Pantoum of Great Depression

Watching the different interpretations of the play was interesting especially to be able to see how people interpreted the meaning of the poem differently. Our group had violin music playing in the background and read the poem with a rhythm (or we tried to at least). The violin music was very morose and somber and captured the essence of the Great Depression very well. We tried to give a rhythm to it which really helped bring out the repetition that is ever-present in a Pantoum. If you just read a Pantoum you might not realize the repetitive nature of the poem. But with the rhythm we had (we read each repeated line together as opposed to alone) it accentuated the nature of the poem. Each first line is the previous quatrain's second line and each third line is the previous quatrain's fourth line.

It would be really hard to write a pantoum I think because there is so much structure involved. You have to constantly remember the right and wrong way to structure the poem and how to still make sense with the amount of repeated lines. I think this particular pantoum did a really good job of embodying what the author was trying to say. While it was still slightly abstract, the repetition of key lines helped embed in the audience's brain how painful a situation it was for whoever experienced the Great Depression. There was also some use of figurative language "And time went by, drawn by slow horses" but the author was also quite blunt. "We gathered on our porches; the moon rose; we were poor." He didn't skirt the issue, he faced the poverty full on which kind of catches the audience off guard. He doesn't try to sugar coat the situation at all, he wants people to understand the brutality and awfulness of living in the times. It's kind of paradoxical that he wrote about such a harsh issue in such a beautiful medium as poetry. Usually this topic would be reserved for newspaper articles or novels but the fact that he kind of showed the ugliness in a beautiful form is very unique.

Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene

Camille E. Paglia’s critique on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is in depth and explores many unarticulated aspects of the main characters in the play. The 19th century play focuses on materialism and social acceptance. Elegance, glamour, smoothness, and elongation are many of the words Paglia uses to describe the characters in the play. She focuses especially on the sense that the men in the play take on a particularly feminine role and the women are definitely more masculine. “…the male feminine in his careless, lounging passivity, the female masculine in her brilliant, aggressive wit…” (116) This main focus of Wilde’s play shows a hermaphroditic idea of sleekness and polish in male characters and emotional sterility and coldness in the female characters. All of the characters (Algernon, Jack, Cecily, Gwendolen, and Lady Bracknell) focus only on the societal caste and turn the “internal world into the external.” (119)There is no real emotion in the play and all of the characters’ motives focus solely on what is expected of them or what is right in the caste system of the Victorian era.
Paglia returns again and again to the idea that Gwendolen and Cecily are not particularly feminine and are “creatures of indeterminate sex who take up the mast of femininity” (120), which after thinking about I do agree with. They are both virtually void of emotion which is especially shown in the scene where they argue about who is to marry Earnest. Both are outwardly polite because they care only on the public’s perception of them and neither gets particularly distraught with the other. “Each rhetorical movement is answered by a symmetrical countermovement of balletic grandeur.” (134) Neither characters even have actual feelings for the alleged same man that they are quarrelling over but they would never want to upset the social caste system or draw negative attention to themselves by not marrying into the right kind of family.
Paglia points out that Gwendolen’s diary “enables her to keep herself in a state of externalization” (125) which I find particularly ironic since one would assume that a diary is extremely personal and a place where one documents all their internal thoughts and feelings so it would be thought that a diary would be a form of internalization. The whole idea of the men and women in Wilde’s play is to externalize everything and that they seem transparent so that society can see through them. Their whole existence is to serve the purpose of pleasing society in a robot-like fashion. Paglia insinuates that Wilde didn’t merely write The Importance of Being Earnest for fun or following the guidelines of the Aesthetic Movement but that he had an underlying meaning of everything portrayed and that much of what he wrote about later surfaced in his own life and served as inspiration for him as an individual.

Thesis Statement

While many, if not all, of the characters' pasts affect their outlook on the war, Jimmy Cross' past experiences and love for Martha affect his capabilities as a leader in the war and eventually lead to his lapse in concentration and loss of a soldier which alters his perspective on the present war and on his future life.

Nostalgia pg. 192-193

I didn’t cry. In an odd way though, there were times when I missed the friends, even the family, of my real home out in the suburbs. It’s a hard emotion to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of cars and skyscrapers has a way of making you fully terrified. It makes things vivid. When you’re in the city, really in the city, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to everything. You ride the subway. You become part of the subway and you share the same space – you breath air together, you get off together. On the other hand, I’d already moved to the city; but I was nostalgic; I missed the suburbs with the same passion that Martin Luther King had once believed in peace, or the way Ghandi believed in the power of morals. I figured my life in the suburbs was over. If it hadn’t been for the constant ache in my heart, I’m sure things in the city would’ve worked out fine.

But it was loud.

At night I had to sleep with my ears plugged. That doesn’t sound so terrible until you consider that I’d slept in quiet all my life. I’d lie there with the traffic and sirens, then after a while I’d hear the rolling of a subway come on. I’d squirm around, covering my ears, half nuts with sleep deprivation, and pretty soon I’d start remembering how peaceful the suburbs had been at night. Quiet, I’d think – how could I get a little quiet? I’d remember how nice it was to hear the crickets, and how the bullfrogs were so natural and rhythmic, and the way the trees kept swaying with the breezy summery wind.

The nights were miserable. Sometimes I’d roam around my flat. I’d head down to the kitchen and stare out at the 7/11, out across the street, and think of how nice the country made me feel. I wanted to just sleep!

Magic Realism

Magic Realism is about authors using utter disillusionment to portray such an intense feeling that cannot be described in the realm of pure reality. The article starts with an excerpt from the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting which exemplifies the idea of magic realism and is a great opener for the discussion of such a literary use. The excerpt is about the communist party in the Czech Republic and uses magic realism to help describe the author's total abandonment from the party and complete loneliness they felt in response to such an act. The author of the article gives a brief cultural overview of where magic realism began and in which cultures and languages it is more commonly found. Famous authors that frequent the use of magic realism are Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Guenter Grass. The author also cites several examples from modern fiction that bring up different experiences all through the same technique of writing. The reader is then given more of a personal background that brings us back to the excerpt from the beginning of the article. We understand more clearly what the excerpt is about after a more political and personal background is given. The author eloquently helps the reader understand what the excerpt from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting means and how it makes us feel. "...it so powerdully and poignantly expresses the emotion that has been built up over the preceding pages." The article ends with the author analysing the writing style and how the author's cinematic background may have influenced his writing style.

The Unreliable Narrator

The Unreliable Narrator was mainly about how authors develop the essential characters that narrate their novels. It starts of with a brief excerpt from The Remains of the Day and the rest of the article revolves around the the character Stevens and the unreliablity of what he dictates as fact. At first the author of the article defines what an unreliable narrator is as, "invented characters who are part of the stories they tell" and that the point of using an unreliable narrator is, "to reveal in an interesting way the gap between appearance and reality." The author then gives the readers a bit more background to the novel to help understand the character flaws of the particular 'unreliable narrator' that he focuses on: Stevens. Many of the paragraphs focus on incidences where Stevens reports himself in a more favourable light than an observable source may think. The author explains Stevens' emotional flaws or 'emotional sterility' and his utter denial when he acts in a crass manner. The author then follows up his claims with another excerpt from the novel which again shows Stevens' distortion of reality. Finally, the author connects The Remains of the Day with another self-deluded narrator from the novel Pale Fire.