The main thing I've been able to take away from this past month of learning is how to take something large and deconstruct it, in order to have a better idea of what it means as a whole. To fully understand a building for instance, you need to be able to recognize all of its pieces, all of the materials that were used to construct it, how those pieces were used in the construction, how it was built, who built it, for what purpose was it built, how it's currently being used...The same can be said about literature. We used this to tackle poetry and to help us construct our theme for The American Dream and are currently deconstructing Death of a Salesman for a similar purpose.
With poetry, we used STIFS to quickly point out the main parts of a poem and to help us tackle multiple choice questions that we will face on future tests (and ultimately the AP). With The American Dream, to construct our theme, we were forced to incorporate every motif in order to be successful. This tested our understanding of the work and really pushed our thinking abilities to the limit. It's similar to the poetry analysis in that in order to have a full idea of the work, we need to be able to find and appreciate all of its pieces. We'll ultimately have to construct another theme for Death of a Salesman and I hope that the building metaphor will keep me focused and on the right track when we have to do another theme and analysis blog. It's a frustrating process, but a necessary one in order to best grasp a work of literature.
Kevin,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that coming up with a theme for a piece of literature is extremely frustrating. Especially when bigger pieces of literature like "The American Dream" because there are so many motifs that must fit in with theme. I feel like this is my weakest part of analysis; determining theme. I'm always unsure if I forgo to consider a piece of the puzzle. I like how you brought up our use of STIFS to analyze the big picture which is sometimes forgotten when we close read. Overall this analysis of the course material is a little vague, you left out our deconstruction of multiple choice questions. I thought our analysis of multiple choice questions was fairly insightful but I understand why you left it out. Our analysis of "Dream" and "Death of a Salesman" were what we spent most of our time on. If I were you I might add a bit more detail about how our discussions in class have helped you understand the literature. Perhaps how you took something from our analysis of "Dream" and how you reapplied it to "Salesman."
I agree with Henry that you need to be more thorough--the multiple choice distractor and question types study and our study of tragedy need to be covered, here. But I would also add that you've done a wonderful job synthesizing material and making connections in this post!
ReplyDeleteKevin, the first point you made in this post about how about learning how to take something large and deconstruct it I completely agree with, and the connection you made between a building and literature was something I have never considered but is a great comparison. I am shocked about how much meaning one piece of work can have, because in no other literature class thus far have we ever taken the time to go so deep into a piece and look at every aspect of it. The American Dream and Death of a Salesman both have so many different themes and complex meanings, it is difficult to come to a conclusion on what is most important. The STIFS we learned about in class are something that I am still working on, because it is hard for me to identify the overarching aspects of poem like style. I liked how you connected analyzing the poems to analyzing the plays we have read, because in analyzing the poems for an overarching theme, we must do the same thing as when analyzing the plays for a theme, just on a smaller scale. Your post was very good, but you want to make sure you discuss everything we talked about in class and perhaps expand on your ideas!
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to lie; at first sight, this post looked a little scrawny. Frankly, I'm impressed you so successfully covered as much of the material as well as you did. The synthesis with outside material was fantastic, but you didn't go into much depth. Like the central player in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose, you briefly touched on each topic, but didn't stay there long enough to really connect (excepting the simply genius building metaphor). The others already covered the few things you missed, and I would have liked to hear a little more on some of the topics (the STIFS sentence came across as more of a recap. than elaboration and synthesis), but the writing you used was elegant and concise, and the post was well put-together despite its lacking size.
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