Category Archives: Class Discussion

Reminder: Post Questions about ‘We’ & Essay #2 drafts

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Hi everyone:

I’ve enjoyed discussing your essays with you individually this past week, and you all are making a lot of progress in your writing (both in terms of content and structure). I look forward to seeing the next drafts tomorrow.

Just a reminder that your complete with Cover Letter, fully revised (based on our individual conferences this past week) draft of Essay #2 is due tomorrow. You must e-mail me the correctly labeled file (your name, Essay #2, Second Draft) before class begins and bring four printed copies of your essay to class.

Please do not show up without your printed copies, and do not be late to class. We have a jam-packed class tomorrow, and we’ll need all the time we have to cover both the novel and the essay.

Also, many of you have been letting me know (in private) that you have many questions about We and that there are whole sections of it that you have been struggling with, but so far no one (except Brian … thank you to him!) has posted any questions on the post I made last week.

Please make sure to do so (by leaving a “comment” on that post) by the end of the day today (W 4/30), and we will be sure to cover all of your questions about the text tomorrow in class. I am going to explain a lot of the text, in detail, tomorrow, but in order to use this time most productively, each one of you should post at least one (but ideally a few) question you have/excerpts (with page numbers) you want to discuss.

See you tomorrow, in (cold, rainy) May!

Cheers,
Professor Belli

Class Discussion: Lingering Questions/Confusions/Ideas about ‘We’

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Please use this as a place to post any lingering questions/confusions/ideas about We. Since are giving ourselves another week of class to discuss the text (and to draft/revise Essay #2), and since we of course can’t possibly discuss everything about the novel, we will prioritize what are will talk about next week using your replies to this post.

Drop a comment here to put items on our “agenda” (for our next class, Th 5/1) to discuss. List particular scenes, events, passages, excepts (please include page numbers) that confuse you, or questions more generally. If there is something you don’t quite understand about the text (and I know a number of you are having some difficulty, as this is a challenging novel), now is your chance to tell me/us about it, and to have the opportunity to go over it in class.

Crowdsourcing D-503’s Transformation As Writer, Thinker, Individual

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As part of our reading of We, we are exploring the un/reliability of the narrator/narrative, the conflation of fact/fiction, the revision of memories, the reconstruction of experience, the ways in which storytellers attempt to portray their own, individual, personal truths (which may not be the same as the “objective” truth or the dominant view of the State). As a dystopian novel explicitly written in the form of a journal, We is a rich text for performing a close reading around these “self-conscious” moments in the narrative.

I am particularly interested in us tracing how, through the act of writing itself, D-503 moves from merely recording the values of the One State that he has already internalized, to developing an individual, rebellious, free-thinking understanding about the world and his place in it. Consider the journal entry titles and headings, D-503’s comments on why he is writing/who he is writing for (and how/why this changes), conflicts, competing sets of values, etc.

In preparation for Thursday’s class (4/10), everyone should post at least two comments (one for the reading, Entries 1-16, from Th 4/3, due by Su 4/6; one for the reading for Th 4/10, Entries 17-26, due W 4/9) as a reply to this post (though I encourage many more) that provides places where D-503 explicitly draws attention (in a meta-fiction way) to the fact that he is carefully/consciously constructing a narrative and controlling his reader’s reception of the text. Your comment (reply) can be just a few sentences: provide the quote/citation and a quick explanation of how/why it functions. Feel free to post multiple comments, and also to respond to others. If you’ve already discussed some of these instances in your previous blogs, you should feel free to draw on that material.

We’ll add to these comments with the final section of the book we’ll read during spring break, until we have a class-generated archive of all of these instances in the text.

Reminder: Essay #1and Midterm Exam tomorrow (Th 3/27)

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Hello from my utopia conference in London!

Just a few quick reminders:

  • Tomorrow, Thursday, 3/27, is your midterm exam. You will not be able to use any notes or texts (either the short stories or novel) for the exam, so no need to bring them with you. As we discussed, to prepare for the exam you should review our class notes on utopia (as a genre), the elements of fiction, the short stories we read (“The Story of an Hour,” “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” “The Day Before the Revolution,” and “The Machine Stops”), and Brave New World. I also suggest reading through all of your/your classmates’ blog posts as well as our class discussions (the “comments”) on the short stories, reviewing the Utopian/Dystopian Framework, and looking over your freewriting (which has been available for the past week in my mailbox, N512).
  • Essay #1 is due at the beginning of class tomorrow. Make sure you review the assignment and the formatting/submission guidelines before you submit it (and don’t forget about the Cover Letter … I will not accept essays without it). Include a Work Cited page. Make sure that you e-mail me a correctly labeled Word file (just one file, with the Cover Letter as the first page … not two separate files) before class begins (anything after 8:30am is considered late and will receive no credit), and bring a printed/stapled copy to class (Professor Corbett, who is subbing for me, will collect these essays at the class).
  • We are moving forward with We next week (Entries 1-16, pp. 1-91), and you have a reading response blog due Monday night in preparation for next Thursday’s class (4/3).

Good luck finishing up your essays and taking your exam! See you all next week 🙂

Cheers,
Professor Belli

on interesting story The machine stops

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In the story the machine stop it start off with a boy who seem to be missing his mother, it seems as though he will have done anything to get her attend , so he ask her go come  visited him  because he was not get the love he wanted from his mother by talking to her though the blue plate. In the story theirs this one machine that seems to have control of everything that goes on  an what from the reading kuno wants his mom to realize that the machine doesn’t have a purpose anymore , but to vishti has her heart set differently. Once she arrives at her son cabinet he start to tell her how he is about to be homeless ( to be cast to death) Why she ask… then kuno stated to explain to her how he excape from the community and survive the other world ( little does she know he being working on how to stop the machine) an because of these action he is now going to be homeless. Now he has her right where he wants he with he story about the other world ( I think that he was doing this to get her mind off they fact the world around her is about to crumble) an how he survive the sun and the air their was different from the air they breath until he stumbles out and say the machine stop now she lost for word not know what to believe… cause the one thing she realized o the most has just been vanished. My thoughts is that I think that kuno want to just wanted some love from his mother and the only way he was going to get it was by taking away the one thing she care for more than him. ( some of the details of this story remind me of the movies Mars with Aronald Schwarzenegger jus they at they end the air saved the planet and not kill everyone

 

stars thoughts

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In the story of an hour Ms. Mallard is about to find out that her husband was kill in a bad accident , it was her sister Josephine who had to break the news to her knowing that she has a bad heart condition. ( it was Josephine who told her , In broken sentence; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. ) Richard was their too the husband best friend he was the first one to receive the information about the disaster . Once the news was broken to ms.ballard she wept in her sister arm , as this is happening she decided to go I to her room to be alone , alone with her thoughts and trying to figure out how to cope with the news she has just received. She goes and sit by open window where she started to let out this long physical exhaustion the pain that she had indore for so long have finally come to pass. As she sit by the window she stared Into the sky motionless .

Ms. Ballard was in this close space looking and felling confused a waiting what was going to happen next she felt something was coming to her , but what ( when she abandoned herself a little whisper word escaped her slightly parted lips ) free, free, free what was she free from the pain the suffering the fact that her husband has been killed or maybe now she can rest now knowing that she can focus on herself ( there would be no one to live for her during those coming years) maybe her and Mr Ballard relationship wasn’t as strong to lead her to think like this again she used the words free again now she says ( free! Body and soul free)

As the sister come to check on her knowing that she not well ,she is begging her to  let someone one comfort her and help her in her time of need , but Ms. Mallard said ( no she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window) once josphine got her sister to finally come out the room they preceeded down the stairs the front door open and to everyone one surprise it was Mr. Mallard he was never hurt in the accident in fact he was no where around it.

The shock of what was going on killed ms.mallard one because her husband didn’t die , two because all the freedom she thought she had went she was starting out the window has just came back to reality.

From my understanding of this whole story is I don’t think that she was never happy and when the news hit her that her husband was gone probably gave the will to go on , but once he surface again even though he never left all the pain and suffering came back and she choose to go with God to suffer no more

Class Discussion: “The Day Before the Revolution”

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Just a reminder that you should make your at least one comment (just hit “reply,” either to my original post or to another comment on it) by Sunday (3/16).

Then go back/read through all comments and extend the conversation by making at least two more comments (of course, more are always welcome!) in response by Tuesday (3/18). 

The goal is to have some good virtual discussions here to help you think critically about this short story. Therefore, your comments need not be very long: for example, you can provide a quote/citation and a few sentences of explanation of how/why it functions in the context of some larger issue/question (or you can raise questions, complicate issues, extend discussions, analyze a character, or setting, etc.).

Class Discussion: “The Machine Stops”

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Just a reminder that you should make your at least one comment (just hit “reply,” either to my original post or to another comment on it) by Sunday (3/16).

Then go back/read through all comments and extend the conversation by making at least two more comments (of course, more are always welcome!) in response by Tuesday (3/18). 

The goal is to have some good virtual discussions here to help you think critically about this short story. Therefore, your comments need not be very long: for example, you can provide a quote/citation and a few sentences of explanation of how/why it functions in the context of some larger issue/question (or you can raise questions, complicate issues, extend discussions, analyze a character, or setting, etc.).

Lower caste?

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Just a question I have regarding the reading. Is the lower caste groups people of color? I read in earlier chapters “The hangars were staffed by a single Bokanovsky group, and the men were twins, identically small, black and hideous” ( Huxley page 69),”the negro had a helicopter accident fell on his head…….. The conditioning knocked all the negro’s conditioning into a cocked hat” ( Huxley page 154-155).

Class Discussion: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

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Just a reminder that you should make your at least one comment (just hit “reply,” either to my original post or to another comment on it) by Sunday (3/2).

Then go back/read through all comments and extend the conversation by making at least two more comments (of course, more are always welcome!) in response by Wednesday (3/5). 

The goal is to have some good virtual discussions here to help you think critically about this short story. You can respond to one of my “discussion-starter”prompts/questions below, or you can discuss any other aspect of the text that isn’t mentioned there.

Your comments need not be very long: for example, you can provide a quote/citation and a few sentences of explanation of how/why it functions in the context of some larger issue/question (or you can raise questions, complicate issues, extend discussions, analyze a character, or setting, etc.).

Here are some thoughts to get you started:

  • Discuss the initial imagery of Omelas (3-4).
  • Discuss the varying ways happiness is described in the text.
  • Who is the narrator?
  • How does the narrator invite the reader (“you”) to imagine the utopian city of Omelas (2-3)? Why does the narrator want the reader to co-create this utopia? What purpose might it serve in the context of what happens later in the text?
  • Why does the narrator keep asking the readers if they believe him/her (middle p. 4; bottom p. 6)? How have things changed in the story (and the readers’ perception of it) by the time the questions are asked the second time around towards the end of the story?
  • Discuss the characterization of the child in the room (and perhaps compare it to the boy flute player at the top of p. 4).
  • Why does everyone in the city have to be aware of the existence of the child? (5)
  • Is it possible to have a happy/good/just society at the expense of someone else?
  • Is ignorance bliss? Would the people in the story be better off not knowing of its existence? What would be gained from this ignorance? What would be lost?
  • Can you think if any analogy of the child in the room in our society? If so, who is the child, and who suffers at its expense?
  • Why do some people walk away from Omelas? Who are these people? Where do they go?
  • Explore how an element of fiction (or multiple ones) plays out in the text.
  • Explore one (or more) of the items on the Utopian/Dystopian Framework within the context of this short story.