down Plot
Story
 The term “story” is an account of a related series of
events in sequential order.
 “Short Stories” are brief fictional narratives in prose
that often focus on the essential aspects of a character
and on a single event or episode – often a life-changing
circumstance.
 Both provide the materials (the events, the characters,
the outcome) from which a plot is constructed.
Plot
 At it’s most basic, plot simply means somebody doing
something.
 It is the action or actions that he or she sets out to do,
which may or may not actually occur, that provides the
structure of a story.
 With plot, we focus on not what happens, but why it
happens and the implications or results of what
happens.
 As a story is converted to a plot, some things are left
out, rearranged, and causal connections between key
events are brought forward.
Plot: In Medias Res
 Means “into the middle of things”
 A plot usually starts at a point that directly and
significantly relates to the series of events being
recorded.
 Background events and information are filled in later
as needed with flashbacks or exposition.
Flashbacks vs. Exposition
 Flashback
 Prior events are presented as an inserted narrative.
Usually written as a character remembering earlier
times.
 Exposition
 Prior events are presented as a speech, usually by the
narrator.
Plot: The Conflict
 Conflict is defined about as you would expect. It is a
struggle or confrontation between opposing characters
or between characters and opposing forces. The range
of possible opposing forces is large, but ordinarily they
fall into three broad catagories:
 Physical Conflict
 This is the most basic kind of conflict.
 Usually occurs as a physical struggle or confrontation
between a character or group of characters.
 Can also involve humans struggling against nature.
 Social conflict
 A common motif in modern fiction.
 Involves personal or societal relationships or values.
 Internal or Psychological Conflict
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Here we see the struggles within a character as s/he wrestles
with competing moral claims or a difficult decision.
Often appear at crucial moments in a person’s life: death,
identity crisis, or self-awareness.
Equally important is a lack of inner conflict.
 Belief Crisis reexamines the foundations of what s/her
puts faith or trust in.
 Value Crisis something forces a person to decide how to
make a moral or ethical decision.
Plot: Structural Techniques
 Suspense
 Has fallen out of favor with modern lit in lieu of conflict.
 Holds the reader’s interest with uncertainty or concern
about how things will turn out.
 Foreshadowing
 Usually found in both the beginning and the middle of
the plot.
 Defined as anticipations of things to come – usually
references death.
 Repetition
 Draws our attention to especially important aspects of
the plot.
 Climax
 Sometimes referred to as rising action of complication.
 Usually found in the middle of the plot.
 Terminology originated from action-based plots where
the most intense moment is the peak of the conflict.
 Epiphany
 A type of climax identifying the moment when a
character experiences a sudden moment of illumination
or revelation, especially as result of perceiving a
commonplace object in a new way or through a new
context.
 Dénouement
 Literally means “unknotting” or the untying of the
threads that are tangled and knotted, the solution of the
mysteries, and the explanation of the secrets and
misunderstandings.
What’s a Narrator and What Does he Do?
A Narrator’s Duty
 A narrator is a person or the voice who tells us the
“facts.” These facts are typically told in one of two
ways:
 By someone involved in the action;
 By someone wholly outside of the action.
 There are two POVs:
 Physical POV – is the actual action taking place;
 Psychological POV – the narrator’s prejudices cannot be
discounted. “lively vs. garish”
The Types of Narrators
 1st Person Narrative
 Usually writes in the “I” form.
 Conventions:
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Limited to what s/he thinks, feels, saw, & heard.
Reasonable assumptions can be made concerning others but
must hedge bets.
 Good News:
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Brings the reader closer to the action.
 Bad News:
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Lacks both flexibility and objectivity.
 3rd Person Narrative
 Usually referred to as “omniscient.”
 Conventions:
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
Can tell the reader anything pertinent to the story, no matter
when and where it occurred and who it occurred to.
Can enter the minds of all the characters and explain what
they saw, thought, & felt.
 Good News:
 More flexible.
 Bad News:
 Seems colder and more distant.
 Limited 3rd Person Narrative
 Convention:

Speaks of the action from a POV outside of the events – thus
gaining objectivity and distance – but is limited to only one
character’s perspective.
 Good News:
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The most reliable of all narrators; we tend to trust the info as
truth.
 Bad News:
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It’s usually the author and he or she has positionality that we
must contend with.
A Narrator’s Credibility
 Just like when a jury hears a case, readers have to
determine whether the narrator is unreliable.
 Does s/he have something to gain by lying?
 Is s/he confused or disorientated?
 Is s/he emotionally unstable?
 Unreliable narrators create an ironic relationship
between the narrator’s POV and our POV
Characters: Flat, Round, Major, and Minor
 It is said that the characters are what make a story
come alive – not the plot, theme, imagery, or the
twists.
 It is the characters that we remember long after we
have read a story that speaks to us. We may forget the
author and the title, but we never forget that character
who laid claim to our hearts.
 Protagonist
 The person whom the plot revolves around
 Antagonist
 The person in conflict with the protagonist
 Major Characters
 Those characters who are central to the plot
 Minor Characters
 Those characters who flavor the plot
 Flat Characters
 Embodies a single trait or stereotyped group of behaviors
 Round Characters
 Has psychological depth to them and they can surprise us
Two Types of Round Characters:
 Static Character:
 This character’s perception of the world and him/herself
never changed.
 Developing Character:
 This character’s perception of the world and him/herself
changes somehow – either positively or negatively – by
the end of the text.
And Just When you had
it Figured Out . . .
Enter Stream of Consciousness . . .
In 1890, William James wrote Principles of Psychology to
describe the unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts,
and feeling of the waking mind. In Psychology, this
was a breakthrough . . . In literature? This was a
nightmarish hell for future students.
 It is a technique that, when used describe the unspoken
thoughts and feelings of the characters without resorting to
objective description or conventional dialogue.
 It is usually written in flux of a character’s thought,
impressions, emotions, or memories without logical
sequence or syntax – and exact presentation of thought.
 Please refer back to 1st Person Narrative and why we can’t
trust them. They lie. They lie to themselves. They lie to
us.
 If you liked T.J.O.G.W., try Joyce, Woolf, and Proust.
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall
Setting
 The setting suggests the actions that take place within
it. A story must be carefully placed in an appropriate
and effective time and location.
 We know, in part, how to “read” settings from actual
experience.
 You’re at restaurant. How do you identify 1st dates? Last
dates?
 Setting is frequently used as an indicator of social
status and mirror the character’s mood.
Juxtaposed vs. Dichotomy
 Sometimes the setting deliberately doesn’t match:
 Tone;
 Character;
 Positionality.
 We always need to figure out why.
Symbolic Settings
 Ruling Power/Order/Hegemony/Patriarchal
 Main Street
 Center of Town
 Post Office
 Bank
 Faith/Belief/ Good Reins Over Evil
 Church
 Gardens
 Destiny Isn’t set in Stone
 Pathways
 Roads
“A Rose for Emily”
 Our perspective: we, like the townspeople, see Miss
Emily's house from the outside looking in until the very
end.
 Symbolizes:
 emblem of money probably earned in large part through the
labors of slaves, or emancipated slaves. Is the fact that it was
allowed to decay and disintegrate, a judgment on the author’s
part?
 Isolation. Like most of us, Emily wanted a house she could
love someone in, and a house where she could be free. But
something went terribly wrong. This something turned her
house into a virtual prison – she had nowhere else to go but
home, and this home, could never be shared with others.
“A Rose for Emily” Cont.
 Setting isn’t always an object; it can be a concept. That
concept is TIME.
 The pocket watch

When members of the Board of Aldermen visit Emily to see
about the taxes a decade before her death, they hear her
pocket watch ticking, hidden somewhere in the folds of her
clothing and her body. This is a signal to us that for Miss
Emily time is both a mysterious "invisible" force, and one of
which she has always been acutely aware. With each tick of
the clock, her chance for happiness dwindles .
 Hair
 When Emily no longer leaves the house, the town uses
the old manservent's hair to tell time, watching as it too
turns gray
 The narrator tells us that Homer's final resting place
hadn't been opened in 40 years, which is exactly how
long Homer Barron has been missing. But, Emily's hair
didn't turn "iron-gray" until several years after Homer's
death.
 Stationery
 The stationery points back to the tensions between the
past, the present, and the future, which this story
explores.
Style and Tone
Style
 The way a writer chooses words and arranges them
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determines his or her style.
This voice conveys a tremendous amount of meaning
and inflection should we choose to listen.
We can determine the characters’ gender, age, socioeconomic position, the prejudices, and sometimes,
where they grew up.
We do that by studying the author’s diction and
syntax.
This is commonly referred to as “Deconstruction.”
Deconstruction Criticism
 attempts to dismantle the literary work and show that it
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does not mean what it appears to mean.
The aim is to demonstrate the instability of language in
texts, thereby revealing how apparently clear meaning
splits into contradictory, incompatible, and ultimately
undecidable possibilities.
critics operate on the premise that language cannot be
controlled by writers.
As a result, literary works mean more than their authors are
aware of, and their meanings are as unstable as the
language of which they are constructed.
Critics favors terms like "unmasking," "unraveling,"
"recovering," "suppression," and “contradiction.”
 To help you, rent or watch “Lie to Me.”
Tone
 Very easy. We read tone all the time. We read it so
well, you understand it w/out us having to work at it.
 We have learned that through interpreting non-verbal
language.
 How we stand, sit, walk, and make facial gestures.
 We can figure out what’s the positionality of the
author through his or her tone.
Add the Biographical Perspective to
Tone and we get . . .
 Gilman relies on the reader's own enduring (and often ugly) human
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feelings to give you a deeply disturbing snapshot of what you might be
like after something as simple as a summer inside – and that snapshot
is no pretty picture.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is counting on the fact that you know
something about claustrophobia or resentment so that you can
sympathize with the narrator of this short story in her slow trajectory
towards madness.
Gilman wants you to feel every crawling inch of craziness. She knows
you've got an imagination.
It's tough to read this story without wondering if, under similar
circumstances, you yourself might start crawling out of the yellow
wallpaper.
because the story's language is powerful enough to reach out of the
page and make you feel like maybe you're cracking up.
 The Wallpaper’s Pattern
 It’s definitely not a coincidence that the woman in the wallpaper is trapped behind a
pattern. We can conceive of societal norms and mores as types of patterns that
metaphorically restrict our movements. The woman whom the narrator imagines she
sees trapped behind a pattern is simply a more direct embodiment of that metaphorical
restriction.
 The Paper
 Scholars have made much of the fact that the narrator starts referring to the wallpaper as
"the paper." Given that the narrator has a repressed literary bent, it is no great stretch of
the imagination to posit that the (wall)paper becomes her text. Her intellect restrained
from reading and writing, the narrator’s mind instead turns to her surroundings and
settles upon the wallpaper as an intellectual challenge.
 Moonlight
 In "The Yellow Wallpaper," moonlight represents as time for the feminine. During the
day, the narrator writes that the woman trapped in the wallpaper is motionless and
immobile. As moonlight strikes the wall, however, the woman begins to move or, perhaps
more accurately, to creep. This pattern mirrors the narrator’s own daily movements.
During the day, she sleeps; at night she lies awake, alert, and invested in the intellectual
activity that she must suppress during the day while her husband is watching.
Combine Setting and Tone
and we get Araby
 Nietzsche’s “God is Dead”
 The empty two story house
 “The Fall”
 The garden in back
 Ash Wednesday and dust
 40 pieces 0f silver
 Bazaar and Eastern enchantment
 Freemasons
 Light vs. Dark
 Days of Winter
 Violet sky
 Feeble lanterns
 Bodies glowed
 Dark muddy lanes
 Dark dripping gardens and nasty smells
 Hiding in shadows
 Mangan’s sister defined in light vs. brown figure
 Flaring streets
 Dark rainy evening