Monthly Archives: November 2016

Keep prioritizing interpretation over information!

Hi class,

I just want to encourage you, in your blog posts/comments/essays, to keep practicing the art of interpreting literary elements.  There’s three weeks left, and it would be easy to do the easy thing and write responses that mainly restate information about characters, events, customs, etc.  Remember, though, that if you write a whole blog/comment/paper without mentioning any literary analysis terms/ideas (first person narration?  Dynamic character?  Setting as reflection of inner psychology?), you’re missing a pretty important piece.

Godspeed,

Professor Kwong

HW for 11/30

Things Fall Apart ch 5-8 due for class discussion Thursday!
Please review notes from today, as well as notes from last 2 units for potentially overlapping themes/questions/points of contrast.

Blog group 1 post due by 5 pm Tuesday. Same rules as always apply.

best,

Professor Kwong

Through the Eyes of Okonkwo

“Looking at a king’s mouth,” said an old man, “one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.” He was talking about Okonkwo, who had risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one of the lords of the clan. The old man bore no ill will towards Okonkwo. Indeed he respected him for his industry and success. But he was struck, as most people were, by Okonkwo’s brusqueness in dealing with less successful men. Only a week ago a man had contradicted him at a kindred meeting which they held to discuss the next ancestral feast. Without looking at the man Okonkwo had said: “This meeting is for men.” The man who had contradicted him had no titles. That was why he had called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man’s spirit.

The text above provides a better picture of how Okonkwo is as a character and how he stands before other men in his tribe. We see how his brusqueness is in dealing less successful men as he was a son to not so successful man who held no title. He had to rise up from nothing to get where he stands now and he is proud of what he has accomplished. However, seeing how his father was not a good role model, who left him nothing, and was not an inspiration to become someone like him, we see how that has affected Okonkwo’s view on others who are similar to that of his father. Okonkwo values those that are successful, who hold titles, and who have a name for themselves and those who do not will be looked down upon by him and treated not as equal but of lesser man, in this case by killing the man with no titles spirit by calling him a woman in a “man’s” meeting.

HW for 11/28; Things Fall Apart edition

Hello class,

Hope you’re well.  For reasons that are unbeknownst to me, there has (yet again!) been miscommunication between myself and the bookstore.  I ordered the 50th anniversary edition of Things Fall Apart, but the bookstore has stocked the plain old regular 1994 Anchor edition, with the red-yellow-purple color scheme.  If you bought that one, fine; if you bought the 50th anniversary edition version, fine. My main hope is that we don’t end up with 5 different editions again!

For Monday, please read chapters 1-4 of Things Fall Apart. As usual, group 6 is welcome to post in any of the categories – Clue, Connect, Create – by 5 pm Sunday.  Group 6, as it’s the last round of blogs, please make sure you’ve done one in each category, for variety’s sake!

Happy Thanksgiving –

Professor Kwong

Finding something else?

“But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger.” “The other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and more frightful odor.”

In the previous chapter, we found that they saw some evidences about the old ones, who lived there millions of years ago, and Dyer mentioned that he actually liked their cultures. Now we can see they are finding more stuff. They were smelling an odor but they didn’t know what was it. So, we can connect that with the previous topic that they will find something that was belong to the old ones. He mentioned it was less and more frightful, so I think they are little scared about what will happen next.