This week, we have been exclusively going over the concept of tragedy. We read the full story of Oedipus Rex and let me say, it was ridiculously tragic. The whole story, Oedipus was trying to avoid the prophecy the oracle revealed to him, but walked right into it. It was foretold that he would kill his own father and marry his mother. To avoid doing this, Oedipus leaves his home and moves somewhere else. Oedipus finds a man on a trail, and has an altercation with him and some others. He ends up killing the man and is on his way. That man turns out to be his father. He then moves to the town of Thebes and becomes the king. He has children and is a successful ruler. Later on, he finds out the queen is his birth mother. It turns out the people he thought were his parents weren't actually his parents, they just took care of him.
Everything that happens seems very coincidental and unlikely to me, but that about sums up Greek literature. I don't know why everything had to happen like that. Although if you think about it, it really is the ultimate tragedy. It's hard to imagine killing your own father and having children with your own mother. Although you had no intent to do these things, you are still doing something extremely awful and so difficult to imagine. I feel like you might be able to recognize your own mother and father, even though you haven't seen them since birth. I am very glad I am not Oedipus and I'm very glad I don't live in ancient Greece.
This week in AP lit class, we started focusing on the element of tragedy. Tragedy is a type of literature in which extremely sad events happen to the characters in the story. We made two blog posts about it already, so if you want some insight on that you can go to my tragedy blog. Another thing we did was we started to analyze and explicate "A Noiseless Patient Spider" by Walt Whitman. The poem has a lot of metaphorical meanings to it, like many other poems we have read in this class. I enjoyed it, but I definitely had some difficulty understanding it right off the bat. I think that happens to me with every poem except for "Pathedy of Manners".
Walt Whitman was a very famous poet who wrote only one piece of literature. His one book was a large book of all of the poems he wrote. It was an extremely famous and well renowned book because of his vast amount of poems and skill as a writer. "A Noiseless Patient Spider" was very interesting to me because he used a literal meaning to compare a figurative meaning to. He used a spider as a literal base and went off of it when describing his soul figuratively, I found that very interesting.
This week in AP Lit class, we explicated a poem titled "Pathedy of Manners" by Ellen Kay. The poem was a lot longer than we are used to having for our poem of the week. To me, this made it much easier to decipher. The author is able to be a little more descriptive and specific. I feel like this poem was much easier to draw a meaning from. To me, it was very easily about a girl who was looking to find a man with money, and that was all she wanted. She had no emotional attachment to her husband, shown in line 19 when it said she was "Toying with plots to kill time and re-wed". This means she is ready to move on only a year after her husband passed. Which may not be that strange, but when the author uses "plots", it definitely tips you off that she has motives that have to do with more than just being by herself. It is all brought together when it says she will be "Alone in brilliant circles to the end." because then you know that she is all alone because gold digging is not your first action if you're trying to make friends.
Overall I found this poem to be a good change of pace in terms of difficulty to understand. It was pretty straightforward and literal. Or at least it seems that way after you try to explicate "Eagle". I don't think there was much disagreement between any of the people in the class. It seemed to be a universal agreement in terms of opinions. I think this will help us in the future because it shows you that not everything is hard and some things come easy. Maybe just not many of them do.
This week was essentially the ending to what we have been building up to. We have been working on elements of literary fiction projects, and we presented them. It was really interesting to see presentations about the other elements of fiction, and how authors use them in their stories to make their work more interesting or how it makes their writing more meaningful. Through the use of symbols, they can achieve compression. I know this because that was my main focus throughout the time. The rest of the topics were helpful for me because they helped me understand how certain elements of writing worked. I feel that in the future I will read an author's story and be able to relate what they wrote to these projects, and maybe realize their writing isn't as clever or crazy as I thought it was.
To me, there's no better way to know you've learned something than judging your ability to teach it. If you're able to teach something to someone, you obviously know the topic at least fairly well. That's why I think it's good to have groups present. The only way to prepare to teach something to someone is to further your understanding of it, or maybe learn it in different ways than you already have if possible. Due to these reasons, I found this to be a very effective and efficient assignment. Overall, I think I learned a good deal this week about symbolism and theme. I learned quite a bit about the other elements as well, but mainly symbolism.
In AP lit class, it has definitely been an eventful week. Mr. Schoenborn has given us a lot to chew on. The thing that has really stuck out to me was our elements of fiction project. My group is working on symbolism and theme, but to me symbolism is very interesting. It has really opened me up to a big part of many of the stories I read and have read.
The idea behind symbolism is that the author can compress his/her story by making either a reference to a well known event or story, or by adding details that can have multiple meanings to them. It's all about compression. The author can reference something well known, like the bible, and he/she doesn't really have to elaborate for the reader to understand the point of this occurrence. This is huge for fiction writers because it can save them time and give their pieces a little more food for thought. Writers can also add a detail about something that would be just your average object or noun, but with symbolism it can represent something completely unrelated. This makes reading it more complex and entertaining, while also saving the author some time.
Understanding what a fiction writer has to work with is rather intriguing because it can really help you see where they are going with something you may not have understood originally. You can connect with what their idea is because you understand what they are working with and can spot it. It definitely makes you feel smarter while reading.