Notes: 2/7 - 2/18

Heart of Darkness

• Geography
• Inner station and outer station- Dante's circles of Hell.
• Hell v. Paradise
• River as a serpant
• Women in Heart of Darkness:
• Fates - two women knitting
• Marlow's Aunt - intelligent?  Marlow (and maybe Conrad) want to deny it. 
• Kurtz's betrothed. Marlow's lie.  
• Man in patches
• Joseph??
• or court jester
• ..both of which mean Kurtz = evil king?
• Frame story
• Can we trust either narrator? The frame story make it more reliable
• sitting on the Thames  telling story - parallels the Congo? This setting wouldn't be there if there wasn't a frame story. 
• The story also wouldn't have Marlow's reflection. 
• Kurtz's mistress?
• She's never called his mistress, we just presumed. And why does Marlow never learn anything about her? What accounts for her power? Why the mystery?

•  The Intended:
• why does Marlow lie to her, especially when he no longer thought so highly of Kurtz and we know he abhors lies, why???

•  In conclusion: 
• Irony or Romance? I think irony. The fact that Marlow is setting out on a similar journey points at irony.  It only makes more ironic that Marlow learned stuff and is still blindly continuing...stupid guy

Apocalypse Now:

• Based off Heart of Darkness but lacks the merit. 
• Set in Vietnam
• Poor representation of Kurtz
• Different ending- it implies Marlow/Willard does not escape the jungle

Outside Reading: Editorial

Donna Dubinsky opens her essay Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance with the blunt explanation that her article is not “the story of a poor family with a mother who has a dreadful disease that bankrupts them” nor is it a lamenting tale of “a child who has to go without vital medicines”, this clarification sets the tone not as a heartfelt emotional plea but an unbiased serious critique of a government policy. She does show that she is willing to play with emotions, with a subtle stab at the system, “Unlike many others, my family can afford medical care, with or without insurance.”

             Dubinsky takes a short paragraph to state her point clearly, namely “how broken the market for health insurance is, even for those who are healthy and who are willing and able to pay for it.” Short and to the point.

She goes on to criticize the lawmakers who wish to complicate the recently reformed system. Dubinsky uses short but flowing sentences to explain the problem and offer a solution. “The truth is that individual health insurance is not easy to get.   I found this out the hard way. Six years ago, my company was acquired. Since my husband had retired a few years earlier, we found ourselves without an employer and thus without health insurance.” Using a personal story brings the reader closer to her. She continues, “An insurance broker helped me sort through the options. I settled on a high-deductible plan, and filled out the long application. I diligently listed the various minor complaints for which we had been seen over the years, knowing that these might turn up later and be a basis for revoking coverage if they were not disclosed.”

Dubinsky utilizes rhetorical questions to lead her argument “Why did we even need insurance?” followed by rational, and “Why were we denied?” followed by not-so-rational explanation that proves her point even more so.

Taking on an informal tone, Dubinsky relates her woes with insurance company denying her coverage and hours spent applying her family, individually, she addresses the reader and one almost gets the feeling she is writing a guidebook on how to get covered. She wants the reader to learn from her mistakes. Unfortunately this means she must spend a good portion of her essay listing off said mistakes.

Besides the colloquial language this essay would be adequate for an AP essay, the arguments can be too informal and personal at times but they are delivered well, with plenty of detail and evidence to back up claims.

Outside Reading: Book Review

          Dwight Garner opens Carter, Reagan and Freaky Times, his review of Dominic Sandbrook’s “Mad as Hell”, about as awkwardly as a really bad cliché comparison, attempting to intrigue the reader with “The cultural politics of the 1970s is irresistible to historians, the way the decade’s dance music is irresistible to D.J.’s at weddings.” I gave Garner the benefit of the doubt and accepted this could be considered comedic, I then cringed at his attempt at humor; I knew that the article was going to be a struggle. Garner leads into the body of his review with more awkward sentences, his random asyndeton tripping up readers “…these presidencies are so familiar that you can hum nostalgically, dismally along.” It is unnecessary and adds to the recurring inelegance, only causing discomfort that discredits his own criticisms. 
          The following paragraph is a train-wreck, crushing any hope that Garner might have anything useful to say. An elaborate lead in, to the simple point that “Mad as Hell” is special, is used for another pathetic attempt at humor- “At first glance, there’s not much that makes ‘Mad as Hell’ — the title is a reference to a famous scene from the film ‘Network’ — stand out on the history table at your local Borders. (If your town still has its Borders.) But if you look closer, some not uninteresting details pop out.” The stab at Borders is off topic and not funny. And then there’s the explanation of the title, Garner chooses possibly the worst place to tell the reader the origin of the book’s title. The explanation elongates the dizzying sentence; it is as if Garner is saying whatever comes into his mind, whenever he wants. Again Garner finishes his paragraph with poor word choice, “some not uninteresting details pop out.” 
          Garner then goes on to give the reader a brief biography of Sandbrook rather than doing his job and reviewing the book. He starts this history lesson with a half-hearted attempt at anaphora. He then mentions that Sandbrook is a “young fogy” and was born in 1974, contradicting his previous statement that the presidents and times Sandbrook writes about are “are so familiar that you can hum nostalgically”. Garner never properly ends this look at the author. 
          The rest of the article is full of school boy errors and complete lack of flow. I tripped over his wording left, right, and center; “I skimmed the acknowledgments, too, before committing to read ‘Mad as Hell.’” Garner leads into quotes almost as poorly as this lead in, “Here’s the lovely way Mr. Sandbrook thanks his wife at book’s end: ” He then quotes lengthy passages and never explains them. He simply rides off Sandbrook’s humor. After three block paragraph quotes one starts to feel that he is just filling the page.  Garner makes the error that all students are told to vehemently avoid when writing book reviews, do not summarize. He effectively spends the latter half of his article writing a long blurb, barely touching on technique, style, or imagery. He closes suddenly and with the same choppy style one sees throughout the piece.

Outside Reading: Reflexive Essay

Jonathan Franzen uses his personal experiences, written with humor, regret, and lessons learnt to explain a decision he has made, a code to live his life by. In his reflective essay for the New Yorker, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, he tells of how he decided to live within his means.
Franzen opens with an anecdote, common in reflective essays. Franzen makes it clear that the force behind all his actions is his poor wealth, as an almost desperate writer, this plays a part in the lessons learnt from his reflection. The essay takes place in the past; opening with “In the early nineties,” however, Franzen avoids any passive tense. Through a series of stories Franzen tells of his poor experiences house-sitting. “The first house I sat belonged to a professor at my alma mater”, immediately he saw all the outweighing downside to his new occupation, realizing “it’s in the nature of a borrowed house that its closets will be hung with someone else’s bathrobes, its refrigerator glutted with someone else’s condiments, its shower drain plugged with someone else’s hair.”  The point of the reflection was not, however, that it is an uncomfortable situation to live in someone else’s home. Though, this was all necessary to develop Franzen’s light-hearted tone and disappointed voice. The precedent that house sitting is bad must also be set. Only after Franzen had grown tired of living in another’s home was he told “This is my house, Jonathan.”
            At the next house, “the grand stucco house of two older friends, Ken and Joan, in Media, Pennsylvania”, Franzen reasserts, almost as an excuse, that he had “less than no money at all”.  Continuing with the comic tone he mocks his hosts “Ken gently chided Joan for having “bruised” with melting ice”, and states “The only thing I had to do to earn my keep in Media was mow Ken and Joan’s extensive lawn. Mowing lawns has always seemed to me among the most despair-inducing of human activities.” The most valuable thing stated by his hosts was that they always live beyond their means. Franzen takes this as advice. Implementing this advice comically, “by way of following Ken’s example of living beyond one’s means, I delayed the first mowing until the grass was so long that I had to stop and empty the clippings bag every five minutes” however perhaps seemingly comic, this turned out to be the catalyst for the change and revelation in Franzen’s life. “I delayed the second mowing even longer. By the time I got around to it, the lawn had been colonized by a large clan of earth-burrowing hornets”; the following anecdote contains the essay’s message. “Ken told me that I needed to visit the hornet homes one by one after dark, when the inhabitants were sleeping, and pour gasoline into the burrows and set them on fire.” With this advice Franzen almost burnt himself out of house and home, and he reflects “and the home wasn’t even mine”. The terrifying experience jolted Franzen. After much anticipation Franzen tells us what was learnt in punch-line-like format he concludes, “However modest my means were, it was seeming preferable, after all, to live within them.” Using short sentences, he bluntly ends with “I never house-sat again.” Lesson learnt.
 Franzen's piece has a somewhat colloquial tone. He is informal, informal to the point that the tone is inappropriate for an AP essay.
Overall an enjoyable read.

Notes: 1/24 - 2/4

Literary Terms   from that one sheet...

• Anaphora - repetition. Repeating words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses. 
• Antistrophe - repetition. Repeating the same words or words at the end of successive phrases/clauses/sentences. 
• Anadiplosis - repetition. Repeating a word or phrase at then end of one clause and the beginning of the next. 
• Diacope -repetition. Repeating words with a phrase or word in between. 
• Epizeuxis - repetition. Repeating words in immediate succession. 
• Polysyndeton - repetition. Repeating conjunctions in a series of  clauses. 
• Alliteration - repetition. Repeating of initial sounds, usually consonants. 
• Assonance - repetition. Repeating vowel sounds repeated in successive or proximate words containing different consonants. 
• Consonance - repetition. Repeating of consonants or consonant patters. 
• Antithesis - parallelism. Establishing a clear, contrasting relationship between two ideas by joining them together or juxtaposing them in parallel structure. 
• Anastrophe - inversion. a figure of speech involving the inversion of the ordinary Western order of words. 
• Chiasmus - inversion. two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point - do not repeat the same words but inverts sentence's grammatical structure or idea. 
• Antimetabole - inversion. the repetition of words in successive clauses but in transposed grammatical order. 

        Yah there's loads


Novel and Novella

• Novella - a work of prose fiction that is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel. Your standard novella is prolly about 12,000-30,000 words. So Heart of Darkness..
• Novel - Fiction. Lots of different styles of structure but must contain a narrative. And obviously they're longer than novellas.

Dante

• Dante's Divine Comedy is written in terza rima. Dante travels through hell, purgatory to reach heaven. Vergil guides him through hell and purgatory but, being a pagan is not allowed into heaven. There are different circles for different types of sins. Purgatory consists of seven for the seven deadly sins. 

Heart of Darkness

• We read and annotated it (to the best of our abilities....)
• It's a frame narrative, allusion's to circles of hell, and we'll discuss more in class