Response to Course Material #3

            I cannot believe this is already our third response to course material blog post. This year has already been flying by so quickly and we have done quite a few different things in AP Lit.

            We finally finished our Death of a Salesman fishbowl discussions and wrote our summary and analysis blog post on it. I had never done a fishbowl discussion before, but I think for the most part it is a pretty good idea. I know that I am not the most talkative person in my class, so being part of a fishbowl discussion allowed me to contribute more of my thoughts. The only thing that I don’t think is so great about these types of discussions is that it can sometimes be hard to pay attention when you’re not in the center, especially when you’ve already been part of the discussion during that class period. It would have been nice to do about half the discussions as a group discussions and the other half as fishbowl discussions.

            We also did another practice in-class essay on the “Century Quilt.” I have written in-class essays before, in previous lit classes and in other AP classes, like APUSH, but I thought this essay was kind of hard to write. I just think it’s hard to have to analyze a poem you’ve never read before, then formulate an essay right afterwards. I think writing essays for history classes (like APUSH) is easier than writing an essay like this for lit because in history everything is fact-based and you don’t really have to formulate a new idea about the work on your own. All you have to do is remember the facts you learned in class. Lit is a lot different because, although we’re given all the tools for writing and analyzing (like DIDLS), when you write a timed essay like this one you have to think up something new off the top of your head (although I guess it’s not really off the top of your head since the information is in the poem that is given to you). Even though writing the essay on the “Century Quilt” was difficult, I think with more practice I will improve, and I still have quite a bit of time before AP exams come around.

            Our class has also done a couple mood and atmosphere exercises.  I think the idea is great, to describe the picture using different techniques without using the mood word that we chose at the beginning. I think this is a great way to prepare for the AP exam. The only thing that kind of annoyed me about the activity was how long our class took to finish the last one (nearly the whole hour).

            Finally, we started and finished reading Hamlet in class. I hadn’t realized Hamlet is such a long play (or at least it felt long to me), but I really enjoyed it. The plot is a bit complicated and the vocabulary and syntax a bit difficult, but I liked reading it in class because every so often Ms. Holmes would explain to us the significance of the plot, or the history behind it, etc.

            Overall, I feel like I have continued to learn a lot in this class, especially through the discussions, and cannot wait for more!

Open Prompt #3

2006. Many writers use a country setting to establish values within a work of literature. For example, the country may be a place of virtue and peace or one of primitivism and ignorance. Choose a novel or play in which such a setting plays a significant role. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the country setting functions in the work as a whole.

Essay 3A: This is a great essay and is super easy to follow. It is well written and evident that the author put some time in to planning the essay before hand, because the organization is great as well. The author makes a wonderful choice using Jane Austin’s Persuasion to write this essay. The question asks how setting influences the work. The author writes about how the protagonist, Anne, sometimes stays in the country and sometimes goes to the city. Whenever she is in the country, she seems at piece, intelligent, and wise, but whenever she is in the city she acts rashly without thinking through her actions. Even though the student did not spend time memorizing quotes for this essay, they provide plenty of examples from the text to support the points made in the essay. The only thing that might have prevented the essay from receiving a 9 could be the student’s lack of use of literary terminology. Although the student does seem to have a clear understanding of the literature discussed, they did not use DIDLS to outline the essay. Nonetheless, the student still received an 8, which I think is a pretty good score.

Essay 3B: This essay is ok. It gets the point across, that in the play, The Importance of Being Earnest, the use of the city and country settings create confusion. The essay is not very well developed. The student writes about confusion at the beginning of the essay, but does not really expand upon the thought in the body paragraphs. Instead of writing in greater depth about the thesis, the student gives a lot of plot summary. The student also does not write about the theme of the play. They do write about how the contrast of city and country setting create confusion and give examples, but they do not write about why it matters and what it means for the work. The essay received a 6, though I might have given it a 5 due to its lack of depth.

Essay 3C: Honestly, this essay is kind of funny. The student writes about William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The story takes place in the south, and the student writes about how, because of the setting, all the characters are backwards and stupid. The student actually uses the word “stupid” in the essay and even writes, “because of the setting, the reader thinks…that it is only because she grew up in the twisted south that she is so dumb.” The student outlines the incompetence of several characters in the work and concludes that their incompetence and stupidity are due to the setting. The student ends the essay writing: “in the end, all the ridiculous dilemmas, poor decisions, and numerous oddities are answered in the mind of the reader by, ‘Well, it is the South…’” The writer does not really give an in-depth analysis of the work and fails to portray how the setting affects the overall meaning of the work.

  

Death of a Salesman

Author and setting: Written by Arthur Miller in 1949; takes place in the late 1940s, although sometimes earlier due to Willy’s flashbacks. Most of the play takes place in New York in the Loman’s house.

Characters:

·      Willy Loman: Willy is the main character. He has been a salesman for most of his life and has always romanticized the life of a salesman. He seems to believe that the only way to be successful is to be well liked and is not particularly fond of the idea of hard work to achieve success.

·      Linda: Willy’s wife and supporter. She protects Willy’s pride and almost always does what she is told, even if Willy is being completely rude to her.

·      Biff: Willy’s older son. He has lost faith in Willy and seems to be lost in general. He does not really know what he wants to do with his life, but he still loves his mom and wants to please her which means pleasing his dad as well.

·      Happy: Willy’s younger son. Happy tries to make others happy, but does not seem to be truly happy himself. He over-exaggerates things and is often ignored or not taken seriously.

·      Uncle Ben: Willy’s brother. He symbolizes everything Willy is not and Willy idolizes him to an extreme. Ben is already dead, so in Willy’s mind he is forever big and powerful.

·      Charley: the Lomans’ neighbor. He leads a successful life and is always lending money to Willy. He offers Willy a job but Willy is too prideful to accept and promises that he will pay back every penny that he has borrowed from Charley.

·      Bernard: Charley’s son. Bernard serves as a foil to Biff. Growing up, Bernard seemed to really like Biff, wanting to hold his equipment to his sports games. Bernard also nagged Biff a lot to do his work. In the end, Bernard worked harder than Biff ever did and it is Bernard who leads a successful life as an adult (he ends up being a lawyer).

·      The Woman: is a secretary and has an affair with Willy. Willy gives her stockings and in exchange she sends him customers.

·      Howard Wagner: Willy’s boss who eventually fires him.

Plot: The play begins as Willy returns from a sales trip. He enters the kitchen and talks to Linda about how Biff hasn’t made anything of his life or of himself. Biff and Happy are also in the house, and they discuss their past and talk about how worried they are of their father.

Later, Willy begins talking to himself and reminisces on the past. He thinks about how successful Biff used to be, as a high school quarter back, and how happy their family was in general. Soon Charley comes to the house and plays cards with Willy. Willy still is in the past and thinks about Ben too. Ben had everything Willy wishes for: a wonderful job and great success and wealth. Willy simply cannot get Ben out of his mind. Charley leaves and Willy walks outside.

While Willy is outside, the rest of his family talks about him. Linda tells Biff that he is not being fair to his father and that he should try to show some compassion. Biff calls Willy a fake, because he knows that Willy had an affair, but Biff does not tell this to Linda. When Linda reveals that Willy has been trying to commit suicide, the situation seems a bit different to both Happy and Biff and Happy suggests that he and Biff going into the sporting business as the Loman Brothers.

In the next act Willy seems happy but quickly becomes upset about their financial situation and not being able to pay off all their appliances. He becomes happy again though when Linda tells him all the great things that are going on with their sons.

Willy goes to work to talk to Howards about working in New York and not traveling so much. Howard is distracted by his new tape recorder and becomes tired and annoyed with Willy and fires him. Howard claims that he has wanted to fire Willy for a while now. Meanwhile, Biff asks Bill Oliver for assistance and is similarly rejected. Biff leaves and steals Oliver’s fountain pen.

At the end of the days, Happy and Biff take Willy out to dinner but completely ignore him the whole night and spend it instead with two girls. The day has gone horribly for Willy and in another one of his flashbacks about Ben, Ben influences Willy to kill himself so that he can give money to his family.

In the end, Biff decides to leave and Willy decides to kill himself. 

Quotes:

“I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. ‘Cause what could be more satisfying that to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?”

Willy says this line and it pretty much sums up his take on life. He wants everyone to remember and love him, and he believes that being a salesman will allow him to achieve such a dream.

“The jungle is dark but full of diamond, Willy.”

Ben says this to Willy towards the end of the play as Willy gets closer and closer towards his decision of suicide. Ben is trying to convince Willy that being well-liked does not matter so much; what really matters is wealth. Sometimes the road to wealth, or diamonds, is dark like a jungle, but it is worth it in the end (according to Ben). 

Theme:

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman portrays that valuing words over actions to achieve conventional success and maintain personal dignity will lead to eventual self-destruction.

            Willy never really seemed to believe in hard work. His philosophy was that, as long as he remained well-liked, he would never have to truly work for anything. If a person is liked, other people will do things for them; everything will come naturally. Of course, this did not actually work out for Willy because this logic is flawed. If anyone ever wants to achieve anything, they have to put effort in to doing so.

Willy also believes that if he said that simply says something is great, it might become so. For instance, Willy continuously lies to his wife about how great work is going and to keep up his charade, he borrows money from Charley and pretends that it is his paycheck. Willy also talked Biff up, always telling Biff how great he is and how he would be a star one day. It is hard to tell whether or not Willy actually believes everything that he says, but either way Willy thinks that simply saying something is more important that actually doing something. He seems to think that success can come simply from words.

In the end, Willy never realizes that he should have put more value in his actions. He concludes that he has failed and that the only way out of his horrible mess is to kill himself so that his family can be left with some money.

Close Reading #3

This article can be found at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/11/09/thomas_edison_his_light_bulb_invention_was_a_publicity_stunt.html

Alison Griswold writes Thomas Edison and the Myth of the Lone Inventor. As the title suggests, she disputes the perception that many people have of inventors, primarily Edison, laboring away to single-handedly create something fantastic. To do this, she uses syntax, diction, and detail.

First, Griswold uses syntax to portray the endless evidence there is that Edison did not invent the light bulb on his own (or at all, for that matter). Throughout her short article, Griswold consistently repeats the word “myth” to emphasize that the story of Edison is just that. She also uses many lists and cuts off her sentences, as if she could go on and on but does not have the time to do so. For instance, she says, “even if the actual details are fuzzy – he tested 1,000, 6,000, 10,000, or some other number of filaments…” She also choppily adds at the end, “Edison, in other words, is not so much the man behind the myth as his story is the myth behind the man.” She uses syntax to illustrate that she is only putting forward a fraction of the evidence that there is proving that Edison did not invent the light bulb himself. 

Griswold also uses diction to express her strong disapproval of the perception people have of “lone inventors.” She starts off her article saying that Edison’s story is America’s “favorite,” but it resulted of a “tremendous” publicity scam. She says that “in short” it was Edison’s partners, the muckers, who “created” him. Griswold uses diction to dismiss all the credit that it typically given to Edison and hopes to change people’s view of him.

Finally, Griswold employs specific detail in her article to validate her points. She explains how oftentimes people think of how hard Edison worked to create the perfect light bulb when actually the laboratory he worked at “was famous for generating more than 400 patents in just six years.” She also quotes an author that writes about “‘the muckers at Menlo Park’” and how they “‘were such a fertile source of source of ideas that it seems odd that their presence is typically dropped from the story.’” She finally concludes that the muckers decided that it would be better to market only Edison rather than the entire group, so they “capitalized on that by mythologizing him.”

Griswold uses details, diction, and syntax to dissuade people from believing that Edison invented the light bulb “in a dusty workshop by himself.” He perfected the light bulb with the help of others, but certainly did not invent it by himself.