Slaughterhouse Five Themes

Themes of the novel along with examples:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuUUQ2dFFRX05pakpPNjFwMkFpZFpWZkVWS1Vz

Rubrics for Papers 1 & 2

Paper 1

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7Yf3lF8m8xuWWdpS2txMDktN0U/edit?usp=docslist_api&filetype=msword

Paper 2

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xubzBvWTg4VkdVZ2M

Secondary Sources for Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5

Here are a couple of essays that may help you to give you some perspective on the novel.


Mixing Fantasy with Fact: Kurt Vonnegut's use of structure in Slaughterhouse 5, by Jennifer Moody

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuS00wbndhVkJRbEE


So it goes:  Discovering Hope Amidst the Chaos of Postmodern Work Slaughterhouse 5, by Kelsey Keane

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuS00wbndhVkJRbEE


Prevelant Themes in Slaugherhouse 5

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuMXRUTUtaUUY3RlE

Kurt Vonnegut Presentation

PDF description of Kurt Vonnegut's life, writing style and beliefs.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuTEZNZ2g0MjRJVDQ

Texts for Part 3

Here are some links to the books that we decided to read for part 3.  The Perfume and Slaughterhouse 5 are in epub (ibooks) and A Brave New World is in txt format.

The Perfume
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Yf3lF8m8xuS2dubUlEd0xZMk0/view?usp=sharing

Slaughterhouse 5
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Yf3lF8m8xuTjVSMEludWhJOTg/view?usp=sharing

A Brave New World
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Yf3lF8m8xuM2tVbHJOb2NrRDg/view?usp=sharing

Lolita

Below is a link to an epub version of the book.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Yf3lF8m8xuQjk1TUdlT2dNVTQ/view?usp=sharing

Material for Paper 2

Some tips for paper 2 PPT:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuMmRhdWRvNzItWWc

Sample Paper 2:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuSkRkUVpsSzhlZHM

Sample outline (comparison):

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuR2pjQnBDYy1ndkE

Sample outline (criteria by criteria):

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuWGNlUmhQTnVEUTg

Sample outline (text by text):

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuQjVzTnFVdXpmOTg

PIE essay:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7Yf3lF8m8xuRmx1SmJORmZhaG8

Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea

This poem written by Sylvia Plath describes an image of a two lover’s summer day in the beach. It has a melancholic tone and it is reflected in the word used like cold and final, the sweet vacation that dwindles, thoughts, disappear, gone, that is all. The poem tries to capsule a moment that slowly fades away leaving memories behind. The poem is written in first person and the narrator as is she was one of the loves staring at the sea. Imageries are used for example when it says “a maze of mermaid hair”, which is also a metaphor, “white whales are gone with the white ocean”, or “a lone beachcomber squats among the wrack of kaleidoscope shells”.

She also tries to say that moments are significant things we have that are hard to remember and may seem insignificant but that’s how it works. It makes the reader think that what ever happens or whatever we think is not going to stop the flow of life. That happens when it says: “Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,

A grain of sand is all we have. Water will run by; the actual sun. Will scrupulously rise and set; No little man lives in the exacting moon, And that is that, is that, is that.”

Other metaphors like “the attic of the skull” are used to make reference to simple things like the mind, making it sound mysterious and beautiful. Also, used to follow the meter of the poem and make it rhyme with fall in the second quatrain. The poem is closed with a repetition of “is that” to round the theme and close the idea of insignificance.

- Adelaida Caicedo. 

Death & Co. (Analysis of a Sylvia Plath’s poem)

The poem’s structure is based on quintets. The poem is a free verse due to the lack of end rhymes. There is a clear use of anaphora in the poem such as:

“He tells me how badly I photograph.

He tells me how sweet”

“The frost makes a flower,

The dew makes a star,

The dead bell,

The dead bell.”

The anaphora is intended to give rhythm at the end of the poem. Also in the first example of anaphora is pretending to dichotomize the idea of death giving it “a good cop, bad cop” kind of sense. The first “He” refers to a different man than the second does.

The theme of the poem is clearly death. The tone is rather aggressive and the sentences are short, giving it a paused rhythm. From what I could grasp from the poem it is trying to change the idea of death as lonesome idea, giving it company that has a quite different personality than death itself. The person describing it is dying and at the end death and its company depart to rip the soul of someone else. This part is described in the last stanza with the anaphora. 

The fatherless son

Fede p

The fatherless son

You will be aware of an absence, presently,

Growing beside you, like a tree,

A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree ---

Balding, gelded by lightning--an illusion,

And a sky like a pig's backside, an utter lack of attention.

But right now you are dumb.

And I love your stupidity,

The blind mirror of it. I look in

And find no face but my own, and you think that's funny.

It is good for me

To have you grab my nose, a ladder rung.

One day you may touch what's wrong ---

The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush.

Till then your smiles are found money.

Analysis

There are 14 stanzas.

Talking about the absence of a father an absence that will grow huge. Comparing the poem to Syliva personal life.

Speaking to his son. 

We know this because she is talking about a born baby, dumb (innocent).

She can see her self in the eyes of the kid which she compares it with a mirror.  

November Graveyard (43)  - Sylvia Plath

Poem Analysis 

Jorge García

November Graveyard be Sylvia Plath is a poem that consists of three stanzas. Representing a strong emotion and Plath's perspective towards what a graveyard means and symbolizes.

The first of the sestet stanzas has a syllable structure 8-11-9-13-11-8, making a meter less evident. This stanza starts off with an evident rhythm, the separation by a semi colon in the first verse, and then the alliteration  in the second verse with the comas, all contribute to marking this rhythm, and while there seems to be no separation in the first part of the first verse, the consonance of the first letters "The Scene Stands Stubborn..." force the reader to separate those stressed syllables, creating rythm. The next two verses start to break this rhythm, the 3rd has only one pause, and the fourth and fifth have none. These verses have the most speed of the stanza, and then breaks down to a slower rhythm on the last one. This rhythm is creating an emphasis on each one of the verses, but this emphasis is greater in the 4th and 5th verses.

Years by Sylvia Plath

First she starts making allusion to Years themselves in the first paragraph but she does not say the word years not a single time through the whole poem.
She makes the allusion to years through animals. Then she also says how they are not like colors greeness or darkness but pure, meaning that they just are. At the end of the first paragraph she ends with saying how years freeze and are. How years still are even when freezing, years don´t freeze.
Then she states her opinion on the second paragraph, making reference to the stars and the universe, black, it bores her, as time and years themselves, eternal.
third paragraph she says how she loves action, "piston in motion" and the horse, making reference to life itself, and things that die, or crash.
She says how at the en the horses are and the pistons hiss, meaning they will still hiss even when the years pass

Child by: Sylvia Plath José Daniel Gómez C 18/02/16

Although a short poem, “Child” takes a look at at Plath’s work as an example of her unequivocal love for her children, and an expression of her stress over being unable to provide for them as she would like to.

 The first three stanzas outline how Plath treasures her child and views him as a perfect creature, uncorrupted by society and civilization. She hopes to expand her child’s horizons by revealing to him the mysteries and magic of the world, a veritable “zoo of the new.” She imagines her young son learning the names of little white flowers, and hopes that what he sees through his “clear eye” is always “grand and classical.” Together, the first three stanzas are easy to interpret expressions of her love.

In the fourth stanza, however, the tone abruptly shifts. She suddenly suggests that the world also carries with it "this troublous / Wringing of hands, this dark / Ceiling without a star." The first three stanzas detail the world as she imagines it for her child. The fourth stanza presents reality as Plath knows it - an upsetting, anxious, and terrible existence. It is almost as though, in imagining a lovely life for him, she suddenly recalled that life is not limitless, but rather defined by limits (a "ceiling") and pain. Further, there she realizes that with her own stress maybe she will pass it to her own son.

This poem has a combination of a desolate tone with a joyful tone, this is very strange in a poem, however this means that Plath uses antithesis as her main technique. This helps her to change the mood of the reader rapidly.

Ceremony

The word he chose to express "fragile" was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku'oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.

Rationale - Pedro

               On this Written Task, I will make an analysis on Anthony Burgess's way of portraying a specific part of society through language. Anthony Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange" tells the story of Alex, a violent teen who's only objective per se is having fun through violence and crime. Burgess does not only give us Alex's point of view but also his friend's and even grown up society surrounding the environment of the british society portrayed by the author. Never the less, being Alex's point of view the more extensively explained and detailed, we are ignoring what his "droogs" might be thinking of a specific situation on this great novel.

                Therefore, what this Creative writing is going to be based of, is on describing (or re-describing) some of the events occurred on the first part and on the ending of this novel, never the less from the point of view of one of Alex's "droogs": Pete. Being Pete the culminating part and main trigger of the final solution of the book, maybe creating a more profound and complex persona on Pete could help us to fully understand the ending of this novel. 

                  The main aspects that are going to be taken into account to portray this character's persona are language  (usage of nasdat and first person narrative), chronological relationship with the novel's events and also the real Pete's reactions described by Burgess himself. There are going to be speculations on what may have happened at some point of the novel before Alex's final encounter with Pete.

Rationale - EMILIO

I have decided to write an afterword to the book "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess.
I chose to do this because I think the book really deserves an explanation in some topics and symbolisms that Burgess uses throughout the book and can be easily overlooked and ignored by incautious readers.
The main topic I shall address in this afterword is Free Will. Burgess has strong beliefs about free will and questions its true meaning in almost every chapter, giving Alex (his main character) the power of choosing and acting on his behalf ,on a world extremely controlled by fear and propaganda.
Just as writers like Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, Burgess portrays a basic, existential question about free will: Is doing evil freely better than doing good on a leash? That is the main question I shall tackle in my afterword to the book, opening a debate on wether good and evil are relative or a constant, and the role they each have on free will.

I decided to write a journal because of the skills it requires when writing one. Especially when transmitting the desired message. Basing my work on the Part 1 of the course and focused on examining different forms of communication within media.

According to Psychiatry journals are a useful resource to maintaining mental health. I wanted the readers to feel identified with the protagonist and to fear his fears, to think that they would actually be able to encounter his struggles.

Based on Edgar Alan Poe´s work called “The Tell Tale”. This piece has a first person perspective and narrates how the character killed a man and he started to go mad, having second thoughts about it. How he is describing his battle and the language it uses to describe in detail, making me (the reader) experience his fight as well, this really caught my attention to base my work on.

My work follows a chronological order using the descriptive resources to make the reading more believable, and to make the readers feel as if they where inside the situation I created. I want the readers to struggle as the protagonist does but in their minds. This required the techniques of knowing the language used and giving structured ideas through the right narrative (first person). Without this, the readers would not be able to understand how the protagonist is suffering and dealing with conflicts, then it would just be a normal journal, not a creative one nor a remarkable one.

Rationale - Adelaida

This blog entry is directed to the world’s citizens with the purpose of informing them about peace and how it can be achieved. In order to approach people in the best way and encourage them to take actions that can develop our world, such an important topic is to be treated in the light of how relations can be strengthened. I decided to root my written task in the work by the creator of the Peace One Day movement, Jeremy Gilley, and one of his conferences in the TED Talks. The way language is managed in this forum helps in the development of the topic explaining the way a “peace day” was created. Persuasive language is used to incite and convince spectators that peace is important and worth fighting for because relations need to be improved. Ergo, this work is related to Part 2: use of persuasive language.

A “state of mutual harmony between people or groups” (Dictionary.com) is a condition that has to be achieved with a lot of work. In the contrary of what many people think, it is does not only include the absence of wars or armed conflicts, but it also involves essential values like the tolerance and solidarity in daily relationships. Moreover, peace can only be reached if everyone starts with small actions and taking certain attitudes that can benefit the entire world.

I came up with the idea of writing this work when I was watching TED Talks on YouTube and felt personally interested with peace. I watched Jeremy talking about his work and I felt it was going to be my written task’s focus. This blog entry has the objective of treating this topic and convincing the readers of the disposition that has to be taken if a change is wanted.

Number of words: 298

Sources of information:

Dictionary.com. "Peace." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2016. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/peace>.

Jeremy Gilley: One Day of Peace. Dir. TED Talks. Perf. Jeremy Gilley. YouTube. TED Talks, 10 Aug. 2011. Web. 25 Jan. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04SEzifEsGg&list=PLnvD3IDksTQnGD3DXIwh5V-TqGZIDckV2>.