Monday, February 25, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Before the Presentation: Vocabulary to Know
1. Sestina: The sestina is a complex form that achieves its often spectacular effects through intricate repetition.
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.
(Excerpted from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5792)
2. Motif: a recurring object, concept, or structure in a work of literature. A motif may also be two contrasting elements in a work, such as good and evil. In the Book of Genesis, we see the motif of separation again and again throughout the story. In the very first chapter, God separates the light from the darkness. Abraham and his descendants are separated from the rest of the nation as God's chosen people. Joseph is separated from his brothers in order that life might be preserved. Another motif is water, seen in Genesis as a means of destroying the wicked and in Matthew as a means of remitting sins by the employment of baptism. Other motifs in Genesis and Matthew include blood sacrifices, fire, lambs, and goats. A motif is important because it allows one to see main points and themes that the author is trying to express, in order that one might be able to interpret the work more accurately.
(Excerpted from: http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/general/glossary.htm)
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.
(Excerpted from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5792)
2. Motif: a recurring object, concept, or structure in a work of literature. A motif may also be two contrasting elements in a work, such as good and evil. In the Book of Genesis, we see the motif of separation again and again throughout the story. In the very first chapter, God separates the light from the darkness. Abraham and his descendants are separated from the rest of the nation as God's chosen people. Joseph is separated from his brothers in order that life might be preserved. Another motif is water, seen in Genesis as a means of destroying the wicked and in Matthew as a means of remitting sins by the employment of baptism. Other motifs in Genesis and Matthew include blood sacrifices, fire, lambs, and goats. A motif is important because it allows one to see main points and themes that the author is trying to express, in order that one might be able to interpret the work more accurately.
(Excerpted from: http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/general/glossary.htm)
3. Allusion: a reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature. Allusions are often used to summarize broad, complex ideas or emotions in one quick, powerful image.
(Excerpted from: http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/general/glossary.htm)
4. Garden of Eden: Genesis tells how God created the first human being, Adam. Then, because Adam needed a companion, God created the first woman, Eve, from one of Adam’s ribs. God created for these first two humans a perfect garden (known as the Garden of Eden and later called paradise), where everything was beautiful and full of good things for them. However, also in this garden was the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve were told by God that they could eat anything in the garden except the fruit of this tree (which, in some later traditions, was an apple tree).
Eve was tempted by a serpent, which is traditionally held to be the devil in the shape of a snake (see also Big ideas: Serpent, Devil, Satan, Beast). The serpent spoke to her, telling her that if she and Adam ate the fruit, they would ‘be as gods, knowing good and evil’ (Genesis 3:5). Eve gave in to the temptation and also persuaded Adam to eat. They were then, for the first time, aware of shame, and instead of being innocently naked, tried to make themselves clothes out of fig leaves. Their disobedience of God is known as theFall of Humankind and fractured the relationship between God and humans. Adam and Eve were then expelled from the garden and kept out by an angelwith a flaming sword. The serpent was cursed as an enemy of humankind.
Eve was tempted by a serpent, which is traditionally held to be the devil in the shape of a snake (see also Big ideas: Serpent, Devil, Satan, Beast). The serpent spoke to her, telling her that if she and Adam ate the fruit, they would ‘be as gods, knowing good and evil’ (Genesis 3:5). Eve gave in to the temptation and also persuaded Adam to eat. They were then, for the first time, aware of shame, and instead of being innocently naked, tried to make themselves clothes out of fig leaves. Their disobedience of God is known as theFall of Humankind and fractured the relationship between God and humans. Adam and Eve were then expelled from the garden and kept out by an angelwith a flaming sword. The serpent was cursed as an enemy of humankind.
(Excerpted from: http://www.crossref-it.info/articles/24/Garden-of-Eden,-Adam-and-Eve,-'Second-Adam')
5. Culture Shock: a sense of confusion and uncertainty sometimes with feelings of anxiety that may affect people exposed to an alien culture or environment without adequate preparation
(Definition from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture%20shock)
(Graphic from: http://www.uwsuper.edu/fye/parents/upload/W-Curve.pdf)
5. Culture Shock: a sense of confusion and uncertainty sometimes with feelings of anxiety that may affect people exposed to an alien culture or environment without adequate preparation
(Definition from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture%20shock)
(Graphic from: http://www.uwsuper.edu/fye/parents/upload/W-Curve.pdf)
Before the Presentation: Novel Overviews
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Julia Alvarez
Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters - Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia - arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost - and what they find - is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that comprise this exquisite first novel. Just as it is a feature of the immigrant experience to always look back, the novel begins with thirty-nine-year-old Yolanda's return to the Island in "Antojos" ("Cravings") and moves magically backward in time to the final days before the exile that is to transform the sisters' lives. Along the way we witness their headlong plunge into the American mainstream, but although the girls try to distance themselves from their island life by ironing their hair, forgetting their Spanish, and meeting boys unchaperoned, they remain forever caught between the old world and the new. With bright humor and rare insight, Julia Alvarez vividly evokes the tensions and joys of belonging to two distinct cultures in a novel that is utterly authentic and full of irrepressible spirit.
(From back cover of novel)
The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior focuses on the stories of five women—Kingston's long-dead aunt, "No-Name Woman"; a mythical female warrior, Fa Mu Lan; Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid; Kingston's aunt, Moon Orchid; and finally Kingston herself—told in five chapters. The chapters integrate Kingston's lived experience with a series of talk-stories—spoken stories that combine Chinese history, myths, and beliefs—her mother tells her.
The final chapter of the memoir, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," is about Kingston herself. This section focuses mainly on her childhood and teenage years, depicting her anger and frustration in trying to express herself and attempting to please an unappreciative mother. There are a number of characters whose personalities highlight many of her Kingston's own characteristics, including a silent Chinese girl whom Kingston torments as a little girl. In a pivotal moment in the chapter, Kingston, after unsuccessfully trying to express her feelings one at a time, erupts at her mother with a torrent of complaints and criticisms. Later in her life, however, Kingston comes to appreciate her mother's talk-stories. At the end of the chapter she even tells one herself: the story of Ts'ai Yen, a warrior poetess captured by barbarians who returns to the Chinese with songs from another land. It is a fitting conclusion to a text in which Kingston combines very different worlds and cultures and create a harmony of her own.
Julia Alvarez
Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, the four Garcia sisters - Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia - arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind. What they have lost - and what they find - is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that comprise this exquisite first novel. Just as it is a feature of the immigrant experience to always look back, the novel begins with thirty-nine-year-old Yolanda's return to the Island in "Antojos" ("Cravings") and moves magically backward in time to the final days before the exile that is to transform the sisters' lives. Along the way we witness their headlong plunge into the American mainstream, but although the girls try to distance themselves from their island life by ironing their hair, forgetting their Spanish, and meeting boys unchaperoned, they remain forever caught between the old world and the new. With bright humor and rare insight, Julia Alvarez vividly evokes the tensions and joys of belonging to two distinct cultures in a novel that is utterly authentic and full of irrepressible spirit.
(From back cover of novel)
The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior focuses on the stories of five women—Kingston's long-dead aunt, "No-Name Woman"; a mythical female warrior, Fa Mu Lan; Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid; Kingston's aunt, Moon Orchid; and finally Kingston herself—told in five chapters. The chapters integrate Kingston's lived experience with a series of talk-stories—spoken stories that combine Chinese history, myths, and beliefs—her mother tells her.
The final chapter of the memoir, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," is about Kingston herself. This section focuses mainly on her childhood and teenage years, depicting her anger and frustration in trying to express herself and attempting to please an unappreciative mother. There are a number of characters whose personalities highlight many of her Kingston's own characteristics, including a silent Chinese girl whom Kingston torments as a little girl. In a pivotal moment in the chapter, Kingston, after unsuccessfully trying to express her feelings one at a time, erupts at her mother with a torrent of complaints and criticisms. Later in her life, however, Kingston comes to appreciate her mother's talk-stories. At the end of the chapter she even tells one herself: the story of Ts'ai Yen, a warrior poetess captured by barbarians who returns to the Chinese with songs from another land. It is a fitting conclusion to a text in which Kingston combines very different worlds and cultures and create a harmony of her own.
(Excerpts from Sparknotes.com)
Prose Passage #2: Yolanda
“What are you trying to say?” she kept asking. He spoke kindly, but in a language she had never heard before.
She pretended she understood. She took a big smell of the flowers. “Thank you, love.” A thte word love, her hands itched so fiercely that she was afraid she would drop the flowers.
He said something happily, again in sounds she could not ascribe meanings to.
“Come on, love,” she asked his eyes; she spoke precisely as if she were talking to a foreigner or a willful child. “John, can you understand me?” She nodded her head to let him know that he should answer her by nodding his head if words failed him.
He shook his head, No.
She held him steady with both hands as if she were trying to nail him down into her world. “John!” she pleaded. “Please, love!”
He pointed to his ears and nodded. Volume wasn’t the problem. He could hear her. “Babble babble.” His lips were slow motion on each syllable.
He is saying I love you, she thought! “Babble,” she mimicked him. “Babble babble babble babble.” Maybe that meant, I love you too, in whatever tongue he was speaking.
He pointed to her, to himself. “Babble?”
She nodded wildly. Her valentine hairline, the heart in her ribs and all the ones on her sleeves twinkled like the pinchers of the crab in the sky. Maybe now they could start over, in silence.
When she left her husband, Yo wrote a note, I’m going to my folks till my head-slash-heart clear. She revised the note: I’m needing some space, some time, until my head-slash-heart-slash-soul—No, no, no, she didn’t want to divide herself anymore, three persons in one Yo.
John, she began, then she jotted a little triangle before John. Dear, she wrote on a slant. She had read in a handwriting analysis book that his was the style of the self-assured. Dear John, listen, we both know it’s not working.
“It’s?” he would ask. “It’s, meaning what?”
Yo crossed the vague pronoun out.
We are not working. You know it, I know it, we both know it, oh John, John, John. Her hand kept writing, automatically, until the page was filled with the dark ink of his name. She tore the note up and confettied it over her head, a rainfall of John’s. She wrote him a short memo, Gone—then added—to my folks. She thought of signing it, Yolanda, but her real name no longer sounded like her own, so instead she scribbled his name for her, Joe (Alvarez 77-79).
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