Outside reading project: blog post

If you have decided to choose the blog post project this is where you can post it. It is due by 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 9th. Please post your entry in the comments below and do your best to format it. Please include your name.

Sula blog posting

Hello students!

Please post your responses to the first couple of chapters of Sula in the comments here. Remember, you need to do two out of the three options for the blog post assignment.

Blog Post: Please contribute to the blog with your thoughts, questions, and ideas. For each assignment, you must do AT LEAST TWO of the following:

A.     Respond to one of the guiding questions (I will post them on the blog for you).

B.      Send me an email with a thoughtful question, so I can post it on the blog.

C.      Build on someone else’s idea or politely disagree, with a thoughtful alternative opinion.

Please be thoughtful, careful, and diplomatic about your comments. I will be checking the blog regularly and will be contributing as well. Each post should be about one body paragraph long. You must complete the blog post by 10 PM on the night before the assignment is due.

Happy reading!

Guiding Questions and ideas to respond to:

• What is the significance of names and naming in the novel?
• Although Sula contains several male characters, the book is, in many ways, a novel that celebrates women.  Sula looms so large in the reader's mind because Morrison strips away the power traditionally given to men.  Examine the deficiencies of two male characters that suggest contrasting strengths in female characters.
• Toni Morrison once said, "I know evil preoccupied me in Sula…"  Examine the nature of evil in Sula, especially as it occurs in the protagonist.  To what extent is Sula evil and how does she manifest this trait?  What are the sources of her evil and what is its ultimate significance in terms of her relationship with the Bottom residents?
• Death is a dominant motif in Sula. The text begins, "There was once a neighborhood," signifying that the community no longer exists (3). Morrison portrays death as an event that purifies, renews, and brings freedom to the deceased and/or their family and friends. Death is also an event that is often witnessed in the text; it is a spectacle that demands attention. Consider how this notion of death subverts more traditional depictions and why Morrison uses this strategy.
• Add your own guiding question or idea here! There are so many to choose from, from motifs to the circular nature of life to Biblical allusions in the book. If you come up with a good question, email it or submit it to me and I will post it on the blog as a potential discussion question.

Sestina

Hello class! Before you read the two poems "Sestina" by Elizabeth Bishop and "Bilingual Sestina" by Julia Alvarez for your homework, please take a look at the information below about the form of the sestina.

Please read the basic information below, from poets.org: 

The sestina is a complex form that achieves its often spectacular effects through intricate repetition. The thirty-nine-line form is attributed to Arnaut Daniel, the Provencal troubadour of the twelfth century. The name "troubadour" likely comes from trobar, which means "to invent or compose verse." The troubadours sang their verses accompanied by music and were quite competitive, each trying to top the next in wit, as well as complexity and difficulty of style.

Courtly love often was the theme of the troubadours, and this emphasis continued as the sestina migrated to Italy, where Dante and Petrarch practiced the form with great reverence for Daniel, who, as Petrarch said, was "the first among all others, great master of love."

The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

The envoi, sometimes known as the tornada, must also include the remaining three end-words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring words appear in the final three lines. In place of a rhyme scheme, the sestina relies on end-word repetition to effect a sort of rhyme.

If you want even more information, keep reading:

Many twentieth-century poets have taken on the form, including Ezra Pound and John Ashbery. In the dramatic monologue "Sestina: Altaforte," Pound, in one of his many responses to his great influence, the Victorian poet Robert Browning, adopts the voice of troubadour-warlord Bertrans de Born. The poem is a tour-de-force in the praises of war as de Born, addressing Papiols, his court minstrel, laments that he "has no life save when the swords clash." This poem is a good example of the possibilities of end-word repetition, where, in expert hands, each recurrence changes in meaning, often very subtly. Note, too, the end-words Pound chose: "peace," "music," "clash," "opposing," "crimson," and "rejoicing." The words, while general enough to lend themselves to multiple meanings, are common enough that they also present Pound with the difficult task of making every instance fresh. Here are the first two stanzas (after a prefatory stanza which sets the scene):

I
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let's to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

II
In hot summer have I great rejoicing
When the tempests kill the earth's foul peace,
And the lightnings from black heav'n flash crimson,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven skies God's swords clash.

Contrast Pound’s sestina with Ashbery’s "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape," a playful romp involving the cast of the Popeye cartoon world. Ashbery deftly remixes the end-word order to great comic effect (notice the surprise in each use of "scratched") while sketching a disturbing domestic pathos, resulting in a poem both funny and melancholic. The poem, a masterful instance of the sestina, manages to also poke fun at the obsessive form.

Other notable sestinas include "Mantis" by Louis Zukofsky, "Sestina" and "A Miracle for Breakfast" by Elizabeth Bishop, "Paysage Moralise" by W.H. Auden, "Toward Autumn" by Marilyn Hacker, and "Sestina: Bob" by Jonah Winter, which employs the pedestrian name Bob for each end-word, to great comic effect. The Web version of the literary magazine McSweeney’s maintains a repository of contemporary sestinas; indeed, the sestina is the only type of poem the site will consider for publication.

There have also been several variations of the sestina form, which usually expand or contract the length. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s "The Complaint of Lisa" is a double sestina, in which twelve end-words recur across twelve twelve-line stanzas, culminating in a six-line envoi. To top things off, Swinburne took the unusual step of rhyming the end-words.

Remember, don't do any of the paraphrasing, just the other parts of the TPSFASTT. Don't forget to include how the form influences the meaning. Happy reading!

Ms. Delman

Ekphrastic sonnet

Here are the two links to art galleries.

Explore the New York MoMA collection here.

You'll have to explore a bit, but keep looking, you'll find some great pieces at the Yale University Art Gallery here.

Enjoy!

Socratic Seminar

Examine your notes from today's seminar on The Great Gatsby. Identify two ideas from the discussion that stand out to you and explain why they make you think differently about your understanding of the text. 

Separate your two ideas into two paragraphs and make sure to fully explain each one. Post your comment by 10 p.m. on Thursday evening. 

Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"

Brian Sutton argues in his article that light plays a big role in The Great Gatsby. It is both a symbol and a driving force behind Gatsby's dream. Summarize the article in a paragraph and then comment on the plausibility of his argument. Are you convinced? Why or why not?

Your comment is due by 8 p.m. on Tuesday evening.

Happy reading and writing!

"Hills Like White Elephants"

Hemingway's use of dialogue in "Hills Like White Elephants" contributes to the tone of the story. Although we never hear what the discussion is about, we learn a lot about the relationship between the girl and the American based on the tone, setting, and spare details. 

Please comment on what you see as the main conflict in the story. Your comment should be between 5-7 sentences. When you reference the story, place quotation marks around it. 

This post is due on Sunday evening by 8 p.m.