Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Reflection on English 102
Throughout the 8 weeks in this course I have learned many things about the writing process, and about some of the literature written in some historically important times. In this class I have learned the differences between summary and analysis. Before this course I as a lot of students used summary as the main filler for my essays. Because English 101 and in high school English the idea was to write a properly formatted essay with correct grammar and conventions not necessarily the writing itself it was easy to just retell the story. Now in English 102 that we are actually being graded on our writing we had to learn how to properly analyze a literary work. All of the writing assignments for this course have helped me learn how to more effectively write an analysis however the assignment that I felt was the most educationally valuable to me was essay 3. In essay 3 not only was it a literary analysis it was also a reading on a historically import event in the case of “The Things they Carried” it was the war in Vietnam and the draft or “Sandstorm”, the war In Iraq. Either was it was very interesting to read about and made a great platform for Analysis.
The readings for this class were very entertaining and I feel that by reading them I really learned a lot. My favorite was Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” this collection of short stories written by a Vietnam veteran and a draftee was in my opinion a great book and an informative story of the true feelings of Vietnam drafted soldiers. Reading this really gives you a great respect and a new outlook on what the young men went through during this time in our nation’s history.
All Together this class was a great learning experience for me. I learned how to write a proper analysis and a lot of other things that will help me write professional papers including proper research and how to properly cite sources for a professional paper.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Annotated Bibliography
Calloway, Catherine. ""How to tell a true war story": Metafiction in The Things They Carried." Critique 36.4 (1995): 249-258. ProQuest Research Library. Web. 15 Jul 2011.
This article written by Catherine Calloway is an analysis of The Tim O’Brien book “The Things They Carried” written in a very similar way as I will be writing my analysis. Here the author uses what we know about the real Tim O’Brien to answer questions as to why he would choose to write the book in the style he chooses. In This article will aid me greatly in my analysis I plan to make regarding O’Brien’s stance on writing in a first person point of view through a fictional version of himself.
"Draft." Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1998. Credo Reference. Web. 15 July 2011.
In this article the facts surrounding the draft of Americas young men through history. In the Vietnam era nearly 10% of American men age 19-20 were sent straight to Vietnam. This article explains a lot about what these young men had to overcome when faced with a draft notice. This article will provide the information about the draft that I will use to conduct a comparison between what is felt in the story “On the Rainy River” to what was felt by the millions of other young men being drafted at that time.
"Tim O'Brien (1946 - )." The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Credo Reference. Web. 15 July 2011.
In this Biography of Tim O’Brien lies a large amount of information about O’Brien’s life that explains why he chose to write in this fashion. Analysis of O’Brien’s other writings gives further incite on O’Brien’s other writings. Using O’Brien’s other writings as evidence we can answer some of the questions that will be posed in my essay about the state of mind of the fictional and the real Tim O’Brien and the similarities between them despite the book being categorized as a fictional story.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Blog post # 5
“All those eyes on me – the town, the whole universe – and I couldn’t risk the embarrassment. It was as if there were an audience to my life that swirl of faces along the river and in my head I could hear the people screaming at me. Traitor! They yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was embarrassed not to.” (Tim O’Brian pg. 57)
This quote comes from Tim O’Brian’s “The things they carried” from the section “On the rainy river”. This is important to the story because it expresses the internal conflict taking place in the conscious of the young Tim O’Brian when faced with the choice to face the war or run off to Canada to escape his fate.
This exact struggle could possibly be the biggest decision in almost every drafted young man’s life. I think this statement really ties together the whole reason for Adding this story to the collection, although it is tough and he doesn’t want to do it he will risk his life to fight for a cause he doesn’t fully agree with because he is afraid to let people down and give himself a bad image. This shows the power of peer pressure truly in action, and because of this pressure people who do not agree with the war will still risk their lives just to save their reputation.
Another outcome of this common struggle that seams apparent in this story is the bond between all of these different men coming from far different backgrounds all sharing this common internal struggle that they can all relate to.
During the time that men were being drafted for the war in Vietnam there are many stories just like O’Brian’s story of “The rainy river’. Even still today there is still the fear of another draft here are some examples I stumbled upon of how some people plan to avoid being drafted if it happens again.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Farther investigation of poetry of witness
From Our investigation of poetry of witness last week and from reading the articles "The Necessity to Speak" by Sam Hamill and the discussion of poetry of witness by Carolyn Forché there are many great examples of the true meaning of poetry of witness. The ideas presented in these two essays also works well to help us better define poetry of witness
In "The Necessity to Speak" Hamill does a great job describing the ideas of victims and abuse in our society, this is very relevant to our investigation of poetry of witness because one of the definitions of poetry of witness is describing ones pain through the means of poetry. In this essay Hamill brings us in to the life of the abused and by doing this allows us to witness from this point of view exactly as for example The poem “Immigrants in our own land” Brings us into the life and struggles of a new inmate entering the prison system.
In the article by Carolyn Forché Poetry is broken up into two easily defined categories, personal and political along with a third more abstract category the “social”. This categorization is a great tool to break up a poem to bring out the true meaning of the poem. This third category that she describes is related to all the unknowns and tough topics that in our society we are often sheltered from. So in this regard I agree with Forché when she says that “By situating poetry in this social space, we can avoid some of our residual prejudices”. If we only focus on the first two categories we will be limited to only the very obvious trues in a poem and never really reveal the authors true struggles.
Sources
Carolyn Forché: on a Poetry of Witness, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/forche/witness.htm
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