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!

Blankets...In Class Blog 3 Panels

I liked the panels on page 57, 58, 59 and 60 on Craig Thompson's, "BLANKETS".

As Craig is reading the bible, he comes to a halt and decides that his drawings (which is his method of "Escapism" along with dreaming), are a distraction to his bible studies in his life. He then decides to burn them all and he goes through this torture of trying to rid his memories with his drawings. At the bottom on page 59, Craig looks like he is in a state of torture, almost like a demonic exercism, of Craig's memories and love for art and drawing coming out of him. It leaves him looking like he has lost a big part of himself. On the panel on page 60, I continue to see this inner torture as it "leaves his body".

I think Thompson's book converstaes with Jeannette Winterson's "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" through both characters wanting two things at the same time but one is apparently evil and the other is good. For Jeannette, she was torn between God and being a lesbian and dealing with her relationships with Melanie and Katy. With Craig, I tihnk he is torn between God and his passion for art.

Belief...

I was raised Catholic, and my grandma was the most influential person as far as that went! My parents would take my brother and I to church every single Sunday whether we wanted to or not. I wouldn't say we were as "hard core" about it like Jeannette and her family in "Oranges..". We would just go to church on Sundays and my whole family would meet at my grandma's house and we'd have a big family lunch/dinner and hang out. I remember them being very fun!
As the years went by however, and things changed my mom left the church, and my dad got closer to it when they divorced. My grandma was the only person who would take my brother and I to church for the years that followed.
Today, my brother and mom do not go to church, but I still like to go on Sundays if I can. I don't take religion very seriously. I mean, I AM Catholic and I believe in God, and I like to go to church, but I'm not as crazy about it. I'm very laid back as far as religion goes.

The Bluest Eye

As I was reading The Bluest Eye, I was definitely confused on the beginning of it! I wonder why she put the "Here is the house it is green and white.." passage over and over, first spaced out, then ending at the words scrunched together at the last of the page... and she would put parts of it in the beginning of a page, for example, on page 38 she put some of that passage on there in capital letters... I guess I don't really understand the point of that!

I also wondered why there aren't any chapters. It was pretty creative though that these were the seasons that took place in the book and let my imagination roll on as to what the weather was like for these people in the book.

I thought about the universality of the text... as far as the "here is the house it is green and white" passage. I just applied it to how one of the little girls on the book lived in a green house... and if maybe this is what she was thinking....

Working Thesis!!!

My Thesis Gallery:
American Born Chinese

1.) What is the continuos pattern of American Born Chinese?

2.) What is the universality of Yang's text?

3.) How are all the three stories in Yang's text similar?

4.) What are the cultural conflicts between Chinese and Americans in Yang's text?

So far these are all I could think of! Yang's text really interested me as far as what I would like to write about for our first paper! Any suggestions or comments about any of these thesis?

P.S. Im only picking one out of the 4!!! =) Thank you!!! =)

Texts In Conversation W/ Each Other

"Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. " -Emerson's essay.

To me, this part of Emerson's essay goes hand in hand when the creator of the Monkey King has come to tell him that he is just a little monkey. He had made him that way and that is what he will always be! Clearly this proves my point :) . These two talk to each other because of the way the monkey was to accept himself as only a monkey, leading him to "the connection of events" explaining how the monkey was stuck under all those rocks for 500 years, till the "master" came and asked for his help. This little event was supposed to make the monkey accept himself as only a monkey, and that his purpose is to help this "mortal master". I loved these two pieces of text because they are so clearly hand in hand!!!

Yang & Emerson, Campaign Writing 9/22 post

I picked Emerson's "imitation is suicide" part of his essay, because it stuck out the most to me when I finished reading Yang's book today.

In the book, I took the Monkey King and Jin and compared them how they both had this mindset that they did not like who they were... the monkey king believed to be the heaven's equal and he was just NOT a monkey. At the very end, Jin transformed himself to become DANNY. (The ending surprised me and I loved it!). Jin even permed his hair so it would look like Greg's. Clearly Jin was imitating Greg. In reality, you cannot ever be something you are not. Jin was never not going to be the typical white male like Greg, it's impossible! You cannot change who you are. The Monkey King tried to be complete equal of a god and would not, by any means, call himself a monkey anymore.
I really liked the book and Emerson's essay; it went hand in hand with the meaning I portrayed from the text.


The "Evolution" depicted in the advertising campaign has a message to our other two authors. I took Emerson's "imitation is suicide" plus Yang's Jin and Monkey King, plus this ad campaign, and all three have an "imitation is suicide" vibe and understatement to it. Again, I believe that you cannot be something you are not. The girl in the Dove ad, was herself, yet was transformed by the images that the directors for that ad wanted to do; they wanted her to look a certain way. There is no way that girl could grow a neck or make her eyes bigger! This is not possible. All 3 of these characters want or are made to be something they are not.
I think that this affected me in my way of thinking; I know that I am Puerto Rican; I will never be blonde hair or blue eyed! I will not be taller, or have longer legs! I accept my heritage and my individuality. Sometimes it's hard to see the ideal size 2 blond hair blue/green eyed model with a perfect tan and nice teeth and toned up perfect body, and not want to be like that! But realistically, you are the way you are because you're meant to be that way; it's how God created you and how you are supposed to be.

American Born Chinese!

So far, reading American Born Chinese has been a good read (as far as comics go for me!) I like how there are 3 stories we're reading about and how they are different and interesting in their own way.

* A panel I chose was for "The Monkey King" story, are on pages 17 and 18. These panels interested me because you can tell just by looking at the pictures that the monkey is beating up the "gods" and causing some major chaos! The words "Smak!" and "Krash!" on page 17 signify pain and loud noises of a fight. Along with these words on page 17 the author drew stars all around the god's heads, which signifies being "knocked out silly", giving the reader (me in this case!) a sense of confusion and unexpectedness of the monkey beating them all up! Next, on page 18, as the monkey continues to fight, you see the jagged lines that look like lightning coming out from the monkey's fist as he is punching a god. From McCloud's text, these lines mean the kind of power these lines represent. As I was reading page 18, I could tell that these jagged lines signify anger and power as far as the monkey's anger and fighting goes. Along with the jagged lines, there were more words on the two panels, "KRAK!" and "BOOM"! This makes me think the fight is noisy and chaotic!

bell hooks

White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy

I think what bell hooks said about this is that this is an "interlocking system of domination". It's institutional. From what I understood this is just how the white people are kept in the middle of the discussion of racism...But that this doesn't only just affect black people and how white people treat them... that it's other ethnic backgrounds being mistreated.

Examples for popular culture

When bell hooks is talking about the popular culture, I think she is saying that there is so much that Hollywood makes that they don't think the underlying message is that important..that a "fuck me till i die" picture or even sentence will make any sort of impact on the crowd. People do take it to an extent...it affects us and younger people that this is okay and this deprives women more than anything (from seeing that clip of the movie!) not cool.

This represents a postmodern lens of interpretation by what we see today and how people represent themselves creating a certain type of image and stereotype.

Motivated Representations

Same with how the movie "Smoke" portrayed a black boy being a thief. Why would the director make him black? He had no answer for that question! He would put a black man as a thief because society thinks of black people as rebellious, gangster, thug like people because of the representations they make in Hollywood about them. They portray African American people to be like that, therefore giving the director a better reason to put a teenage young black man as a thief.

La Guernica

LA GUERNICA:

I chose the portrait of "La Guernica" by Pablo Picasso because it is the picture that appealed to me the most! =)

La Guernica let me apply some of Molly Bang's ideas of pictures. First, there is a sense of fear and a "not-so-safe" vibe coming from the portrait itself because of how dark the background is and all the colors in it are dark blue hues. I noticed that the horses trampling around are dark, and the people are a lighter color, making it seem that the horses are meant to be feared and dangerous. The people in agony and fear are a lighter color representing innocence.

Second, I would like to point out the fact that the center of the picture is where there is the most commotion, with the horse trampling the man on the floor... On the top half of the picture there is what I thought was a light bulb shedding out light, signalizing hope or a greater spiritual power watching over all this commotion on the bottom!

Lastly, the jaggedness and abstraction of the shapes of the horses and people give the portrait a sense of anxiety, sorrow and fear. There's a woman on the left of the painting that is holding what looks like a dead child. There is sorrow on her face, the way she is looking up to the horse (or even the sky)!

Overall, I liked the "La Guernica" the most to apply Molly Bang's ideas of how we look at pictures!

In Class Writing #2

What Are "REAL BOOKS"?

I think Real books is any book with text in it, with page numbers and pages!?! Haha I don't really know how to explain it...Something that's written on text in a book with pages and page numbers that you read from left to right horizontally and it's either a story (fiction or not), or any type of book about ANYTHING.

As far as visual texts go like comics...I never really got into reading them! I was one of those people that it was hard for me to read McCloud's text (it really gave me a headache!). I don't really like them, because I think it's too many little pictures and little sentences that take up a whole page and keep going! For some people it's more enjoyable to read that, but not for me, I think I prefer reading a book! =)The one comics that do catch my attention are the ones with the picture and it will say a sentence at the bottom of the page of the catch of the joke. To me, those are more entertaining than comic books!

McCloud Text HW 2

How does the text combine what multimodal scholars have come to recognize as the 5 modes of multimodal literacy: linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and audio?

I think that the text combines linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural and audio multimodal literacy by taking it all and putting it into one big text. You can see all these things just by reading it! You get a great visual through reading it, with pictures as examples... I can hear the text just by reading it. It's very well illustrated and it's almost like you can hear what the person is saying, even though there is no one there. The way something is written, let's say, in capital letters, can change the pitch of an audio sound when you read it. It's meant to be loud, or empowering!

My experience reading McCloud's text, made me dizzy at first because I feel like there's so much going on in just one page!, but other than that, I was surprised to see that I learned a lot from it; because I'm a visual learner =)..But at the beginning in Chapter 1, when he was explaining the Egyptian drawings...It seemed it was all so jam packed there that it made me dizzy and I wanted to flip to the next page...I like the parts where it's easy to follow and read simply! His text caught my attention also through his cartoon of himself; I wonder if he really looks like that!

Web Article! (The multi's!) HW 2

I read the article, "What Are Multimodalities, Multisemniotics, and Multiliteracies?" And I found it pretty interesting. First, I will define them how I understood them. Multimodalities are our senses that let us experience life, like seeing, hearing, smelling and touching. We do that everyday. Multisemniotics is very similiar to that, because that is our responses to our personal history, experiences, cultures, communities, and how we identify ourselves, so, our identity as individual people. Last, are Multiliteracies. I understood these as ANY KIND OF TEXT that you read, interpret, and learn on. It can be anything on the computer, paper, etc. For example, we can read text on a computer, and learn from it. We can also learn from people showing us gestures with their hands, and with props. It all connects.

You encounter everyday situations with multimodality and multiliteracies. For multimodality, I was sitting on a chair on my deck eating a sandwich and watching a soccer game (all the soccer fields are on my backyard! It's sweet) and it was a really nice, sunny day. All the sense of enjoying the weather, watching the game, and eating a really yummy sandwich i made, gave me an experience. For multiliteracies, I was in class and a professor was using a power-point for our class notes. I read them on the screen, but then wrote them down on my notebook. He also used a pointer...all these things helped me write down and learn what we did in class.

In-Class Writing #1

What is an American?

I think an American is a person that is in cue with themselves to believe that they live in a free country and have free will to do what they want in life. Besides being loyal to your family, friends, and anything else you may believe in, you are also loyal to your country. By being loyal to your country I don't mean that, for example, you have to join any branch of the military. By being loyal to your country you should know what goes on in it. Whether it's politics, or gas prices going up, or our economy, or our "GO GREEN!" type of lifestyles emerging, being conscious of these problems make you a loyal American. You know what is going on in your country, and you have a choice whether you want to take part in changing it, or sit back and live your life how it is. Apart from being loyal you do have choices! Secondly I think an American is someone that has choices and opportunities. You can choose what you want to do in your life. You have the choices and opportunities to go to college, and get a job, or take over your family's business if you're not interested in college! There's a lot you can achieve in our country with loyalty, opportunity and choices.

Facebook

I chose a soccer ball because soccer is my favorite sport! I've played since I was 8 years old all the way through my senior year in high school!
Although I haven't played since then, a few of my friends and I are planning on joining an intramural team here at Western this year! =)

Homework Assgnmt. for 9/8/08!

Two of the two theories that I read about that interest me the most were Pop Culture and Reader Response! I liked the Pop because it has to do with the media, popular reads, and analyzing it all! I think that would be fun. I also liked Reader Response because, as students, we can apply how the piece of literature affected us and/or our way of thinking. I like to discuss books after reading them, so maybe this falls onto the category? =)