January 10th TEWWG Presentation

Jillian, Simi, Kaitlin Presentation

Chapters 2-4

PLAN:

• Summary and Important Quotations

• Real world aspects activity

Quotation:

1. Chapter 2, pg. 8 - "Janie saw her life like a great tree.."
1. Tree is her life
2. Dawn is beginning, discovers sexuality under tree, mention to blooming and bee paragraph
3. Doom is end, no love for Logan, doesn't want to be the woman Nanny says she is, really doesn't want to grow up

2. Chapter 2, pg. 20 - "Put me down easy, Janie, Ah'm a cracked plate." Nanny
1. Nanny says to Janie
2. Guilt Janie
3. Wants to protect her but slaps Janie, contradicting, emotions and physical
4. Wants what is best for Janie, Janie doesn't want to disappoint

3. Chapter 3, pg. 21 - "There are years that ask questions and years that answer"
1. Does love come with marriage?
2. Learns with Logan it doesn't
3. Becomes a woman through having her dreams crushed
4. No emotion when nanny dies - resentful so doesn't grieve?
5.  Nanny should tell Janie her wishes, not just God

4. Chapter 4, pg. - 26 "Long before the year was up, Janie noticed that her husband had stopped talking in rhymes"
1. Begins chapter with no love, matured, out of "honeymoon phase"
2. Beginning of chapters have changed from fantasies to realities
3. "Dreams of women change"
4. Has Janie changed?
5. Loves changes from physical, "Dream love"  to protective
6. Relationship with Logan and Nanny is the same - very short
7. Joe Starks - new comes along,  cute vs. Logan - dirty, but never lied (connect to feet)

Article Activity:

1. Article 1 - NRA Gun control
1. Nanny - very opposed to adding more guns OR could support because of added protection of self and Janie
2. Janie - Up in the air?, submissive personality, guns too much for her, will develop more confidence leading to greater opinion

2. Article 2 - BBC harsh treatment of women in India
1. Nanny - can relate to article because of her and her daughter's rape and life, supports marriage to protect Janie
2. Janie - wants her freedom and independence, subconsciously blocks out bad things ie. Possibility of death and rape, "ignorance is bliss", you could still be assaulted although, lowest age of assault is reproductive age - thinks she can delay protection for awhile

3. Article 3 - CNN Obama's cabinet all men
1. Nanny -accepts gender inequality, wouldn't be bothered by this
2. Janie - wouldn't be opinionated, not a feminist, wants love more than power

7 January 2012 notes - TEWWG chapter 1

Chapter 1:

Men:
- wait for wishes to come
- see dreams - some land, some are too late
- "watcher" = dreams are outside of them.
- men always want what they don't have
- similar dreams
- desire their dreams greatly
- freedom (+)
- broad horizon of possibilities (+)
- dreams are out of reach sometimes (-)
- They are not in control - time is (-)

Women:
- women know what they want, remember good desires
- selective in memories
- correlate dreams with reality, dreams based on reality
- boundaries of reality have already limited the horizon of their dreams.
- dream = truth
- power in their hands (+)
- more realistic in their goals (+)
- fear? (-)
- dreams limited because of their realities (-) - why dreams are limited is also debatable.
- forget things they don't want to remember = forget their fanciful dreams because they know they can never have them and the sorrow at that is too much.

"sick", "ailing", "sodden", "bloated", "sudden dead", "eyes flung wide open in judgement" - brings you back to reality

Porch-sitters:
- during the day they are restricted, less human - slaves "tongueless", "earless", "mules and other brutes"
- at night they come alive and become human - "powerful", "human", "lords", "They sat in judgement" - like God.

Hurston definitely dislikes gossip, calling it "burning statements", "killing tools", "mass cruelty".
         - people judge Janie on appearance (hair, body) - men like her, but everybody thinks she doesn't belong.
         - think she is being a bit ungrateful when she comes back from her fancy life wearing overalls. - "serves her right, thinking she was better than us" - what the porch-sitters would say.

Class Notes 1/4/2013

Class Notes 1/4/2013

For homework - Work on revising your sonnet, read the historical packet, and keep reading Their Eyes Were Watching God

Bio about Zora Hurston Notes

Section 1

- Zora used to have a curiosity with horizons, and nature in general, and she ties that into her novel

- Zora grew up in Eatonville (all black town, self governed)

- Her father was biracial

Section 2

- Mom died, her father remarried, and she moved to Jacksonville

-Then she was sent to school

-She is now surrounded by more of a racist outlook in Jacksonville, unlike Eatonville

-Her father couldn't pay for school, so she was kicked out

-She started picking up jobs, but wasn't very good at any of them because she just wanted to read and write

-She went to  Morgan State and Howard University, and then met her husband 

-They got divorced, because they wanted to stick with their careers

Section 3

- She submitted articles to a literary magazine, and they were published and well liked by the editor

-Started getting more recognition

-Moves to NY, in the start of the Harlem Renaissance 

-She meets a guy named Boas, an anthropologist, who gives Zora an apprenticeship, and she eventually travels back to the south

Section 4

- 1927, she received a grant to travel back to the south and tried to research folk tales, but did not have much success

- She travels back to NY, and meets Mrs. Mason, and gets a one year contract to research in the south

- Zora found information for Mason, which is where she found some information for her book

Section 5

- In Louisiana and Florida, she would lie about her identity so that people would trust her and tell her their stories

-She learned about voodoo, and then became a firm believer in it

- She became a threat to women, because men were kind of attracted to her personality

- She became an apprentice to many voodoo doctors, and tried to heal a man she fell in love with voodoo, but he ended up dying

Section 6

- This section was about the letters she sent to Mason

-Zora has self-doubt, which was prominent in her letters

- Then Zora returns to Eatonville

Section 7

- Zora and Langston Hughes tried to write a play called Mule Bone

- She later tried to self-destruct the project, and it was never published (probably because she like Langston, but he was paying more attention to another woman, so Zora probably became jealous)

Notes -

dialect : writing the way we talk

vernacular : a particular region's dialect

January 3rd Their Eyes Were Watching God

1.Took Fake Test
Wishy- Washy about the test

Woman going through life searching for identity through failed and successful relationships with men and God.

She tells her friend Phoeby about her life story- frame.

20s/30s Harlem Rennissance:

• South/racial 
• Racial uplift 
• Was rejected/ not received well
• Wrote for 4-7 weeks in Haiti

God/Nature

• Mrs. Turner- white features 
• Hurricane- bad side of God
• Harmony- pear tree/ awaking of her sexuality/ kissing Johnney 

Choice of Diction: Sophisticated narrorator/ vernacular

Protective/ Possessive love: Nanny
Materialistic: Trophy wife to Jody
Real Love? With Tea Cake?: Money? Cheating?

What can we gain from reading the actual book?

• Skills from reading that you need in life later on
• How it was written 
• People that where making these analysis are opinionated and you do not know exactly what they know and what they are saying is true. 
• Reading is not about the factual things it is about the deeper analysis.
• Feelings 
• How it is written

A Cop Out Ending?

A Cop out Ending

It could be argued both ways that William Shakespeare did and did not use a cop out ending  in his play A Merchant of Venice. Many may thing that Shakespeare did go the way of a cop out ending because of his conclusion of the bond. Shakespeare in act 4.1 stripped Shylock of his bond, pride, and religion leaving him with nothing and letting Antonio go free. In the final act he also has Antonio’s merchant ships return restoring him of his wealth. This could be seen as a cop out because instead of taking another stand on religious prejudice and having Shylock, the Jew, get his bond fairly he let the audience have what they wanted, which was the Christians emerging on top. On the other hand Shakespeare ending  could be very true to his character. He always restored the natural order of things at the end of his plays, and the natural order of Christians dominating Jews was restored at the end of The Merchant of Venice. He also wraps up all the different story lines he has going in the book, with Portia forgiving Bassanio for giving away the ring, Antonio’s ships returning, and Lorenzo and Jessica becoming Shylocks heir.

I personally like the ending for all plots are brought fully to close, even though I truly sympathize for Shylock and wish he has been able to keep his religion and sense of self. 

MOV Cop Out Ending

The ending to Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice could percieved as either a satisfactory conclusion or a "cop out". On one hand, it should be taken into consideration that at the time it would not have been politically "acceptable", even in literature, for a Jew like Shylock to be victorious in his bond being fullfilled, especially if it meant a wealthy and respected Christian merchant would lose his life.
While this social standard does justify Shakespeare's decision to spare Antonio and leave Shylock with next to nothing to his name, I feel that Shakespeare ultimately deprived the audience of a satisfying ending. It is a commonly attributed technique of Shakespeare's to restore the natural order of things within his novels, and I feel that because Shylock was so mistreated and abused by these wealthy and prejudice Christians and yet was still denied his bond, the natural order in a sense was never restored.
Shakespeare took a risk by merely including a Jew in his novel, so why not carry out his effort to change society and the world? Why not allow the minority and the oppressed to rise up and overcome their oppressor for once? It is because of this unfullfilled attempt to change society that I feel the ending to Shakespeare's A Merchant of Venice was a "cop out".

Cop-out Ending to The Merchant of Venice

I felt as though the ending to The Merchant of Venice was not completely a cop-out.  I thought that it answered questions about Portia and Nerissa and how they dealt with the fact that their husbands gave away their rings.  I thought that this was necessary to show Portia and Nerissa’s true emotions because there were many unanswered questions after the court scene such as if they would forgive their husbands or not.  I am glad that Shakespeare included act five in the play because the answer of whether or not the wives would forgive their husbands was different from my idea of what would happen.

Although it showed how all the characters reacted after the court scene, it could be considered a cop-out ending.  Shakespeare did not include Shylock at all in the last act which caused many unanswered questions to how he reacted after the court scene and how he dealt with all his loss.  Throughout the play, there are examples where Shakespeare could be persuading the audience to give up their prejudice against Jews, but in the last act no one shows any mercy or compassion to Shylock.  By not appearing in the last act, Shylock is depicted as less than a Christian which could give a counterexample to this fact.  I personally thought that the ending to The Merchant of Venice was not entirely a cop-out, but it could have included Shylock’s character to provide answers to questions about his reaction and for Shakespeare to further his point on whether he is against prejudice to Jews or not.