Monthly Archives: October 2016

HW for October 6 (Joyce annotation)

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Dear class,

Thank you for your hard work today.  I’m confident that, over the next few classes, your hard work will train you to ask good guiding questions, which in turn will enable you to take better snapshots for richer analysis.  This will make the experience of reading our 3 novels (Wells, Lovecraft, Achebe) a little less intimidating!

For homework, please focus on pp.55-59 of “The Dead.”  As usual, take notes in the margins, either on questions you have, or clarifying definitions of words/phrases.  Take a picture of one annotated page and upload it (either as .jpeg or PDF) to the appropriate dropbox (under Assignments + Essays Dropbox) by 11 am tomorrow.  We will spend tomorrow’s class wading further into “The Dead” together.

Note that there is no blog or comment due tomorrow.  However, I am expecting you to keep track of how many comments you have completed!  Remember that you should have 12 comments – approximately one per week – by the end of the semester, and you can’t make up comments if more than a week has passed.

Happy annotating!

sincerely,

Professor Kwong

Connect- The management of grief

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In this tragic story, ” the management of grief “, the use of theme and character plot helped connect with the style of how the author wanted to present the story. The concept of loss and death is a very heavily ordeal, even harder is the factor of going on after a loss or death, is very burdensome cross to bear. There have been stories discussed in class that has similar ways of interpretation, such as The Story of an Hour, where they faced grief only to face death by acceptance. The theme of death and grief helped motivate different aspects of each character, especially the protagonist. To face losing her husband and sons, with the clouded hope of them still being alive, drove the emotional plot point, For Shaila, grief is not an option. She is frustrated in being calm when she didn’t have to be.  This makes her callous. The thought of hope of her family miraculous alive drives the definition of stages of grief to work through the story: denial, anger fear, bargaining, and acceptance. (though the order of the stages varies to each individual character).

 

Clue “The Management of Grief”

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During my reading of “The Management of Grief” by Bharati Mukherjee, I was able to connect so deeply within every passage written, and the dialogue between characters. As I read, I tried to imagine myself during the time of our tragic event on 9/11. It was not the exact tragedy that Bharati was describing, but it was the closest way for me to connect into the solid world she was trying to create within her style of writing. The passage that I pulled out for this blog post is the last one that ends the reading on page 985.

As we have learned in Charters’s “The Elements of Fiction” plot is the sequence of events in a story and their relation to one another as they develop and usually resolve a conflict. In the last passage of “The Management of Grief” it’s as if all the events including the bombing, the loss of relatives, the new reports, the identifying of the lost lives, the constant reminders of such a tragic moment had all come to a calm ending. The last passage certainly resolved the inner conflict that this young woman was facing throughout this tragic story, her inner being was being tested and finally she was able to bring it to an end. Bharati writes as “Your time has come”, they said. “Go be brave” , the style in which she writes this small mental and realistic dialogue shows us how the events of the plot led to us the audience understanding the main character in so much depth. We have all dealt with situations we may not have known how to deal with whether it may be a loss of a family member, or friend, and the events that take place before and after the loss takes a toll on one. Bharati allows us the audience to see that there is no rush or time frame for when it is time to move on. It’s the plot of events that allow us to determine how we will go on and how we will continue our lives once we have come to terms with what has occurred. “The Management of Grief” certainly allows us to get into more than just the plot to show Bharati’s great use of literary elements throughout this reading.