Reading Log for Lord of the Flies
For chapters 9, 10, 11 and 12, please do the following:
1. Read the chapter. Be familiar with what happens. For each chapter, write a paragraph (approximately 150 words) on how the events in the chapter function as allegory. Remember that allegory is “a symbolic work: a work in which the characters and events are to be understood as representing other things and symbolically expressing a deeper, often spiritual, moral, or political meaning” (Encarta Dictionary).
2. Answer the following questions:
a) Tell about a time when you had a similar dilemma to one of the characters in this chapter. Explain what some of the similarities are.
b) Could the things in this chapter happen in today’s society? Give a specific, detailed example (i.e. bullying, morality, etc.).
3. Choose one concrete detail that you feel is significant in this chapter. Write a transition, a lead in and lead out. Remember to include the page number. If you don’t include a page number, you will not receive credit for this assignment. Write two sentences of commentary that is in-depth interpretation or explanation of the CD.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Friday, October 28, 2011
The Demon Lover
The Demon Lover
Elizabeth Bowen
Toward the end of her day in London Mrs. Drover went round to her shut-up house to look for several things she wanted to take away. Some belonged to herself, some to her family, who were by now used to their country life. It was late August; it had been a steamy, showery day: At the moment the trees down the pavement glittered in an escape of humid yellow afternoon sun. Against the next batch of clouds, already piling up ink-dark, broken chimneys and parapets stood out. In her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up; a cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs. Drover’s return. Shifting some parcels under her arm, she slowly forced round her latchkey in an unwilling lock, then gave the door, which had warped, a push with her knee. Dead air came out to meet her as she went in.
The staircase window having been boarded up, no light came down into the hall. But one door, she could just see, stood ajar, so she went quickly through into the room and unshuttered the big window in there. Now the prosaic woman, looking about her, was more perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw, by traces of her long former habit of life—the yellow smoke stain up the white marble mantelpiece, the ring left by a vase on the top of the escritoire; the bruise in the wallpaper where, on the door being thrown open widely, the china handle had always hit the wall. The piano, having gone away to be stored, had left what looked like claw marks on its part of the parquet. Though not much dust had seeped in, each object wore a film of another kind; and, the only ventilation being the chimney, the whole drawing room smelled of the cold hearth. Mrs. Drover put down her parcels on the escritoire and left the room to proceed upstairs; the things she wanted were in a bedroom chest.
She had been anxious to see how the house was—the part-time caretaker she shared with some neighbors was away this week on his holiday, known to be not yet back. At the best of times he did not look in often, and she was never sure that she trusted him. There were some cracks in the structure, left by the last bombing, on which she was anxious to keep an eye. Not that one could do anything—
A shaft of refracted daylight now lay across the hall. She stopped dead and stared at the hall table—on this lay a letter addressed to her.
She thought first—then the caretaker must be back. All the same, who, seeing the house shuttered, would have dropped a letter in at the box? It was not a circular, it was not a bill. And the post office redirected, to the address in the country, everything for her that came through the post. The caretaker (even if he were back) did not know she was due in London today—her call here had been planned to be a surprise—so his negligence in the manner of this letter, leaving it to wait in the dusk and the dust, annoyed her. Annoyed, she picked up the letter, which bore no stamp. But it cannot be important, or they would know . . . She took the letter rapidly upstairs with her, without a stop to look at the writing till she reached what had been her bedroom, where she let in light. The room looked over the garden and other gardens: The sun had gone in; as the clouds sharpened and lowered, the trees and rank lawns seemed already to smoke with dark. Her reluctance to look again at the letter came from the fact that she felt intruded upon—and by someone contemptuous of her ways. However, in the tenseness preceding the fall of rain she read it: It was a few lines.
Dear Kathleen: You will not have forgotten that today is our anniversary, and the day we said. The years have gone by at once slowly and fast. In view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely upon you to keep your promise. I was sorry to see you leave London, but was satisfied that you would be back in time. You may expect me, therefore, at the hour arranged. Until then . . .
K.
Mrs. Drover looked for the date: It was today’s. She dropped the letter onto the bedsprings, then picked it up to see the writing again—her lips, beneath the remains of lipstick, beginning to go white. She felt so much the change in her own face that she went to the mirror, polished a clear patch in it, and looked at once urgently and stealthily in. She was confronted by a woman of forty-four, with eyes starting out under a hat brim that had been rather carelessly pulled down. She had not put on any more powder since she left the shop where she ate her solitary tea. The pearls her husband had given her on their marriage hung loose round her now rather thinner throat, slipping in the V of the pink wool jumper her sister knitted last autumn as they sat round the fire. Mrs. Drover’s most normal expression was one of controlled worry, but of assent. Since the birth of the third of her little boys, attended by a quite serious illness, she had had an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth, but in spite of this she could always sustain a manner that was at once energetic and calm.
Turning from her own face as precipitately as she had gone to meet it, she went to the chest where the things were, unlocked it, threw up the lid, and knelt to search. But as rain began to come crashing down she could not keep from looking over her shoulder at the stripped bed on which the letter lay. Behind the blanket of rain the clock of the church that still stood struck six—with rapidly heightening apprehension she counted each of the slow strokes. “The hour arranged . . . My God,” she said, “what hour? How should I . . . ? After twenty-five years . . . ”
The young girl talking to the soldier in the garden had not ever completely seen his face. It was dark; they were saying goodbye under a tree. Now and then—for it felt, from not seeing him at this intense moment, as though she had never seen him at all—she verified his presence for these few moments longer by putting out a hand, which he each time pressed, without very much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his uniform. That cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally, what she was to carry away. This was so near the end of a leave from France that she could only wish him already gone. It was August 1916. Being not kissed, being drawn away from and looked at intimidated Kathleen till she imagined spectral glitters in the place of his eyes. Turning away and looking back up the lawn she saw, through branches of trees, the drawing-room window alight: She caught a breath for the moment when she could go running back there into the safe arms of her mother and sister, and cry: “What shall I do, what shall I do? He has gone.”
Hearing her catch her breath, her fiancé said, without feeling: “Cold?”
“You’re going away such a long way.”
“Not so far as you think.”
“I don’t understand?”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “You will. You know what we said.”
“But that was—suppose you—I mean, suppose.”
“I shall be with you,” he said, “sooner or later. You won’t forget that. You need do nothing but wait.”
Only a little more than a minute later she was free to run up the silent lawn. Looking in through the window at her mother and sister, who did not for the moment perceive her, she already felt that unnatural promise drive down between her and the rest of all humankind. No other way of having given herself could have made her feel so apart, lost and forsworn. She could not have plighted a more sinister troth.
Kathleen behaved well when, some months later, her fiancé was reported missing, presumed killed. Her family not only supported her but were able to praise her courage without stint because they could not regret, as a husband for her, the man they knew almost nothing about. They hoped she would, in a year or two, console herself—and had it been only a question of consolation things might have gone much straighter ahead. But her trouble, behind just a little grief, was a complete dislocation from everything. She did not reject other lovers, for these failed to appear: For years she failed to attract men—and with the approach of her thirties she became natural enough to share her family’s anxiousness on this score. She began to put herself out, to wonder; and at thirty-two she was very greatly relieved to find herself being courted by William Drover. She married him, and the two of them settled down in this quiet, arboreal part of Kensington: In this house the years piled up, her children were born, and they all lived till they were driven out by the bombs of the next war. Her movements as Mrs. Drover were circumscribed, and she dismissed any idea that they were still watched.
As things were—dead or living the letter writer sent her only a threat. Unable, for some minutes, to go on kneeling with her back exposed to the empty room, Mrs. Drover rose from the chest to sit on an upright chair whose back was firmly against the wall. The desuetude of her former bedroom, her married London home’s whole air of being a cracked cup from which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away, made a crisis—and at just this crisis the letter writer had, knowledgeably, struck. The hollowness of the house this evening canceled years on years of voices, habits, and steps. Through the shut windows she only heard rain fall on the roofs around. To rally herself, she said she was in a mood—and for two or three seconds shutting her eyes, told herself that she had imagined the letter. But she opened them—there it lay on the bed.
On the supernatural side of the letter’s entrance she was not permitting her mind to dwell. Who, in London, knew she meant to call at the house today? Evidently, however, this had been known. The caretaker, had he come back, had had no cause to expect her: He would have taken the letter in his pocket, to forward it, at his own time, through the post. There was no other sign that the caretaker had been in—but, if not? Letters dropped in at doors of deserted houses do not fly or walk to tables in halls. They do not sit on the dust of empty tables with the air of certainty that they will be found. There is needed some human hand—but nobody but the caretaker had a key. Under circumstances she did not care to consider, a house can be entered without a key. It was possible that she was not alone now. She might be being waited for, downstairs. Waited for—until when? Until “the hour arranged.” At least that was not six o’clock: Six has struck.
She rose from the chair and went over and locked the door.
The thing was, to get out. To fly? No, not that: She had to catch her train. As a woman whose utter dependability was the keystone of her family life she was not willing to return to the country, to her husband, her little boys, and her sister, without the objects she had come up to fetch. Resuming work at the chest she set about making up a number of parcels in a rapid, fumbling-decisive way. These, with her shopping parcels, would be too much to carry; these meant a taxi—at the thought of the taxi her heart went up and her normal breathing resumed. I will ring up the taxi now; the taxi cannot come too soon: I shall hear the taxi out there running its engine, till I walk calmly down to it through the hall. I’ll ring up—But no: the telephone is cut off . . . She tugged at a knot she had tied wrong.
The idea of flight . . . He was never kind to me, not really. I don’t remember him kind at all. Mother said he never considered me. He was set on me, that was what it was—not love. Not love, not meaning a person well. What did he do, to make me promise like that? I can’t remember—But she found that she could.
She remembered with such dreadful acuteness that the twenty-five years since then dissolved like smoke and she instinctively looked for the weal left by the button on the palm of her hand. She remembered not only all that he said and did but the complete suspension of her existence during that August week. I was not myself—they all told me so at the time. She remembered—but with one white burning blank as where acid has dropped on a photograph: Under no conditions could she remember his face.
So, wherever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You have no time to run from a face you do not expect.
The thing was to get to the taxi before any clock struck what could be the hour. She would slip down the street and round the side of the square to where the square gave on the main road. She would return in the taxi, safe, to her own door, and bring the solid driver into the house with her to pick up the parcels from room to room. The idea of the taxi driver made her decisive, bold: She unlocked her door, went to the top of the staircase, and listened down.
She heard nothing—but while she was hearing nothing the passé air of the staircase was disturbed by a draft that traveled up to her face. It emanated from the basement: Down there a door or window was being opened by someone who chose this moment to leave the house.
The rain had stopped; the pavements steamily shone as Mrs. Drover let herself out by inches from her own front door into the empty street. The unoccupied houses opposite continued to meet her look with their damaged stare. Making toward the thoroughfare and the taxi, she tried not to keep looking behind. Indeed, the silence was so intense—one of those creeks of London silence exaggerated this summer by the damage of war—that no tread could have gained on hers unheard. Where her street debouched on the square where people went on living, she grew conscious of, and checked, her unnatural pace. Across the open end of the square two buses impassively passed each other: Women, a perambulator, cyclists, a man wheeling a barrow signalized, once again, the ordinary flow of life. At the square’s most populous corner should be—and was—the short taxi rank. This evening, only one taxi—but this, although it presented its blank rump, appeared already to be alertly waiting for her. Indeed, without looking round the driver started his engine as she panted up from behind and put her hand on the door. As she did so, the clock struck seven. The taxi faced the main road: To make the trip back to her house it would have to turn—she had settled back on the seat and the taxi had turned before she, surprised by its knowing movement, recollected that she had not “said where.” She leaned forward to scratch at the glass panel that divided the driver’s head from her own.
The driver braked to what was almost a stop, turned round, and slid the glass panel back: The jolt of this flung Mrs. Drover forward till her face was almost into the glass. Through the aperture driver and passenger, not six inches between them, remained for an eternity eye to eye. Mrs. Drover’s mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream. After that she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets.
Elizabeth Bowen
Toward the end of her day in London Mrs. Drover went round to her shut-up house to look for several things she wanted to take away. Some belonged to herself, some to her family, who were by now used to their country life. It was late August; it had been a steamy, showery day: At the moment the trees down the pavement glittered in an escape of humid yellow afternoon sun. Against the next batch of clouds, already piling up ink-dark, broken chimneys and parapets stood out. In her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up; a cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs. Drover’s return. Shifting some parcels under her arm, she slowly forced round her latchkey in an unwilling lock, then gave the door, which had warped, a push with her knee. Dead air came out to meet her as she went in.
The staircase window having been boarded up, no light came down into the hall. But one door, she could just see, stood ajar, so she went quickly through into the room and unshuttered the big window in there. Now the prosaic woman, looking about her, was more perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw, by traces of her long former habit of life—the yellow smoke stain up the white marble mantelpiece, the ring left by a vase on the top of the escritoire; the bruise in the wallpaper where, on the door being thrown open widely, the china handle had always hit the wall. The piano, having gone away to be stored, had left what looked like claw marks on its part of the parquet. Though not much dust had seeped in, each object wore a film of another kind; and, the only ventilation being the chimney, the whole drawing room smelled of the cold hearth. Mrs. Drover put down her parcels on the escritoire and left the room to proceed upstairs; the things she wanted were in a bedroom chest.
She had been anxious to see how the house was—the part-time caretaker she shared with some neighbors was away this week on his holiday, known to be not yet back. At the best of times he did not look in often, and she was never sure that she trusted him. There were some cracks in the structure, left by the last bombing, on which she was anxious to keep an eye. Not that one could do anything—
A shaft of refracted daylight now lay across the hall. She stopped dead and stared at the hall table—on this lay a letter addressed to her.
She thought first—then the caretaker must be back. All the same, who, seeing the house shuttered, would have dropped a letter in at the box? It was not a circular, it was not a bill. And the post office redirected, to the address in the country, everything for her that came through the post. The caretaker (even if he were back) did not know she was due in London today—her call here had been planned to be a surprise—so his negligence in the manner of this letter, leaving it to wait in the dusk and the dust, annoyed her. Annoyed, she picked up the letter, which bore no stamp. But it cannot be important, or they would know . . . She took the letter rapidly upstairs with her, without a stop to look at the writing till she reached what had been her bedroom, where she let in light. The room looked over the garden and other gardens: The sun had gone in; as the clouds sharpened and lowered, the trees and rank lawns seemed already to smoke with dark. Her reluctance to look again at the letter came from the fact that she felt intruded upon—and by someone contemptuous of her ways. However, in the tenseness preceding the fall of rain she read it: It was a few lines.
Dear Kathleen: You will not have forgotten that today is our anniversary, and the day we said. The years have gone by at once slowly and fast. In view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely upon you to keep your promise. I was sorry to see you leave London, but was satisfied that you would be back in time. You may expect me, therefore, at the hour arranged. Until then . . .
K.
Mrs. Drover looked for the date: It was today’s. She dropped the letter onto the bedsprings, then picked it up to see the writing again—her lips, beneath the remains of lipstick, beginning to go white. She felt so much the change in her own face that she went to the mirror, polished a clear patch in it, and looked at once urgently and stealthily in. She was confronted by a woman of forty-four, with eyes starting out under a hat brim that had been rather carelessly pulled down. She had not put on any more powder since she left the shop where she ate her solitary tea. The pearls her husband had given her on their marriage hung loose round her now rather thinner throat, slipping in the V of the pink wool jumper her sister knitted last autumn as they sat round the fire. Mrs. Drover’s most normal expression was one of controlled worry, but of assent. Since the birth of the third of her little boys, attended by a quite serious illness, she had had an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth, but in spite of this she could always sustain a manner that was at once energetic and calm.
Turning from her own face as precipitately as she had gone to meet it, she went to the chest where the things were, unlocked it, threw up the lid, and knelt to search. But as rain began to come crashing down she could not keep from looking over her shoulder at the stripped bed on which the letter lay. Behind the blanket of rain the clock of the church that still stood struck six—with rapidly heightening apprehension she counted each of the slow strokes. “The hour arranged . . . My God,” she said, “what hour? How should I . . . ? After twenty-five years . . . ”
The young girl talking to the soldier in the garden had not ever completely seen his face. It was dark; they were saying goodbye under a tree. Now and then—for it felt, from not seeing him at this intense moment, as though she had never seen him at all—she verified his presence for these few moments longer by putting out a hand, which he each time pressed, without very much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his uniform. That cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally, what she was to carry away. This was so near the end of a leave from France that she could only wish him already gone. It was August 1916. Being not kissed, being drawn away from and looked at intimidated Kathleen till she imagined spectral glitters in the place of his eyes. Turning away and looking back up the lawn she saw, through branches of trees, the drawing-room window alight: She caught a breath for the moment when she could go running back there into the safe arms of her mother and sister, and cry: “What shall I do, what shall I do? He has gone.”
Hearing her catch her breath, her fiancé said, without feeling: “Cold?”
“You’re going away such a long way.”
“Not so far as you think.”
“I don’t understand?”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “You will. You know what we said.”
“But that was—suppose you—I mean, suppose.”
“I shall be with you,” he said, “sooner or later. You won’t forget that. You need do nothing but wait.”
Only a little more than a minute later she was free to run up the silent lawn. Looking in through the window at her mother and sister, who did not for the moment perceive her, she already felt that unnatural promise drive down between her and the rest of all humankind. No other way of having given herself could have made her feel so apart, lost and forsworn. She could not have plighted a more sinister troth.
Kathleen behaved well when, some months later, her fiancé was reported missing, presumed killed. Her family not only supported her but were able to praise her courage without stint because they could not regret, as a husband for her, the man they knew almost nothing about. They hoped she would, in a year or two, console herself—and had it been only a question of consolation things might have gone much straighter ahead. But her trouble, behind just a little grief, was a complete dislocation from everything. She did not reject other lovers, for these failed to appear: For years she failed to attract men—and with the approach of her thirties she became natural enough to share her family’s anxiousness on this score. She began to put herself out, to wonder; and at thirty-two she was very greatly relieved to find herself being courted by William Drover. She married him, and the two of them settled down in this quiet, arboreal part of Kensington: In this house the years piled up, her children were born, and they all lived till they were driven out by the bombs of the next war. Her movements as Mrs. Drover were circumscribed, and she dismissed any idea that they were still watched.
As things were—dead or living the letter writer sent her only a threat. Unable, for some minutes, to go on kneeling with her back exposed to the empty room, Mrs. Drover rose from the chest to sit on an upright chair whose back was firmly against the wall. The desuetude of her former bedroom, her married London home’s whole air of being a cracked cup from which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away, made a crisis—and at just this crisis the letter writer had, knowledgeably, struck. The hollowness of the house this evening canceled years on years of voices, habits, and steps. Through the shut windows she only heard rain fall on the roofs around. To rally herself, she said she was in a mood—and for two or three seconds shutting her eyes, told herself that she had imagined the letter. But she opened them—there it lay on the bed.
On the supernatural side of the letter’s entrance she was not permitting her mind to dwell. Who, in London, knew she meant to call at the house today? Evidently, however, this had been known. The caretaker, had he come back, had had no cause to expect her: He would have taken the letter in his pocket, to forward it, at his own time, through the post. There was no other sign that the caretaker had been in—but, if not? Letters dropped in at doors of deserted houses do not fly or walk to tables in halls. They do not sit on the dust of empty tables with the air of certainty that they will be found. There is needed some human hand—but nobody but the caretaker had a key. Under circumstances she did not care to consider, a house can be entered without a key. It was possible that she was not alone now. She might be being waited for, downstairs. Waited for—until when? Until “the hour arranged.” At least that was not six o’clock: Six has struck.
She rose from the chair and went over and locked the door.
The thing was, to get out. To fly? No, not that: She had to catch her train. As a woman whose utter dependability was the keystone of her family life she was not willing to return to the country, to her husband, her little boys, and her sister, without the objects she had come up to fetch. Resuming work at the chest she set about making up a number of parcels in a rapid, fumbling-decisive way. These, with her shopping parcels, would be too much to carry; these meant a taxi—at the thought of the taxi her heart went up and her normal breathing resumed. I will ring up the taxi now; the taxi cannot come too soon: I shall hear the taxi out there running its engine, till I walk calmly down to it through the hall. I’ll ring up—But no: the telephone is cut off . . . She tugged at a knot she had tied wrong.
The idea of flight . . . He was never kind to me, not really. I don’t remember him kind at all. Mother said he never considered me. He was set on me, that was what it was—not love. Not love, not meaning a person well. What did he do, to make me promise like that? I can’t remember—But she found that she could.
She remembered with such dreadful acuteness that the twenty-five years since then dissolved like smoke and she instinctively looked for the weal left by the button on the palm of her hand. She remembered not only all that he said and did but the complete suspension of her existence during that August week. I was not myself—they all told me so at the time. She remembered—but with one white burning blank as where acid has dropped on a photograph: Under no conditions could she remember his face.
So, wherever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You have no time to run from a face you do not expect.
The thing was to get to the taxi before any clock struck what could be the hour. She would slip down the street and round the side of the square to where the square gave on the main road. She would return in the taxi, safe, to her own door, and bring the solid driver into the house with her to pick up the parcels from room to room. The idea of the taxi driver made her decisive, bold: She unlocked her door, went to the top of the staircase, and listened down.
She heard nothing—but while she was hearing nothing the passé air of the staircase was disturbed by a draft that traveled up to her face. It emanated from the basement: Down there a door or window was being opened by someone who chose this moment to leave the house.
The rain had stopped; the pavements steamily shone as Mrs. Drover let herself out by inches from her own front door into the empty street. The unoccupied houses opposite continued to meet her look with their damaged stare. Making toward the thoroughfare and the taxi, she tried not to keep looking behind. Indeed, the silence was so intense—one of those creeks of London silence exaggerated this summer by the damage of war—that no tread could have gained on hers unheard. Where her street debouched on the square where people went on living, she grew conscious of, and checked, her unnatural pace. Across the open end of the square two buses impassively passed each other: Women, a perambulator, cyclists, a man wheeling a barrow signalized, once again, the ordinary flow of life. At the square’s most populous corner should be—and was—the short taxi rank. This evening, only one taxi—but this, although it presented its blank rump, appeared already to be alertly waiting for her. Indeed, without looking round the driver started his engine as she panted up from behind and put her hand on the door. As she did so, the clock struck seven. The taxi faced the main road: To make the trip back to her house it would have to turn—she had settled back on the seat and the taxi had turned before she, surprised by its knowing movement, recollected that she had not “said where.” She leaned forward to scratch at the glass panel that divided the driver’s head from her own.
The driver braked to what was almost a stop, turned round, and slid the glass panel back: The jolt of this flung Mrs. Drover forward till her face was almost into the glass. Through the aperture driver and passenger, not six inches between them, remained for an eternity eye to eye. Mrs. Drover’s mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream. After that she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Losing the Senses by Rosalyn Ostler
One - It fades intermittently--
the perfume of orange blossoms
sweet in my nostrils, then a flatline
of fragrance, until a later surprise
when your face touches mine
and the scent of your rushes in.
My skin breathes your embrace,
Hording for the times of loss.
Two – I miss the taste of blackberries,
Caramel, fresh cauliflower, of shrimp,
Fried mushrooms, root beer,
Buttered toast, Hershey’s kisses.
Three – As clouds, fluttered leaves,
and butterflies dim, my mind scrambles
to preserve them. I imprint my brain
with sunsets, waterfalls, autumn colors,
saving the most precious space
for your smile.
Four – My ears strain for last sounds
Of mockingbirds, crickets and frogs,
The creek rushing through a summer night,
Tchaikovsky and Alley Cat, laughter
Of friends, your lips whispering love.
Five – And last – oh please last,
My fingers strive to remember
Their journeys across your face,
Through your hair.
My skin craves the communication
Of your articulate hands.
When numbness cloaks my fingertips,
May every touch live in their memory.
the perfume of orange blossoms
sweet in my nostrils, then a flatline
of fragrance, until a later surprise
when your face touches mine
and the scent of your rushes in.
My skin breathes your embrace,
Hording for the times of loss.
Two – I miss the taste of blackberries,
Caramel, fresh cauliflower, of shrimp,
Fried mushrooms, root beer,
Buttered toast, Hershey’s kisses.
Three – As clouds, fluttered leaves,
and butterflies dim, my mind scrambles
to preserve them. I imprint my brain
with sunsets, waterfalls, autumn colors,
saving the most precious space
for your smile.
Four – My ears strain for last sounds
Of mockingbirds, crickets and frogs,
The creek rushing through a summer night,
Tchaikovsky and Alley Cat, laughter
Of friends, your lips whispering love.
Five – And last – oh please last,
My fingers strive to remember
Their journeys across your face,
Through your hair.
My skin craves the communication
Of your articulate hands.
When numbness cloaks my fingertips,
May every touch live in their memory.
Monday, October 24, 2011
CD and Commentary Practice
Name_________________________________Date__________________Period____________
Lord of the Flies CD and Commentary
Please choose one concrete detail from the assigned chapters and write it below. Be sure to correctly document the source (page number). Include a transition (who, what, where).
CD:
Commentary: Write four sentences of commentary that interpret or explain the CD.
Lord of the Flies CD and Commentary
Please choose one concrete detail from the assigned chapters and write it below. Be sure to correctly document the source (page number). Include a transition (who, what, where).
CD:
Commentary: Write four sentences of commentary that interpret or explain the CD.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Reminder!!
REMINDER!!!
Please remember to read Chapters 2-4 of Lord of the Flies by Monday, October 24, 2011.
Literary Criticism
Introduction to Literary Criticism and Analysis
In general terms, literary criticism is writing that asks two questions:
What is good and bad about this text?
Why is a particular aspect of the text good or bad?
When you were younger, a teacher may have asked you to write a book review. Book reviews only have to answer the first question, what is good and bad about this text. Literary criticism goes one step further to ask why. Literary criticism is very similar to literary analysis. Literary analysis asks one main question:
Why is this text the way it is?
Several common ways of looking at that question more specifically include,
Why does this character act the way he or she does?
Why does the writer use the particular style he or she uses to convey
this text’s message?
What effect does one aspect of the text, such as the setting or a particular
trait of a character, have on other aspects of the story?
When you write literary criticism and literary analysis, you ask a lot of “why” questions. The main difference between the two is that in literary criticism, more of your opinion comes through. Literary criticism and literary analysis sometimes answer their “why” questions in recognizable ways. Those habitual ways of answering these questions are called different schools of literary theory. Literary theories are simply different ways of approaching those “why” questions. Some of those
approaches include:
Reader response theory: A text is the way it is because of how readers look at it, so any explanation of a text’s meaning needs to take into account the ways different people react to the text.
New Criticism: Texts make sense without reference to outside sources. So any question about a text can be answered by looking closely at how different parts of the text relate to each other.
Historical/biographical criticism: Texts are written by authors, who are heavily influenced by the events in their lives and in the world they live in. So any question about a text should be answered by referring to outside information about the life of the author or the history and culture in which the author lived or lives.
Feminist or gender criticism: This kind of criticism looks at the way male and female characters act in a story and analyzes how that behavior reflects the author’s cultural context and how those portrayals might affect readers’ perceptions of gender. This kind of criticism also looks at what texts leave out; for instance, if there are only stupid men in a story, a gender critic would analyze why.
A sample text:
The rain beat hard against the window, as if heaven was both sad and angry at Lisa, who sat inside, safe and dry, and buried her head in her hands.
A text review (like a book review):
This text describes a girl who is probably sad on a rainy day. It is an effective text at communicating depressing emotions.
A literary criticism:
This text describes two things: rain and a person named Lisa. The text communicates
depressing emotions effectively because it applies them not just to a person but to the weather. Lisa buries “her head in her hands,” which may indicate sadness. While rain isn’t strictly speaking sad, its similarity to tears can make it seem so. The author of this text also personifies heaven and gives it the emotions of sadness and anger to explain why it is raining. Having the weather match Lisa’s mood communicates sadness or anger in a realistic way, because when people are sad or angry they are often so emotional that they cannot see the world as anything
but an extension of those emotions.
A literary analysis:
This text describes two things: rain and a person named Lisa. It describes them both in a depressing way. The text uses personification of nature, because it gives nature the emotions “sad and angry” to explain why it is raining. Giving nature human emotions can make it seem that nature matches or even sympathizes with the person in the scene, who puts her head down in her hands, a sign that she could be sad or angry too.
Note that all three texts start with a quick summary of the text they are writing about.
Note also that both the literary criticism and literary analysis shown here are primarily New Criticism, because for the most part they rely just on the text—as well as a few literary terms—to make their points.
A historical/biographical literary analysis of this text might indicate the following:
It was raining heavily outside when the author wrote this text, and that might have helped her think of rain as a parallel for Lisa’s emotions.
**Be careful to provide cited evidence from a source for the facts you use in historical/biographical literary criticism and analysis.
In general terms, literary criticism is writing that asks two questions:
What is good and bad about this text?
Why is a particular aspect of the text good or bad?
When you were younger, a teacher may have asked you to write a book review. Book reviews only have to answer the first question, what is good and bad about this text. Literary criticism goes one step further to ask why. Literary criticism is very similar to literary analysis. Literary analysis asks one main question:
Why is this text the way it is?
Several common ways of looking at that question more specifically include,
Why does this character act the way he or she does?
Why does the writer use the particular style he or she uses to convey
this text’s message?
What effect does one aspect of the text, such as the setting or a particular
trait of a character, have on other aspects of the story?
When you write literary criticism and literary analysis, you ask a lot of “why” questions. The main difference between the two is that in literary criticism, more of your opinion comes through. Literary criticism and literary analysis sometimes answer their “why” questions in recognizable ways. Those habitual ways of answering these questions are called different schools of literary theory. Literary theories are simply different ways of approaching those “why” questions. Some of those
approaches include:
Reader response theory: A text is the way it is because of how readers look at it, so any explanation of a text’s meaning needs to take into account the ways different people react to the text.
New Criticism: Texts make sense without reference to outside sources. So any question about a text can be answered by looking closely at how different parts of the text relate to each other.
Historical/biographical criticism: Texts are written by authors, who are heavily influenced by the events in their lives and in the world they live in. So any question about a text should be answered by referring to outside information about the life of the author or the history and culture in which the author lived or lives.
Feminist or gender criticism: This kind of criticism looks at the way male and female characters act in a story and analyzes how that behavior reflects the author’s cultural context and how those portrayals might affect readers’ perceptions of gender. This kind of criticism also looks at what texts leave out; for instance, if there are only stupid men in a story, a gender critic would analyze why.
A sample text:
The rain beat hard against the window, as if heaven was both sad and angry at Lisa, who sat inside, safe and dry, and buried her head in her hands.
A text review (like a book review):
This text describes a girl who is probably sad on a rainy day. It is an effective text at communicating depressing emotions.
A literary criticism:
This text describes two things: rain and a person named Lisa. The text communicates
depressing emotions effectively because it applies them not just to a person but to the weather. Lisa buries “her head in her hands,” which may indicate sadness. While rain isn’t strictly speaking sad, its similarity to tears can make it seem so. The author of this text also personifies heaven and gives it the emotions of sadness and anger to explain why it is raining. Having the weather match Lisa’s mood communicates sadness or anger in a realistic way, because when people are sad or angry they are often so emotional that they cannot see the world as anything
but an extension of those emotions.
A literary analysis:
This text describes two things: rain and a person named Lisa. It describes them both in a depressing way. The text uses personification of nature, because it gives nature the emotions “sad and angry” to explain why it is raining. Giving nature human emotions can make it seem that nature matches or even sympathizes with the person in the scene, who puts her head down in her hands, a sign that she could be sad or angry too.
Note that all three texts start with a quick summary of the text they are writing about.
Note also that both the literary criticism and literary analysis shown here are primarily New Criticism, because for the most part they rely just on the text—as well as a few literary terms—to make their points.
A historical/biographical literary analysis of this text might indicate the following:
It was raining heavily outside when the author wrote this text, and that might have helped her think of rain as a parallel for Lisa’s emotions.
**Be careful to provide cited evidence from a source for the facts you use in historical/biographical literary criticism and analysis.
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