Here is your Final Reflective Essay for The Woman Writer: Due June 5--No Exceptions

ENG 247.18014

The Woman Writer

Spring 2013

Dr. Van Slyck

Final Reflective Essay

On page 3 of your coursepak I have listed some of the major themes we have discussed in this course on The Woman Writer.  We will review these themes again in the next two weeks and you will choose one theme and two texts to compare and contrast in the way they explore, illuminate that theme.  You must choose texts you have not already written about!

Possible themes and suggested directions:

1.     women’s ways of knowing; women’s strategies for self-expression, self-knowledge: hidden insights, hidden powers, tearing down the wallpaper

2.     women and the use of material culture: from quilts to dolls to ironing

3.     gender ideology: how it is developed and maintained; how women collaborate; how they resist: setting horses free, setting selves free

4.     how women speak back to patriarchy: from murder to seizing the vibrator

5.     women and magical powers: crying madonnas, flying women in flames, dolls that express women’s oppression

6.     language and women’s voices: race and culture—claiming voice, redefining voice, embracing hybridity

Your essay should be 600 to 800 words.  It should be typed, double-spaced, using 12pt font, Times New Roman.  It should have a title of your own that reflects your argument.  You should quote from each poem 2-3 times.  Be sure to integrate the quotations carefully, comment fully on each and use line numbers in parentheses.  Do not use overly long quotations.  Use an ellipsis (. . .) if you are leaving out some of the words and be sure to mark line breaks and capitals for the beginnings of each line: “You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies. . .”

Please remember to put a heading in the upper left corner of your essay with the course, section number and your name as well as mine!  This is the only essay you may not revise and it must be returned to me.  Due Date: June 5.   You may review this essay at our final class meeting and celebration on Tuesday, June 11.

Writer, Theme, Texts for Essay #2--Post your ideas here--try to post tonight--Wednesday May 15

Hi Everyone--on this blog I have already posted guidelines for Essay #2.  What you need to do here is tell your classmates and your professor what writer or writers you have chosen and answer the following questions:
 1.  why did you choose this writer or writers?

 2.  what do the texts or writers have in common?

 3.  how do the texts differ in the treatment of theme?

 4.  what kind of research would be helpful?

We will brainstorm in class to help you refine your thesis based on the blogs you write.

Essay Planning: Essay #2 Comparison Guidelines

The Woman Writer

Guidelines for Essay #2

A Comparison/Contrast of Two Works

Deadlines: Blog for May 16; Essay due May 23 (draft in class discussion May 21.)

Choices:

1.     You may compare a technique in two writers, for example, magical realism in Ferre and Danticat.

2.     You may compare two poems or stories by the same writer, for example the poems we have read by Alvarez or Angelou—you will need a theme.

3.     You may compare a theme in two different writers, for example, identity or language in Anzaldua and Alvarez.

4.     Women’s oppression; women’s self-affirmation has been a thread throughout the course and we will return to that in new ways in the last two readings: “The Yellow Wallpaper” and In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play. Both these texts are based on real events, so another angle is to examine how real events are used fruitfully, productively to create fiction. (This also works for “The Youngest Doll,” “1937”and Trifles.)  You may choose any two texts you have not already written about to explore a feminist-type theme.

As with the previous essay, I am asking you to research your authors, and, in some cases, the historical or social issue surrounding the story or play or poem.

I will post a blog after our class May 14, so that you can begin to share ideas about your comparison contrast essay.

Simple structural advice:

·      First establish what the two texts have in common; then clearly define how each text approaches the theme differently;

·      The opening of your essay should create a structural frame for the comparison, so that you and your reader know exactly what is coming next

·      Each body paragraph should be devoted to one aspect of the theme, should have textual support that is clearly introduced, related to the theme and commented on in depth.

·      Your conclusion should make some kind of social, psychological or philosophical observation, comment on the importance of the theme and the specific way the writer chose to advance our understanding.

Example of the comparison contrast thesis:

Gloria Anzaldua and Julia Alvarez both struggle to describe the relationship between language and identity.  Both use Spanish and English in the same text and both express complex emotions about living in two languages.  However, Anzaldua writes in prose, Anzaldua in poetry.  Anzaldua wants her reader to think about how Latina women can make their voices heard in the world, while Alvarez gives us a more intimate, private analysis of an individual’s identity—between worlds.

Please do this Bricolage Blog after we have discussed Anzaldua and Alvarez

Bricolage: do an inventory of your personal culture(s) and see if you can determine where the things you wear, buy, eat, think, read, watch--come from. How globalized are you?  What do you disavow from your culture of origin? What do you stress?  Explore your hybridity and share with your classmates.  (See article by Michael Kimmelman, which inspired this assignment: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/arts/18abroad.html?ref=design

Here are samples of my students’ bricolages taken from an earlier course Ning: http://worldlit295.ning.com/

“Various cultural influences shape my tattoos. I have the words "nature" and "god" tattooed across my wrists in Sanskrit, a space where Jesus was allegedly pierced as he was crucified. On my upper arms I have an abstract version of the African continent (abstract because it's supposed to mimic the henna tattoos Indian brides have on their palms) with the Hindu symbol for the sound of creation, on one arm. While the other has a short prayer to the Hindu god Shiva surrounded by the lotus flower. This collage of symbols is evident of what has influenced me as a human the most” (Dominick).

When I'm walking around my neighborhood, or anywhere, the first thing that people often recognize, is my hair. And most people classify my to the group or culture of being a Rastafarian, "Rasta", which in my case, that's not a culture or a group that I can say internally that I appeal to. Like most, I don't really like to identify myself as being in a "culture", because there are its limitations, and often just boxed into what comes with being in a culture. And, I am totally the opposite at being boxed in. As an African-American young woman there are so many cultural identities, that I can be identified with, but I believe that it is the choices and options available to you, that deciphers what kind of cultures that you best coexist with. For me, I find that an "earthy-like" element is something that best fits with me. My look, I attempt to be very different, and I stray away from the norm of what Fashion is said to be like, I like my own originality. Even the music that I listen to, I have no limits to what I listen too, I love the words, in the poetic sense. (Victoria)

Post Response to Rosario Ferre Here

Greetings Woman Writer Scholars: (excuse belated posting!!--we will work on this in class today and you will follow up tonight)

Please post your personal response to "The Youngest Doll" here.  First just give your reaction to the story, your interpretation (or thoughts about) various events and characters.  I am especially interested in your ideas about the ending.  Please quote at least once from the story.

Then read the accompanying essay that explains the economic and social situation of Puerto Rico at the time of the story and leading up to that time (1976).

After reading the essay, write a brief paragraph explaining how/why the essay helped you understand the story.  Choose one passage from the essay that affected your understanding of the story and include a reference to it in your discussion.

So this is a two-paragraph blog--first on the story, then a response to the essay.  Enjoy reflecting!

Guidelines for Short Story Essay #1

The Woman Writer

English 247.0909

Spring 2013

Dr. Van Slyck

Guidelines for Essay #1

A.      Plan to include biographical information about your writer in your introduction.  In class we will discuss how to write the introduction so you can move from biographical information to your thesis.

B.     The body of your essay will be based on a close reading of the story we discussed in class for that writer.  You will need to decide whether you are going to write about a) character, b) theme, c) symbolism, d) setting, or e) point of view.  Included here below are some guidelines for each of these approaches and examples.

1.     Essay about character:  character is revealed by speech, action (especially change in action), dress, setting, and by what other characters say about the individual.  Even an absent character can be a fully developed individual: consider the character of Minnie Wright in Trifles, for example.  How is she revealed in the play?  In particular, how are changes in her nature shown?  If you answer this question you have a thesis.

2.     Essay about theme:  what main idea seems particularly important in the work?  What values are embodied in the idea?  Is the idea associated with a major character?  For example, what ideas about marriage or relationships are explored through Mrs. Mallard in  “The Story of an Hour”?

3.     Essay about symbolism: what symbols can be located in the work?  How is a particular symbol related to a character or theme?  Consider, for example, the use of the egg, the shell, and the fragility associated with it in “The World’s Greatest Fisherman.”  Write a thesis statement about this symbol in the story.

4.     Essay about setting: does the author provide extensive visual detail throughout the story?  How is that detail related to character and/or theme?  Consider the use of setting at the beginning, middle and end of “Desire’s Baby.”  Write a thesis statement connecting setting to character or theme.

5.     Essay about point of view: point of view is most often first or third person, occasionally second person.  A second person narration can be addressed to an audience but is probably also directed toward the speaker herself.  Consider the narrator’s use of second person in Engel’s “Green.”  Why does she tell the story this way?  What is the effect on the reader, on the story itself, its theme?  Does it make the story more ironic, more distant, or more intimate? If the point of view is third person, is the story still filtered through a particular character (central intelligence)? Make a claim about point of view and support it.

Please see my handout on guidelines for strong writing.  All essays for English 247 should be 600 to 800 words (minimum).  You should include a heading in upper left corner (name, course, essay #, date, my name.)  The essays should be typed, double-spaced, using 12 point font, Times New Roman.  You should include a Works Cited entry with page numbers for parenthetical documentation using original page numbers; if the story is from an online source just the author’s name after quotation will suffice.  We will go over these details in class.

works cited entries for Woman Writer essay #1

 

Works Cited for English 247, The Woman Writer, Spring 2013 (for April 18 essay)

Chopin, Kate. “Desiree’s Baby.” ND. Eastoftheweb UBooks. n.d. [Web]. 5 March 2013

Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Virginia Commonwealth University Webtext. n.d. [Web]. 5 March 2013

Erdrich, Louise. “The World’s Greatest Fisherman.” Love Medicine. New York: Harper Perennial Books, 1993.

Engel, Patricia, Vida. New York: Black Cat, 2010.

Glaspell, Susan. Trifles. University of Virginia Electronic Text Center. n.d. [Web]. 5 March 2013

Munro, Alice. “Boys and Girls.” Tripod. n.d. [Web]. 5 March 2013.

Olson, Tillie. “I Stand Here Ironing.” Tell me A Riddle.  New York: Rutgers University Press, 1956.

Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” In Love and Trouble. New York: Harcourt, 1973.

Note: If page numbers from original appear in coursepak version, use page numbers for parenthetical citations.

Example:

            In Patricia Engel’s “Green,” the narrator introduces the girl who hated her in high school, and the theme of jealousy, through the title but also the opening lines of the story: “Your mom just called to tell you that Maureen, the girl who tortured you from kindergarten to high school, who single-handedly made it so that you were never welcome in Girl scouts, soccer, or yearbook, is dead” (47).  Engel’s vivid use of physical description reminds the reader of the intensity of high school meanness (“your skin was the color of diarrhea”[47]), but her use of the second person creates distance and ironic humor to the detail.

 You must use parenthetical documentation for each quotation you use and put a works cited entry at the end of your essay.

Alice Walker: "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens. . ."

Excerpt from “In Searcy of Our Mother’s Gardens: the Creativity of Black Women in the South,” by Alice Walker, MS Magazine, 1974.

What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.

Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer's lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasturelands? Or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)-eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children-when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of Rebellion, in stone or clay?

How was the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years Black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a Black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist. Consider, if you can bear to imagine it, what might have been the result if singing, too, had been forbidden by law. Listen to the voices of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Aretha Franklin, among others, and imagine those voices muzzled for life. Then you may begin to comprehend the lives of our "crazy," "Sainted" mothers and grandmothers. The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short Story Writers, who died with their real gifts stifled within them.

And if this were the end of the story, we would have cause to cry out in my paraphrase of Okot p'Bitek's great poem:

O, my clanswomen

Let us all cry together!

Come,

Let us mourn the death of our mother,

The death of a Queen

The ash that was produced

By a great fire,

O this homestead is utterly dead

Close the gates

With lacari thorns,

For our mother

The creator of the

Stool is lost!

And all the young women

Have perished in the wilderness!

But this is not the end of the story, for all the young women-our mothers and grandmothers, ourselves-have not perished in the wilderness. And if we ask ourselves why, and search for and find the answer, we will know beyond all efforts to erase it from our minds, just exactly who, and of what, we Black American women are.

Choosing your Writer Instructions and Deadline

Hi Everyone--Hope you are enjoying the beginning of your Easter / Passover Break.

Here are instructions so that you are ready to work on your writer after the break.

1.  Read "Green" by Patricia Engel, "I Stand Here Ironing" by Tillie Olson and "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker.

2.  Choose any one of the writers we have read so far, including the three above whose work we will discuss during the week after the break.

3.  Find additional information about the writer you have chosen: interviews, biography, website.

4.  Write a blog in which you tell your classmates and me why you have chosen this writer, what interests you most about her and her theme(s).  Include in your blog at least one source and a brief description of what you learned about the writer through your research.

That's all!

Please post by Tuesday April 2 so I have time to review your posts and so you can see what others have found.

You may write about character, setting, point of view, symbolism, or theme.  We will discuss possibilities on April 4.  Basically I will ask you to make a claim (thesis) and support it with evidence from the text.  Review, if you wish, "Anatomy of an Essay" on page 10 of your coursepak.

Lyrics for Danny Boy--Munro story--and blog for Wednesday

Questions Below--please choose one and do blog by Wednesday evening.

LINK TO SONG:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQtc9msoLjg 

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer's in the meadow
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow
'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

And if you come, when all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.

And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above me
And all my dreams will warm and sweeter be
If you'll not fail to tell me that you love me
I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.

I'll simply sleep in peace until you come to me. 

Blog Questions--choose one:

1.  Why does the narrator admire the father? what does he represent?  Think about the difference between spaces--inside and outside.

2.  How does the narrator attempt to inscribe herself in the male domain?  

What does she think about; what does she do?

3.  How are the foxes and the horse Flora symbolic of something important for the narrator?

3.  Analyze the mother's role in the story and the narrator's attitude toward the mother.  

4.  Why does the narrator let Flora escape?  How does the narrator change at the end of the story?  

Is this a positive or negative ending?

5.  What part of the song "Danny Boy" above is relevant to the story?--as it is a song the narrator sings as she 

is falling asleep.

missing page for "Boys and Girls"

I had told Laird, as soon as he was old enough to understand such things, that bats and skeletons lived over there; whenever a man escaped from the county jail, twenty miles away, I imagined that he had somehow let himself in the window and was hiding behind the linoleum. But we had rules to keep us safe. When the light was on, we were safe as long as we did not step off the square of worn carpet which defined our bedroom-space; when the light was off no place was safe but the beds themselves. I had to turn out the light kneeling on the end of my bed, and stretching as far as I could to reach the cord.
     In the dark we lay on our beds, our narrow life rafts, and fixed our eyes on the faint light coming up the stairwell, and sang songs. Laird sang "Jingle Bells", which he would sing any time, whether it was Christmas or not, and I sang "Danny Boy". I loved the sound of my own voice, frail and supplicating, rising in the dark. We could make out the tall frosted shapes of the windows now, gloomy and white. When I came to the part, y the cold sheets but by pleasurable emotions almost silenced me. You'll kneel and say an Ave there above me —What was an Ave? Every day I forgot to find out.
Laird went straight from singing to sleep, I could hear his long, satisfied, bubbly breaths. Now for the time that remained to me, the most perfectly private and perhaps the best time of the whole day, I arranged myself tightly under the covers and went on with one of the stories I was telling myself from night to night. These stories were about myself, when I had grown a little older; they took place in a world that was recognizably mine, yet one that presented opportunities for courage, boldness, and self-sacrifice, as mine never did. I rescued people from a bombed building (it discouraged me that the real war had gone on so far away from Jubilee). I shot two rabid wolves who were menacing the schoolyard (the teachers cowered terrified at my back).  Rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the townspeople’s gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-out piece of heroism (nobody ever rode a horse there, except King Billy in the Orangemen’s Day  parade). There was always riding and shooting in these stories, though I had only been on a horse twice — the first because we did not own a saddle — and the second time I had slid right around and dropped under the horse's feet; it had stepped placidly over me. I really was learning to shoot, but could not hit anything yet, not even tin cans on fence posts.
    Alive, the foxes inhabited a world my father made for them. It was surrounded by a high guard fence, like a medieval town, with a gate that was padlocked at night. Along the streets of this town were ranged large, sturdy pens. Each of them had a real door that a man could go through, a wooden ramp along the wire, for the foxes to run up and down on, and a kennel — sometimes like a clothes chest with airholes — where they slept where they slept and stayed in winter and had their young. There were feeding and watering dishes attached to the wire in such a way that they could be emptied and cleaned from the outside. The dishes were made of old tin cans, and the ramps and kennels of odds and ends of old lumber. Everything was tidy and ingenious; my father was tirelessly inventive and his favorite book in the world was Robinson Crusoe. He had fitted a tin drum on a wheelbarrow, for bringing water down to the pens. This was my job in the summer, when the foxes had to have water twice a day. Between nine and ten o'clock in the morning, and again after supper. I filled the drum at the pump and trundled it down through the barnyard to the pens, where I parked it, and filled my watering can and went along the streets. Laird came too, with his little cream and green gardening can, filled too full and knocking against his legs and slopping water on his canvas shoes. I had the real watering can, my father's, though I could only carry it three-quarters full.

Blog #1: Women's Roles in Marriage

Please use this space to formulate your thoughts about women's roles in marriage, and their ways of contesting their condition, or not, based on any of our first three readings: Trifles,  "The Story of an Hour," and "Desiree's Baby."  This blog will be due Wednesday evening (midnight) for Thursday's class

What assumptions are made about women in each text?

How are women's voices ignored, misunderstood, 
erased?

How is setting symbolic in each story?  In what spaces do women find freedom, find themselves?

How do women acquire a voice of their own?  That is, what strategies do they implement to articulate their feelings?

Why do women sometimes choose not to speak?

How does each story explore, expose, the power of patriarchy? (the law of the father) 

You may write about one text or compare two, or all three.  Be sure to quote from each text at least once.

The blog should be about 300 words.  See page 9 of coursepak for blog scoring.

A Few Comments on Trifles

Thank You those of you who have joined the Woman Writer Blog.  One glitch for our first play, Trifles.  The printer reversed some pages so if you are reading the play, look at the page numbers at the bottom (mine!) and read in correct order.

Here are some questions for tomorrow's discussion:

1.  How does Glaspell set up the contrast between what women pay attention to and what men focus on?  Give examples.  Which characters are "round" and which are "flat"?


2.  List as many symbols as you can find in the play and consider how symbols are related to themes.  For example, there is the literal quilt that the women find; quilting can also be seen as a metaphor for what the women visitors are doing. . .(note--there is a short story version called "A Jury of Her Peers").

3.  The play raises important legal and ethical questions: how do the women and the men see their ethical roles and responsibilities differently?  How do the women conduct their own trial?

4.  How do the women change in the course of the play and what changes them?  How do they gradually identify with Minnie Wright?

5.  How are two absent characters (one dead, one in jail) present in the play--what details tell us about their characters? 

6.  Why does Glaspell set the play in a domestic space instead of, for example, a court of law?  What are advantages?

7.  Why do the women hide the evidence?  In the end, who is in control of the story and how is this ironic--and important for Glaspell's theme?  Why do women, in general, hide evidence?