Victoria Becker
William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper"
English 12-1
1) I feel that both of these poems promote social change. Blake wrote these two poems in different forms but I feel they still appeal to the emotions and imagination of many people. In "The Chimney Sweeper: The Songs of Innocence" is very dark and gloomy. It highlights the young children awaiting death and wanting a better life. They feel that if they work hard during this lifetime they will be rewarded in heaven. An example from the text is: "locked up in a coffin of black". These children were very confused about what was happening to them. They were facing terrible hardships and didn't know how to express their emotions. In "The Chimney Sweeper: The Songs of Experience" it goes into detail about how the children are in emotional pain because of the fact that their parents sent them to work in these homes. They say that even though they are playing and laughing they do suffer ("they think they have done me no injury"). This is a different type of suffering because it is deep and mental. This is the main reason why I feel that these poems could have promoted social change. I can see parents reading these poems and feeling compassion for these young children because their parents (people that are supposed to be looking out for their well-being) are placing them in these horrible conditions. Unlike the typical poem or notice about the conditions, Blake took this a step further and made it connect to our feelings and emotions.
2) I think that the editors included the Parliament transcript as a primary source document because its straightforward, first-hand experience to what these children went through. Since it was a public transcript, documents like this could have been used by Blake as research for his poems. Sometimes it is easier for people to read a transcript or facts instead of trying to interpret the poem. This is a true example of the "voice of the people". It doesn't really affect or alter my interpretation of Blake's poem, it actually highlights my opinions more. I noticed that Blake only focused on the mental deterioration of the children and this transcript centers on the physical, grueling conditions.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Gulliver's Travels Prep Work
Victoria Becker
Gulliver's Travels Prep Work
A)
As I read Gulliver's Travels: Part I the questions I came up with were-
1. Why did the people of Lilliput give Gulliver a sleeping potion?
2. Why didn't the people of Lilliput kill/harm Gulliver? Why did they provide him with food and water?
3. Why did the people take him as a prisoner in the first place?
4. Why was Gulliver traveling alone? How did he come across these little people?
5. Why doesn't Swift include Gulliver's reaction to the little people? Gulliver seems too calm to have little tiny people playing hide and seek in his hair.
6. How do we know if the people of Lilliput are little people? What if Gulliver is just a giant?
7. What didn't Swift include a translation of the Lilliputian language?
8. Why hasn't Gulliver tried to escape?
9. Is Swift making fun of Gulliver and his lack of an attempt to escape?
These are the excerpts from the text that stood out to me:
pg. 654 "I could easily free myself... but fortune disposed me otherwise."
pg. 655 "However... appear to them."
*These quotations from the text stood out to me because the whole time I was wondering why Gulliver hasn't escaped. He says in these quotes that he could easily have gotten away but he wasn't sure that all the people were small or he didn't want them to shoot him with the arrows. But still, the arrows were probably the size of a toothpick and they only gave him blisters. A part of me thinks he is just lazy and liked the fact that these people were taking care of them. He didn't want to cause tension by trying to escape.
*Maybe Gulliver can be considered gullible because he is physically able to escape but he is content and trusts the people of Lilliput to let him be free. This was the only idea or thought that I could relate to satire because Swift could be saying that mankind is too easily duped and settles for less. Gulliver is content with the fact that people are feeding and treating him nicely. Maybe Swift is trying to say that man doesn't take enough risk when necessary. It kind of seems like Swift is making fun of Gulliver.
B)
Teaching Group- Victoria Becker, Eugene Aversa, Frankee Spinosi
I think our group work went really well the past couple days. Our group worked really well together and even came up with some of the same questions. Were all having trouble with interpreting the satire of the text but we came up with some possibilities. We wrote down what we wanted to include on our paper to teach. We didn't really focus on a topic to teach though. We mostly centered everything around the questions that we had. I think the questions are pretty basic because we haven't read the whole story.
C)
On Monday we will figure out a way to connect all the questions and excerpts that we have into a lesson. We also have to transfer the information onto a piece of large paper. I'm not really sure if we are going to talk about how it represents satire because that is the topic that our group struggled with. But we are going to work on how to present what we found in a "teaching manner".
Gulliver's Travels Prep Work
A)
As I read Gulliver's Travels: Part I the questions I came up with were-
1. Why did the people of Lilliput give Gulliver a sleeping potion?
2. Why didn't the people of Lilliput kill/harm Gulliver? Why did they provide him with food and water?
3. Why did the people take him as a prisoner in the first place?
4. Why was Gulliver traveling alone? How did he come across these little people?
5. Why doesn't Swift include Gulliver's reaction to the little people? Gulliver seems too calm to have little tiny people playing hide and seek in his hair.
6. How do we know if the people of Lilliput are little people? What if Gulliver is just a giant?
7. What didn't Swift include a translation of the Lilliputian language?
8. Why hasn't Gulliver tried to escape?
9. Is Swift making fun of Gulliver and his lack of an attempt to escape?
These are the excerpts from the text that stood out to me:
pg. 654 "I could easily free myself... but fortune disposed me otherwise."
pg. 655 "However... appear to them."
*These quotations from the text stood out to me because the whole time I was wondering why Gulliver hasn't escaped. He says in these quotes that he could easily have gotten away but he wasn't sure that all the people were small or he didn't want them to shoot him with the arrows. But still, the arrows were probably the size of a toothpick and they only gave him blisters. A part of me thinks he is just lazy and liked the fact that these people were taking care of them. He didn't want to cause tension by trying to escape.
*Maybe Gulliver can be considered gullible because he is physically able to escape but he is content and trusts the people of Lilliput to let him be free. This was the only idea or thought that I could relate to satire because Swift could be saying that mankind is too easily duped and settles for less. Gulliver is content with the fact that people are feeding and treating him nicely. Maybe Swift is trying to say that man doesn't take enough risk when necessary. It kind of seems like Swift is making fun of Gulliver.
B)
Teaching Group- Victoria Becker, Eugene Aversa, Frankee Spinosi
I think our group work went really well the past couple days. Our group worked really well together and even came up with some of the same questions. Were all having trouble with interpreting the satire of the text but we came up with some possibilities. We wrote down what we wanted to include on our paper to teach. We didn't really focus on a topic to teach though. We mostly centered everything around the questions that we had. I think the questions are pretty basic because we haven't read the whole story.
C)
On Monday we will figure out a way to connect all the questions and excerpts that we have into a lesson. We also have to transfer the information onto a piece of large paper. I'm not really sure if we are going to talk about how it represents satire because that is the topic that our group struggled with. But we are going to work on how to present what we found in a "teaching manner".
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
1984 Final Prompt
Victoria Becker
English 1984 Prompt
During the infamous speech when O'Brien is confronting Winston about the true ideologies of Big Brother and The Party, many things are addressed. Throughout the novel, one of the burning questions Winston had was, "Do people think like me? Am I the minority?" O'Brien answers this almost immediately when he tells Winston that he is a lunatic and what he sees is distorted. Ingsoc is based on complete psychological and physical control. When the Thought police discover someone who doesn't agree with their rules, they take them to The Ministry of Truth and alter their entire thought process. It isn't enough to just "vaporize them". They can not be seen as a martyr (even though it would be considered thought crime to even acknowledge his disappearance). The Party and O'Brien both know that Winston and Julia will both be killed. They want them to go through complete transformation before they disappear in the night. This is related with the control Big Brother wants. He wouldn't be satisfied if people hated him, he wants everybody to LOVE Big Brother and then feel that they deserved to die because they made a huge mistake and error in judgement.
"And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself." -Julia
Julia says these lines to Winston in Book Three, Chapter VI, as they discuss what happened to them in Room 101. She tells him that she wanted her torture to be shifted to him, and he agrees that he felt the same way. These acts of betrayal represent the Party's final psychological victory. After their experiences in Room 101, Winston and Julia are set free because no longer pose a threat to the Party. Winston knows that in order to save his self he really did want the Party to torture Julia. In the end, the Party proves to Winston and Julia that no moral conviction or emotional loyalty is strong enough to withstand torture. Physical pain and fear will always cause people to betray their convictions if doing so will end their suffering. This greatly upsets Winston because they both promised that no matter what horrible things happened they would never betray each other. Winston claimed that they could never alter your heart. You could confess to whatever ridiculous crime, but they could never make him stop loving Julia.
Though his time at the Ministry of Love has destroyed his mind and individuality, his love for Big Brother is now the main focus. Winston still envisions the day that the Party will shoot him. He sits quietly at the Chestnut Cafe and knows that his true fate would be. It surprised me that this came to him as a shock that he would get caught. It was him who said eventually everyone gets caught and they are the dead.
"Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing." -O'Brien
Ultimately, Winston loses his spirit and his humanity, the two characteristics that he fought so hard to keep. Orwell insists that Winston’s fate could happen to anyone, and it is for this reason that Orwell destroys Winston in the end, so that the reader may understand Orwell’s warning and see that the society of 1984 never come to pass. I'm not sure what would be a continuous to this novel or what would happen. I would like to think that Winston really doesn't bow down the The Party and is just demonstrating an excellent version of doublethink, but after analyzing the many ways of control, it's safe to say that Winston and Julie are not the rebelling, unique lovers. They are just like every other comrade who accepts that 2+2=5 and that they were always at war with East Asia and Big Brother is God.
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." -O'Brien
English 1984 Prompt
During the infamous speech when O'Brien is confronting Winston about the true ideologies of Big Brother and The Party, many things are addressed. Throughout the novel, one of the burning questions Winston had was, "Do people think like me? Am I the minority?" O'Brien answers this almost immediately when he tells Winston that he is a lunatic and what he sees is distorted. Ingsoc is based on complete psychological and physical control. When the Thought police discover someone who doesn't agree with their rules, they take them to The Ministry of Truth and alter their entire thought process. It isn't enough to just "vaporize them". They can not be seen as a martyr (even though it would be considered thought crime to even acknowledge his disappearance). The Party and O'Brien both know that Winston and Julia will both be killed. They want them to go through complete transformation before they disappear in the night. This is related with the control Big Brother wants. He wouldn't be satisfied if people hated him, he wants everybody to LOVE Big Brother and then feel that they deserved to die because they made a huge mistake and error in judgement.
"And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself." -Julia
Julia says these lines to Winston in Book Three, Chapter VI, as they discuss what happened to them in Room 101. She tells him that she wanted her torture to be shifted to him, and he agrees that he felt the same way. These acts of betrayal represent the Party's final psychological victory. After their experiences in Room 101, Winston and Julia are set free because no longer pose a threat to the Party. Winston knows that in order to save his self he really did want the Party to torture Julia. In the end, the Party proves to Winston and Julia that no moral conviction or emotional loyalty is strong enough to withstand torture. Physical pain and fear will always cause people to betray their convictions if doing so will end their suffering. This greatly upsets Winston because they both promised that no matter what horrible things happened they would never betray each other. Winston claimed that they could never alter your heart. You could confess to whatever ridiculous crime, but they could never make him stop loving Julia.
Though his time at the Ministry of Love has destroyed his mind and individuality, his love for Big Brother is now the main focus. Winston still envisions the day that the Party will shoot him. He sits quietly at the Chestnut Cafe and knows that his true fate would be. It surprised me that this came to him as a shock that he would get caught. It was him who said eventually everyone gets caught and they are the dead.
"Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing." -O'Brien
Ultimately, Winston loses his spirit and his humanity, the two characteristics that he fought so hard to keep. Orwell insists that Winston’s fate could happen to anyone, and it is for this reason that Orwell destroys Winston in the end, so that the reader may understand Orwell’s warning and see that the society of 1984 never come to pass. I'm not sure what would be a continuous to this novel or what would happen. I would like to think that Winston really doesn't bow down the The Party and is just demonstrating an excellent version of doublethink, but after analyzing the many ways of control, it's safe to say that Winston and Julie are not the rebelling, unique lovers. They are just like every other comrade who accepts that 2+2=5 and that they were always at war with East Asia and Big Brother is God.
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." -O'Brien
Sunday, February 22, 2009
1984
Victoria Becker
12-1
English; Mr. Fiorini; 1984 Commentary
I found a possible essay topic that I was interested in online so I decided to answer that as my one-page commentary to George Orwell's "1984". Describe Julia's character as it relates to Winston. How is she different from him? How is she similar to him? How does Julia's age make her attitude toward the Party very different from Winston's? Use examples from the text to support your answer.
Winston is thirty-nine. His childhood took place largely before the Party came to power around 1960 (as he remembers it). Winston often fantasizes about the "Golden Country" and has dreams about his mother and sister. He grasps onto theses thoughts because it is the only aspect of a true "memory" from before the Party. He has this obsession with finding out the real truth on whether life was better before or after Big Brother took over. Julia, on the other hand, is a child of the Party era. She is only twenty-six. Many of the regime's elements that seem most frightening and evil to Winston fail to upset or even faze Julia. For example, Winston is disgusted with the fact the the Party said they invented airplanes. He knows for a fact that they didn't but when he approaches Julia with this idea she was very apathetic and claims that it didn't make any difference and falls asleep. Like Winston, she hates the Party and sees through many of its techniques. She understands that it uses sexual repression to control the populace. She even has a better intuitive grasp of the Party's methods than Winston does, planning their affair and often explaining aspects of the Party to him. For instance, Julia thinks that buying the coral paperweight was extremely too risky and not worth dieing over. Winston admires the paperweight because it is a true artifact from a time when people were free. Winston wants to change how the Party acts. He believes in the Brotherhood. He wants to make a difference. Julia is more concerned with doing what she has to do to stay alive, not acting suspicious, and rebellion in secret (mostly by having sexual relationships with Party members). The Party's large-scale control of history does not interest or trouble her as it does Winston, because she does not remember a time when the Party was not in control. In blunt defiance of Party doctrine, Julia enjoys sex and rebels against the Party in small ways. But growing up under the Party rule has made her apathetic to the difference between fact and fiction. I find their differences interesting because it shows that there are different ways for these people to rebel. Whether a small defiance, or large one, both were caught and sent to Room 101. I feel that I would be more like Winston because it would anger me that the Party has so much control over people's instincts and natural thought. I would over analyze everything and risk "thought crime" so I could try and put pieces together.
12-1
English; Mr. Fiorini; 1984 Commentary
I found a possible essay topic that I was interested in online so I decided to answer that as my one-page commentary to George Orwell's "1984". Describe Julia's character as it relates to Winston. How is she different from him? How is she similar to him? How does Julia's age make her attitude toward the Party very different from Winston's? Use examples from the text to support your answer.
Winston is thirty-nine. His childhood took place largely before the Party came to power around 1960 (as he remembers it). Winston often fantasizes about the "Golden Country" and has dreams about his mother and sister. He grasps onto theses thoughts because it is the only aspect of a true "memory" from before the Party. He has this obsession with finding out the real truth on whether life was better before or after Big Brother took over. Julia, on the other hand, is a child of the Party era. She is only twenty-six. Many of the regime's elements that seem most frightening and evil to Winston fail to upset or even faze Julia. For example, Winston is disgusted with the fact the the Party said they invented airplanes. He knows for a fact that they didn't but when he approaches Julia with this idea she was very apathetic and claims that it didn't make any difference and falls asleep. Like Winston, she hates the Party and sees through many of its techniques. She understands that it uses sexual repression to control the populace. She even has a better intuitive grasp of the Party's methods than Winston does, planning their affair and often explaining aspects of the Party to him. For instance, Julia thinks that buying the coral paperweight was extremely too risky and not worth dieing over. Winston admires the paperweight because it is a true artifact from a time when people were free. Winston wants to change how the Party acts. He believes in the Brotherhood. He wants to make a difference. Julia is more concerned with doing what she has to do to stay alive, not acting suspicious, and rebellion in secret (mostly by having sexual relationships with Party members). The Party's large-scale control of history does not interest or trouble her as it does Winston, because she does not remember a time when the Party was not in control. In blunt defiance of Party doctrine, Julia enjoys sex and rebels against the Party in small ways. But growing up under the Party rule has made her apathetic to the difference between fact and fiction. I find their differences interesting because it shows that there are different ways for these people to rebel. Whether a small defiance, or large one, both were caught and sent to Room 101. I feel that I would be more like Winston because it would anger me that the Party has so much control over people's instincts and natural thought. I would over analyze everything and risk "thought crime" so I could try and put pieces together.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
