Class Response!

In this class, I have grown as a student by becoming more diligent and organized in my work... Upon receiving a paper that I knew I needed to revise eventually, I found myself doing it right away and looking through it again. Also, I don't think I missed any days in this class so it made me feel better knowing that I came every day as expected! The most challenging ideas for me in this class were the research paper method of writing. It's always challenging for me to come up with a thesis, and get on with the rest of the paper. I have improved as a writer by cutting out excess words in my sentences, and knowing MLA format like the back of my hand!

The texts I responded more positively to were Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, American Born Chinese and A Midnight Summer's Dream because these books were entertaining and I understood the points of them. They were pretty good books! I struggled with The Bluest Eye because I did not understand the way the author wrote things. Her style was confusing and I did not really enjoy reading that book.

My perspectives on the graphic novel as a literary genre has been challenged because I never read any of them until this class. I always thought they were just "comics" and they'd be short and sweet. Graphic novels are whole stories with pictures and are, of course, comic-esque! My thinking evolved regarding this genre because it has opened me up to read more different kinds of texts. I enjoyed reading the graphic novels and they have encouraged me to read some more in my spare time.

The assignments and activities I enjoyed the most were the blog!, writing the response papers, and discussing the texts in class. I have heard of blogs but I have never come close to making one. When we started to do it in class I thought it was fun, adding your own personal style to a webpage! Writing the response papers was a fun way to do writing in a short way. I liked to explain myself and the text in these papers and when we got them back, graded, I saw what I did wrong/right, and what I need to work on so it was eye-opening. Lastly, discussing the texts in class really made me understand the texts whenever I did not understand what was going on. Hearing other people's perspectives and thoughts on the texts helped me understand and interpret it a lot more. The activities and assignments I disliked was the research paper! Haha. I knew it was coming, but I just had a hard time looking up an article that was relevant to my thoughts about the text.

I feel better prepared to think critically about a variety of texts because now I like to know and understand more than the story when I'm reading a book. Overall, I think all my expectations were achieved in this class! =)

Gaiman vs. Shakespeare

As I finished reading both Gaiman and Shakespeare's text, I saw a lot of differences including how they are written, the plots of the story, and the interpretation of the text.

In my personal opinion, I liked reading Shakespeare's text better because it was the classic one, and it was more romantically themed! In Gaiman's text, I liked how there were pictures that illustrate what is going on in the story. However, I think that there were two stories going on at once. For example, how the "Will Shakspear" is confronted by the mysterious lord that bribes him gold for two plays to have his debts payed (Gaiman, 64) then all of a sudden the play will take place. The other part that confused me about Gaiman's text were all the fairies and monsters attending the play (Gaiman, 70)...what were they doing there and why?
The graphics are great though, and they were cool to look at. I think they are both really good texts, but I liked the original better.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

HERMIA & LYSANDER

I wanted to write about Hermia and Lysander because I find their situation complicated!
It sucks that Hermia's father is making her marry Demetrius, when Hermia and Lysander are clearly in love. It's either that or death which is weird to think about because if you love your child so much why would you have him/her condemned to death by "disobeying" you?! Weird. (Shakespeare, Act 1 scene i)

Another reason for their situation being complicated is that by Puck's simple mistake, the couple were so close to being in a relationship together with their free will, when they sleep separate Puck assumes that this is Helena (who's in love with Demetrius unlike him!) and makes Lysander wake up to fall in love with Helena, who doesn't want or love him, and begs him to get back to Hermia. Meanwhile Hermia is confused and heart-broken when she wakes up to find Lysander gone! It's a "so close yet so far away" kind of thing! It frustrates me! haha.

Thesis for Research Paper (2)

So far I have an idea of what to write about but I don't know how to put it into thesis form! haha

I want to talk about Persepolis, and show Sartrapi's experiences as a little girl into her teen years shape her as a person and how it ends...I want to include examples and I guess find an article that will be along these lines!

My thesis:

Marjane Satrapi goes through events in her childhood that later shape her as a person when she finds her identity coming to and from Iran...

^something among those lines!!??

Any suggestions please?!

Persepolis I

How does conflict forge identity?

In Persepolis, I feel like these people are happy to serve and die for their rights in the revolution. For example, on the first panel on page 31... we see the people carrying the body of a dead man killed by the army in the midst of the revolution. The man was carried by a crowd of people, whom were proclaiming him a martyr..

In Stephen Crane's "War is Kind", he explains how people should be proud of the soldiers and/or loved ones that have died during it. Even though I disagree because I think war brings nothing but pain, others may be "pro-war" and have a degree of patriotism to an extent. On lines 8-9 we read:

These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them.

I think these two lines interact with Persepolis' panel in which the young man is recognized a martyr for being killed by the army in the revolution protest. We clearly see the unexplained glory by having a random crowd of people praising this boy because he died in the revolution; something everyone is willing to die for at that time.

Also,[comparing Persepolis and "War Is Kind"] on page 40, that the first panel is of dead people, looking up, and it states that "After black Friday, there was one massacre after another. Many people were killed". I can see on Crane's poem, line 22, "And a field where a thousand corpses die".

This war, or conflict, forges the identity of global war and killings in our world both in the past and present..hopefully not the future, anymore! We can see the language of war globally in all nations and worlds. It brings on the same deaths, and people who have given up their lives for it.

Poems about war

I read "War is Kind" by Stephen Crane (1899). I disagree with the poem. I don't think war is kind and that there's nothing you win out of it other than death and pain for others...and I think war gets you no where.

In a multimodal sense, I can see a man wearing worn out clothes and carrying a gun, wounded, stumbling on the river with his hand on his heart and taking his last breath and falling dead to the shallow water.

"Because your father tumbles in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died" (line 13,14)

Intersections

2 Panels I would like to discuss in class are the panel on page 301 and page 304. In these panels, Craig is very nervous about going to sleep with Raina in her bed. In that same panel you can tell that Craig looks shocked and kind of dumbfounded when she asks him this question. Then, on page 304, as he is undressing and ready to go to bed [with Raina] he starts reciting in his mind bible verses about the sin of the body with adultery and love and the fire burning within the man when he loves a woman kind of thing, and he looks just as worried and nervous about having a little "sleepover" with Raina! I found these very interesting because I think that he is only nervous because of the way his faith has brought him up to be.

In "Blankets" and "Oranges", the literature speaks to each other by having the same sort of concept when it comes to the individual's Christian upbringing and their own path of discovering who they really are. For example, I think that on page 60 in "Blankets", Craig is getting rid of his passion for art choosing God instead. In "Oranges" Jeannette was to choose between God and her relationships between Melissa and Katy. They are speaking in the sense that they are losing themselves in order to be close to God and continue their expected spiritual lives. In the end, both Craig and Jeannette leave their Christian ways and pursue their lives without Christianity as the center of it. With that point said, I would ;ike to add Emily Dickinson's poem, "Some Keep The Sabbath", she explains that she connects with God simply by discovering nature and not being a churchgoer. I think that she does what she wants to in her life, without God being the complete and utter center of it all. And I think it is what Craig and Jeannette do at the end of their stories, when they let go of their family's strict religious ways!