LIT205A

Updated Course Syllabus and Classroom Policies (Semester 2, AY 2010-2011) for LIT205A

2010-11-28T17:15:00.000-08:00

LIT205 Course Syllabus and Classroom Policies: World Literature***
Instructor: Timothy Sanchez Official website: www.lit205a.blogspot.com

General Course Objectives
The purpose of this course is to promote intellectual growth by strengthening students' abilities to read analytically and creatively, by filing in or reinforcing students' knowledge of the outlines of history, and by making students conversant with many major cultural landmarks and developing their sensitivity to cultural diversity through a critical study of the literatures of the world. This course intends to develop among students the ability to read, understand and appreciate the literatures of the world in order to deepen their knowledge of the complexities of human life and nature, and to inculcate among them the respect for people and cultures, love for nature, desire for peace and passion for truth and justice, which will, eventually, contribute to the enhancement of a compassionate, competent and committed global Thomasian.

Specific Course Objectives
At the end of the course, the students are expected to: (1)Identify, comprehend and value the different types and forms of literature across cultures; (2)Appreciate the significant human experiences exemplified in the different literary works; (3) Gain insights on the complexities of human nature, cultures, and practices through a close reading of world literatures; (4) Write a critique paper on a novel, drama or epic; and (6) Creatively transform literature to other artistic forms.

Learning Outcomes and Competencies
Students who successfully complete this course will be able to demonstrate the following on appropriate testing/evaluation instruments: (1) An ability to analyze a piece of literature and effectively write about it using appropriate critical strategies and other materials that I require. (2) An ability to appreciate literature in its broader social context and thereby garner insights into the human condition through examination of such fundamental relationships as those between man and self, man and society, and man and Nature. (3) An appreciation for the historical context of literature, how it affects and reflects the age in which it was written, and how it is linked to broader historical currents in politics, philosophy, psychology, science and art as well as how it resonates within contemporary culture.

Intellectual Competencies Expected of all Students Enrolled in General Education Courses in English and the Humanities
This course will afford the enrolled students the opportunity to refine their existing skills in the following six areas:
Reading: Reading at the college level means the ability to analyze and interpret a variety of printed materials.
Writing: Competency in writing is the ability to produce clear, correct, and coherent prose adapted to purpose, occasion and audience.
Speaking: Competence in speaking is the ability to communicate orally in clear, coherent, and persuasive language appropriate to purpose, occasion, and audience.
Listening: Listening at the college level means the ability to analyze and interpret various forms of spoken communication
Critical Thinking: Critical thinking embraces methods for applying both qualitative and quantitative skills analytically and creatively to subject matter in order to evaluate arguments and to construct alternative strategies.
Computer Literacy: Computer literacy at the college level means the ability to use computer-based technology in communicating, solving problems, and acquiring information.

Course Methodologies
1. Lectures
2. Report/Discussion
3. Creative/Critical Writing (see Writing Assignment)
4. Drama Presentation/Dramatic Reading (see Final Requirement)
5. Film Viewing and Field Exposure

Assessment Procedures
Students will listen to lectures, participate in class discussions through reporting, and write about the authors and works through activities that include essay exams and critical papers. Successful essays and papers must respond to the requirements established by the assignment prompt.

Traditional academic essays must contain a clearly stated arguable thesis, effective evidence used in support of the thesis, a clear organizational pattern, adequate paragraph development, paragraph unity and coherence, and appropriate and accurate documentation, including paraphrasing, quoting, and a "works cited" list at the end when requested by the prompt.

All essays, quizzes and papers must be written according to conventional standards of English grammar and punctuation and should not contain errors that significantly harm or diminish meaning. The following are considered major grammatical errors: sentence boundaries, subject/verb disagreement, and verb tense and form. All essays, quizzes and papers must be written for the appropriate reader and the subject, occasion, and purpose of writing. They must contain complex sentence structure and effective word choice and include a title.

Consultation Hours
Office: CTHM Faculty Room E-mail: timi_sanchez@yahoo.com
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 2-3 p.m.

Grading
Students may earn a maximum of 335 points per grading period (prelim and finals), and grades are based on the percentage of those points a student earns. The percentage is traditional. (Keep track of the points you have earned for the assignments listed above and convert them into a percentage to determine your grade. For more information on calculating your grade in class, see the information on Quizzes and Grade Calculation below.) Grades are broken down as follows:

Writing Assignments, Quizzes 135 pts., or 30% of your grade.
Major Examination 100 pts., or 40% of your grade.
Attendance/Participation 100 pts., or 30% of your grade.

MY CLASSROOM POLICIES

Quizzes and Grade Calculation
Quizzes will usually be worth ten points. I will not announce quizzes in advance; students should expect one at the beginning of every class period. Students will be given ample time to complete quizzes if they arrived to class on time, but if a student is late for class he/she will have less time to complete the quiz. For instance (10minute quiz), if a student arrives 8 minutes late, he/she will only have 2 minutes to complete the quiz. If the student arrives after the quiz is over or if the student is absent, he/she will not be allowed to make up the quiz. I do not give special/make up test. If a student misses a major exam, he or she needs to write a formal letter requesting for one. This should also be accompanied by supporting documents. The student will have to wait until the end of the semester to take the special make-up exam. Students may prepare for quizzes by using the (1) course pack reader, (2) lectures in our official website (http://www.ithmlit102.blogspot.com/) and (3) by reading taken lecture notes. Quizzes and exams may consist of identification, true-false, and short answer and essay sections. Exams may consist of open and closed book portions. Tests are under time pressure. My students will need an envelope to compile all returned quizzes and exams so that they may use these in the event that they would like to request for a re-computation of their grade.

Lecture Notes
Taking notes from lecture is a required part of class and an essential habit of serious students. On any given class period I may ask the student to show me his/her notes for that class period (I have the option to give merit or demerit in class participation.)

Reading Assignment as Homework
Essentially, the homework of students in this course is to read assigned texts. In between each class period, students are expected to review their lecture notes and the material covered in the previous class period, in addition to completing all assignments for the next class period.

Attendance and Class Participation Rules and Point Deductions
Attendance is mandatory; absences should be rare; tardiness and leaving early will be penalized; disrupting class is unacceptable. Each student will begin the term with 100 points for attendance and participation; these are the points to lose for violating class rules:

-15 points (for MWF classes) 20 points (for TTh classes) per absence

Excuse letters with corresponding medical certificate/supporting document must be duly received and noted within a week from date of the absent student’s return to class. Noted excuse letters should be filed to the instructor one day before the prelim/final examinations. No adjustment in class participation grade will be made if excuse letters are not received on said date/s.

Students who are attending co-curricular and/or extra-curricular activities (including tours, ushering assignments, thesis defences, trainings, seminars, contests, etc.) and would like to be excused from class will have to write me a formal letter of request BEFORE actual activity/ies. The excuse letter should be accompanied by duly approved supporting documents. This rule will be strictly implemented.

-10 points for arriving late or leaving early

-10 points for failing to bring your course pack and/or required materials

-10 points for failing to take lecture notes or completing homework

-10 points for disrupting class (examples are cell phones going off in class, having private conversations while class is in session, leaving your seat without permission in the middle of lecture, discussion, or other class activities, etc.) I may also confiscate your IDs and turn these over to the SWDB chair for appropriate action.

-100 points for cheating or plagiarizing, + failure for the assignment (notice that this means that if you cheat, you will most certainly fail the course. I reserve the right to refer a student to the Prefect of Discipline as well.

If a student has accumulated more than -100 points, he/she will earn 0 points for this portion of the grade and the remaining points will be deducted from his/her overall grade. I expect active rather than passive learning. All students must be prepared for class. All students in this course must be prepared to ask and answer questions and participate in class discussion.

Writing Assignment
Students enrolled in this course may write one paper during the term. I will provide separate assignment sheet for the writing assignment. The paper is due at the beginning of the class period on the date listed on the syllabus. Late papers will not be accepted.

Classroom Cleanliness and Order
My college students should not expect me to instruct them to clean/ pick up pieces of dirt from their respective areas as well as direct them to align their desks every single meeting. They must ensure that they are part of making the classroom in order so that it is conducive for learning. The classroom must be in order before I even come in. I may choose not to proceed with the day’s lecture/activity should I reckon that the classroom and the class are not ready in this respect. In which case, the class will be responsible in catching up with the missed session.

Academic Dishonesty
Student Responsibility: Students are expected to be above reproach in all scholastic activities. Students who engage in scholastic dishonesty are subject to disciplinary penalties, including the possibility of failure in the course and dismissal from the university. Scholastic dishonesty includes but is not limited to cheating, plagiarism, collusion, the submission for credit of any work or materials that are attributable in whole or in part to another person, taking an examination for another person, any act designed to give unfair advantage to a student or the attempt to commit such acts. Since scholastic dishonesty harms the individual, all students, and the integrity of the university, policies on scholastic dishonesty will be strictly enforced. (Refer to the Student Handbook for more information.) Student/s who signed a slip/note or anything of that nature that directly or indirectly concern me or my course (to indicate to the dean’s office that I am absent in class, for instance) MUST inform me of such incident as soon as possible to avoid unnecessary conflicts (especially if I am not absent, but merely late for the class, for instance.) I shall file a charge against a student (or students) who commit/s an act that harms my integrity.

Emergency Academic Continuity Program
If available, academic courses, partially will be available on the ELEAP Blackboard Academic Suite management system. From time to time, I shall conduct graded quizzes using this technology. Students may also join group discussions to earn credit. I will also post official announcements in the system. Each student will also receive these announcements in their respective emails (the ones provided by UST.) Students, therefore, are responsible for the activation of their respective ELEAP accounts. This will allow me and my students to continue my teaching and learning via UST E-Learning Access Program (ELEAP), UST BLACKBOARD Academic Suite management system, in case the university shuts down as a result of a pandemic outbreak, typhoon, or any other natural disaster. If the university is forced to shut down, I shall notify my students using Blackboard on how to proceed with the course. If I chose not to use ELEAP for a particular given semester, my students may resort to the course’s official blog site. To receive credit for a course, it is the student's responsibility to complete all the requirements. Failure to access course materials once reasonably possible can result in a reduction of the student’s overall grade in the class. To facilitate the completion of classes, most or all of the communication between students and the institution, the faculty and fellow classmates will take place using the features in the ELEAP Blackboard and/or though the course’s website. In the event of a disaster, disease outbreak or other disruptions of normal operations that would result to the suspension of classes, all students must make every effort to access an internet-enabled computer as often as possible to continue the learning process.

REQUIRED TEXTBOOK
View/s:between Borders, Beyond Barriers, Understanding People and Cultures through World Literatures. by Ferdinand Lopez, Remedios Biavati and Luciana Urquila. UST Publishing House, Manila. 2009

***subject to changes

The Bird by Tita Lacambra Ayala

2010-11-27T20:59:00.001-08:00

THE BIRD

Tita Lacambra Ayala

It was all of Sisa’s fault anyway. She said that if I sat beside the window facing the sea without moving, for hours on end, a bird would come and sit on my head and nest there. I mused over these for a long time while I watched her comb her hair with a big red comb.

I really don’t know why she does that, lave her thick head of long hair with coconut oil and comb it, unknotting all the snags from the scalp down over and over again until she looked like a black waterfall a-glisten with brilliant lights with the water falling down in straight lines, falling all over her front so that her body was fenced from sight, the tips of her hair touching her knees as she knelt on the floor.

Her quiet black-red black-red strokes of comb to head and down lulled me into a hypnotic state and all of a sudden I felt very lonely, like I wanted to go home somewhere but I didn’t know where. I swam in the feeling for awhile, staring at the blue flowers on her brown dress, and at the very pale undersides of her feet contrasted against the very dark sides of the rest of her.

When she was all oiled up like snake, she coiled her hair into a loose knot behind her head freeing her face to the light again. Her face had the fine brown skin that glistened from her own natural oils and the coconut essence, and I wondered vaguely if other parts of her body were just as oily, knowing that in a day or two she would probably smell rancid and overripe and would have to use steam or bathwater heated to boiling to wash away that oil again. Coconut cakes wrapped in banana leaves occurred to me and I began to feel very hungry.

She left the room carrying her coconut shell of remaining coconut oil, her red combed hitched to the back of her head. She left behind her a mixed smell in the small bamboo room which we shared, a small bamboo in a not-so-small bamboo house facing the sea, with sawali walls over and under which lizards wove their loveliness and housekeeping without a thought for human beings, leaving their droppings and their eggs everywhere, sometimes inside my baul.

Sisa’s pillow will have an oily mark when she sleeps tonight, I thought, then turned towards the window.

The sea was especially calm in the early afternoon sun, brownish at the shoreline and blue farther in, little ripples, just a few waves marking times of turning. If, as Sisa said, a bird would come would it notice my eyes and peck at them, or get curious about my nose? And that pearl earrings—would it think them seeds? The noonday sun cast a shining on everything, the unquiet coconut fronds trembled their own greenish lights and if I were to sit here at all for the bird I would have to lean with one side against the window, and face the bamboo cabinet where all the red pillows were piled atop each other fatly over all the folded blankets, and the amts on top rolled up like giant cigars.

I adjusted my seating on my baul, leaned my left elbow against the wide bamboo piece that was the window sill, and prepared to wait for the bird. I burped my lunchburp and smelled the gingerfish with pepper leaves all over again and longed mightily for a drink of water. But I would not stir now that I was in the right place and state of mind for waiting. I stared at the stack of red pillows and fell into a trance.

As it happened, it was not at trance at all- I had fallen asleep and with my left shoulder aching I opened my eyes to see Sisa sitting cross-legged on the floor before a low table covered with blankets, a glowing charcoal iron with a red handle to her left, its numerous scalloped eyes smoldering as it moved back-forth back-forth over a garment in the falling afternoon light. A pile of finished ironing was on a mat on her other side and at her elbow a wooden basin almost empty of dampened rolled laundry. Sisa was flecked with orange dots from the dying sun.

There was no bird at all, I told Sisa, turning away, looking out into the sea.

Sometimes when the waiting is strong the bird does not come, she said, her voice coming in waves as she pressed down on her iron.Then one day if you’re patient enough but nearing the end of your patience it will appear.

I mused over that and slapped at a mosquito that was sucking supper out of my toe.

Sometimes the bird takes a long time to come because it comes from a long way and the journey is troublesome. So long that even as it flies to you its limbs grow and its feathers lengthen, ageing in its flight. Some of them start as young birds and get to their destinations already adult and mature.

Don’t they ever turn back from getting tired? Some come over a wide sea, some in a storm, she answered, the waves in her voice growing like the rising tide. The orange in the sky turned lavender as the sun set and soon the sea was part of the sky.

A year passed since Sisa told me about magical birds and, very often as I was attuned to many other things, I decided that waiting for birds was not the best thing. For Sisa perhaps, yes, and women like her who lived by the sea all their lives, rising with the first shimmering of light by dawn and putting away their boats of charcoal irons when the sun set. But as for me I had breaks in the monotony of my life. Occasionally I went to town to call the Chinaman when it was time to haul away the coconuts, or hunted for the buyer of our vinegar and dried fishes, or helped Mother buy cloth to sell in the adjoining barrios. It was the idle days that left me time to dream about Sisa’s birds, and in that year that passed I must have sat by the window in all the hot searing days of summer.

Sometimes as I dove into the water then turned to float on my back I imagined the shadow of a wide winged white bird following me, beckoning to me out of the water and on to the house so that I might sit there and wait its imperative arrival. The shadow of the bird would be a cool cloud over my body.

At times in my sleep I would feel the clasp of its claws on my hip, its weight pressing me closer to the mat, its tail fanning my backside. And I would wake up to find the cat Musang draped asleep over me, her head hanging to my backside, her tail trailing against my thigh.

Sisa never said that the bird would come in the night but when the sea was still and the moon was up I thought it came in the guise of a bat gliding strongly among the palms. Or it was invisible like a wind and entered dead-blind into the bamboo house slapping against the sawali. Or not wanting that, silently perched on the nipa roof scudding in the nipa, resting its travel-worn head under its wing, hiding its eyes from the moonlight, its fine head feathers trembling in the seawind.

Sometimes it would be white gray markings –like a dove but larger. Other times it would be a bright blue like that of kingfishers, brilliant and elusive, the lone flash of color in the black of night. It went for short dips into the sea to catch some fish then came back on the rooftop to dry its salty feathers. Sometimes it was a silver with red markings at the tips of wings and tail, with red feet. But half-blind. And it would circle endlessly above the house and higher searching for me, uttering a forlorn cry, and never finding me would leave again, and my heart would yearn for it painfully in my dreams and I would sigh and cry into my red pillow silently. Somehow, waiting for the bird in the dark, in the night, was a more intense waiting than sitting up still by the window in the afternoon hours. The mysteries of the dark made him more changeable and fascinating, the span of wings wider, the song a deeper call. His reality extended from the sounds and shadows of the hours into the immeasurable ravines of sleep.

The rainy nights were difficult to bear. The bird circled around in the forest of the night, its feathers wet and heavy, its vision blinded by the rain. Sometimes it would find me and under all the wet feathers I would feel its hot skin, its heartbeat fast and strong under my hand.

One clammy morning, the air heavy with damp from the night's rain, I walked the coconut footpath towards the road inland from the sea. Father had complained that the Chinaman had not comet o haul away the coconuts as he had promised. It was my duty to go into town and remind him of what was to be done. Also, the last batch of fish drying on the fillet trays had not been salted properly and on top of that the rain had started to fall heavily before the fish could be taken away into the shade. Sisa had gone about the house in a distracted way as father scolded and mother proceeded to the granary to bring out some bundles of palay to pound. That morning the sun had risen too early and too hot, as if making up hastily for all the faults attributed to the rain that day before. Even the jeepney driver that brought me and the other barrio folk into town seemed morose and unhappy. My change when he handed it to me lacked a coin. I walked away without asking for it.

The Chinaman was not at his warehouse when I got there. He had

gone with his truck and driver to the north to bring in some molasses. I waited till almost noon and while the molasses were being unloaded he ate his lunch in between mouthfuls of which he promised to haul the coconuts the same day. I rode with him and his two men in the truck. He rode in front with the driver and another worker. I sat in the back of the truck shieldign my head and face with mother's checkered shawl. When I closed my eyes against the dust I saw red and orange lights, spots of violet and light green and blue dancing around in different sizes, advancing then re-arranging and blending inside my eyes. The truck floor was hard and twice over stones on the road I bumped my head against the wooden sides. The floor smelled of molasses and salted fish.

After father greeted the men from town I went to the water pump at the back of the house to wash my face and feet to hang out the shawl on a bamboo pole beside the stairs. I was hot and hungry and I called Sisa from the kitchen stairs, the smooth bamboo stairs creaking under my damp bare feet. Sisa did not meet me at the door clutching at her skirt as she usually did when I got back from town, asking questions about how the trip was and what I saw, or if what she had asked me to buy I had bought.

The kitchen window was shuttered down and I wondered if a strong wind had come to blow away the slender pole that held the shutter up like eyelashes over it.

I called to her again, meanwhile getting a wooden plate from the window shelf and lifting a pot lid for some food. Not getting any answer I sat down on the floor to eat, moistening my fingers in the water from a clay basin. The cold spicy sour fish with coconut milk and gabi leaves soothed me and very soon I noticed the sound of grain winnowing in baskets in the rice shed nearby. That means the pounding had been done and I would not be needed to help. My afternoon was free. I would go for a swim in the sea later and watch fishermen prepare their nets and boats. Later on I would go and look at the new litter of Carya's sow. Carya had promised me a female to keep as her sow had benn bred to mother's boar.

The door to our bedroom was barred when I tried to get in and wondered if Sisa was ill. I peeped through a crack between the fat wooden frame of the door and the door but I could see nothing because the room was dark.

Sisa, Sisa, open the door, I'm back from town and I need my towel, I called through. What are you doing in there?

Go away, came her voice. She sounded urgent and threatening. She sounded like she had a sore throat. I'm making a nest.

A nest? Where?

Here in the room.

With what are you building a nest? Straw?

My dreamworld of birds that Sisa had started in my mind was being quickly spurred on again and what she was doing in there suddenly seemed the most exciting thing. A dreamworld come to earth. A fantasy coming true. I imagined myself likewise making a nest with straw and palm fronds. Mother's shawl, soft and downy things. Anything. Anything.

People's clothes, she said. And blankets.

I want to see. I almost shrieked. Let me in.

She made no sound except shuffling, and I could hear the bamboo slats of the floor moving under her feet as she negotiated distance.

Let me in!

I went back to the kitchen for the bolo used for cutting firewood. I inserted the bolo into the door crack and pushed upwards to disloge the strip of wood that was used to bar down the door. The bar fell to the bamboo floor with a clatter and I pushed my way in.

My eyes widened in the closed room. Sisa was seated on the floor beside my baul. She was completely naked, her hair undone from its neat oily topknot. She was surrounded by a circular pile of clothing which I recognized as the laundry that had been out on the poles the day before. They were the clothing that she should have been ironing at that time of the day. The pillow rack was empty and I recognized the pillows among the surrounding humps of material around her. She was just there sitting in the middle of her nest, staring at me with dark round eyes with something like amusement and smugness in them, just as if she expected me to envy her.

An invisible breath of wind pushed in through the door and I felt cold. Outside I could hear grain being winnowed in baskets, and a coconut midrib broom scraping the dried cowdung floor to gather up fallen grain. I looked cautiously around the room as I backed out slowly, half expecting to be confronted by the presence of something that has long been expected and had finally arrived. I could see nothing else, I could see no one. Only Sisa smiling at me with strange sharp eyes. And I knew that even as I did not see the one who had arrived, that it was there in that room and it was eyeing me curiously, questioning my impertinent presence.

I closed the door as quietly as I could, pulling it into place onto the door frame, picked up the bolo, tiptoed the kitchen and down the stairs towards the rice shed to call mother.

At the Crossroads : Of Tradition and Change

2009-01-16T02:51:00.000-08:00

Chignon
Chi Chun

When Mother was young, she would weave her tresses in to a long thick braid. During the day she wound it in to a shell-like spiral and piled it high on the back of her head. Evenings she undid it and let it hang down her back. When I slept I would snuggle up close to Mother's shoulder and playfully wrap my fingers around the tip of her braid. My nose was continuously assailed by whiffs of "Twin Sister" hair oil mingled with the smell of her hair. Though the odor was rather unpleasant, it was part of the security I felt in lying by Mother's side, and I would fall quickly off to sleep.
Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, Mother would thoroughly wash her hair. According to rural custom, hair could never be washed on ordinary days as the dirty water would flow down to where the king of the underworld would store it up to make one drink after death. Only if the hair was washed on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month could the dirty water pass harmlessly out to the Eastern Sea.
So on that day, all the women in the village let their hair hang loose to dry over their shoulders. Some of the women with flowering hair were as beautiful as vineyard fairies, others as hideous as monsters. Take my fifth uncle's wife for example-a squat, withered old hag. On her nearly-bald head she used black ash to draw in square hairline, and then painted her scalp pitch black. Thus when shampooing her hair, the charcoal was completely washed away, and out shone the half-bald, shiny crown of her head, fringed with thin wisps of hair fluttering down her back. She would hobble to and fro helping my mother fix dinner. I never dared glance her way.
But Mother's raven hair was like a length of satin falling over her shoulders. When a breeze blew, locks of shorter hair would sometimes sweep against her soft white cheeks. She would squint, gather the hair in her hand, and smooth it back, but soon another puff of wind would pass by. Mother was near-sighted, and when she narrowed her eyes in a squint, she was remarkably beautiful. I thought, if only Father were at home to see Mother's glossy black hair, he certainly would go out and buy a pair of sparkling diamond hair clips for her to wear. Mother probably would have worn them a while, then, embarrassed, have taken them out. That pair of diamond clips would then become part of my headdress when I played bride.
Father returned home soon afterward, bringing not the diamond clips, but a concubine. Her skin was white and delicate, her head of soft cloud-like hair even blacker, shinier than Mother's. The hair on her temples seemed like folded cicada wings half-concealing her ears. Her hair, brushed back and knotted in a horizontal "S" chignon, covered the back of her head like a huge bat. She presented Mother with a pair of emerald earrings, but Mother just let me play with them, though. I thought she was probably saving them because they were too nice.
After the family moved to Hangchow, Mother didn't have to work in the kitchen anymore. Frequently Father would want her to come out and entertain guests. Her sever hairstyle really seemed out of place, so Father insisted that she change. Mother asked her friend Aunt Chang to style an "Abalone Fish" for her. At that time, the "Abalone Fish" was the style old ladies wore. Mother had just turned thirty, yet she wanted to look like an old lady. When the concubine saw it, she would only smirk, while Father would constantly wrinkle his brow. Once when we were alone, I quietly implored, "Mother, why don't you also do your hair into an 'S' twist and wear the emerald earrings that Auntie gave you?" Mother replied solemnly, "Your mother is a country woman, unsuited for that kind of modern fashion. How can I wear such fancy earrings?"
When "Auntie" washed her hair, she would never select the seventh day or the seventh lunar month. Within one month she washed her hair many times. After washing, a maidservant standing to one side would lightly swing a large pink feather fan to and fro. Her soft hair would float out making me feel light and dizzy. Father would sit on a sandalwood lounge chair puffing away on his water pipe. He often turned around to look at her and his eyes sparkled with laughter. "Auntie" dressed her hair with "Three Flowers" oil, and the perfume floated in all directions. Then she sat straight up facing the mirror, and entwined a glossy "S" chignon around her head. I stood to one side, entranced. She handed me a bottle of the "Three Flower" oil and asked me to take it to Mother. But Mother just put it in the back of the closet saying, "The smell of this new hair oil turns my stomach."
Mother couldn't always trouble Aunt Chang, so she styled a taut “Abalone Fish" herself. It turned out about the same as her first twist. Father didn't like it; even I thought it was awful.
At that time, "Auntie" had already hired a Mrs. Liu to dress her hair. Mrs. Liu wore a huge red bamboo pin in her hair and puffed and panted as her large duck feet carried her short plump body along. She came every morning at ten to fashion all different kinds of coiffures for "Auntie"-the "Phoenix," "Feather Fan," "Entwined Heart Twist," "Shallow Tail," etc. She was always changing the style. The coiffures accentuated "Auntie's" delicate skin and willowy waist, which more and more drew delightful smiles from Father. Mrs. Liu advised Mother, "Madam, why don't you dress your hair a little more fashionably?" But Mother, shaking her head, pursed her thick lips, and walked away without saying a word.
Soon afterward Aunt Chang brought a regular hair dresser, a Mrs. Chen, to Mother. She was older than Mrs. Liu, and had a huge flat yellowish face with two protruding shiny gold teeth. At a glance one could tell she was the kind of woman who liked to gossip. She would ramble on about people from old Mr. Chao's elder daughter-in-law down to General Li's third concubine, all while dressing Mother's hair. Mother sat wilted on her chair, not uttering a single word, but I listened with great relish. Sometimes Mrs. Liu and Mrs. Chen came together. Mother and the concubine would sit back to back in front of the breeze way and have their hair dressed. One could hear "Auntie" and Mrs. Liu talking and laughing; on our side. Mother just sat resting with her eyes closed. Mrs. Chen brushed and combed with less and less vigor, and soon quit altogether. I distinctly heard her tell Mrs. Liu, "This antique of a country hick-she still wants her hair combed and dressed." I was so angry that I cried, but didn't dare tell Mother.
From then on, I stood on a low stool and brushed Mother's hair into the simplest "Abalone Fish." I would stand on tiptoe and watch Mother in the mirror. Her face was already not as plump and radiant as when we lived in the country and she hurried about in the kitchen. Her eyes fixed on the mirror, she gazed at herself absent-mindedly, never again squinting and smiling. I gather Mother's hair a lock at a time and brushed, but I already knew that one little yellow willow comb couldn't brush away Mother's heartsickness-because from the other side of the breezeway came floating across the occasional tinkling sound of Father's and "Auntie's" laughter.
After I grew up I left home to pursue my studies. When I returned home for summer and winter vacations, I would sometimes dress Mother's hair. I gathered her hair together in the palm of my hand and felt it becoming sparser and sparser. I remembered back in my childhood when on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month I saw Mother's soft raven tresses flowing over her shoulders, her face filled with joy, and I couldn't help but feel heartbroken. When Mother saw me return home, her distressed look occasionally gave way to smiles. No matter what, the happiest time was when Mother and daughter were together.
When I was studying in Shanghai, Mother wrote to say she had rheumatism and couldn't lift her arms. Even the simplest twist came out all wrong so she just cut her sparse locks off. I clutched her letter in my hands, and as I sat bathed in desolate moonlight beside the dormitory window, I cried in loneliness. The late autumn night breeze blew over me and I felt cold. I draped the soft sweater that Mother had knit for me over my shoulders and warmth crept over me from head to toe. But Mother was old now; I couldn't always be at her side. She has cut off her thinning hair, but how could she trim away a heart full of sorrows?
Soon afterward, "Auntie" came to Shanghai on business and brought me a picture of Mother, I hadn't seen her for three years-her hair had already turned silvery white. Saddened, I stared dumbly at the picture, yet had no way of pouring out my feelings to "Auntie," who stood before me. Almost as if sympathizing with my thoughts of Mother, she rambled on and on about Mother's present condition, saying her heart was weak and she was troubled again with rheumatism, so she was not as strong as before. I bowed my head and listened in silence, thinking that it was she who had made my mother unhappy all her life. But I didn't hate her anymore, not even a little bit, because since Father's death, Mother and "Auntie" had unpredictably become friends in their mutual suffering. Mother had stopped thing her long ago.
I looked at her closely. She wore a gray padded cloth gown, with a white flower tucked in her hair. Her nape no longer was draped with the rich and versatile "Phoenix" or "Entwined Heart" twists of days past, but was covered by a very simple "Banana Roll." She didn't apply makeup, and appeared sad and lonely. I couldn't help feeling unlimited pity for her, because she wasn't a woman like Mother, contenting herself with a tranquil life. Having followed Father close to twenty years, she had enjoyed honor and wealth, but once her support was gone, her feeling of emptiness and loss was even greater than Mother's.
After coming to Taiwan, "Auntie" became my only relative, and we lived together for many years. In the breezeway of our Japanese-style house I watched her sit by the window brushing her hair. She occasionally pounded her shoulder blade with her fist saying, "My hands are really stiff. I'm truly old now." Old-she too was old. Her black hair, like a silken cloud in those days, had now gradually thinned out, only a wisp remained, and that was speckled with gray. I remembered the days of their rivalry in Hang chow, when she and Mother sat back to back in the corridor, having their hair coiffure, not exchanging a word. In a flash all that was past. In the human world, what then is love and hate? Old decrepit "Auntie" had finally started on a vague journey in an unknown direction. Her life at this time was lonelier than anyone else's.
Startled, I stared at her, and remembering her lovely horizontal "S" chignon, said, "Let me brush it into a new style, all right?" But she gave a nervous little laugh saying, "What do I still want to wear fancy styles for? That's for you young people."
Can I stay forever young? What she had said is already more than ten years past. I'm far from being young anymore, already callous and wooden toward love, hate, greed, and foolishness in this world. The days with Mother slip farther and farther behind me. "Auntie's ashes," too, are deposited in a lonely temple somewhere. What, after all, is eternal in this world, and what is worth being serious about?

War by Luigi Pirandello

2009-01-07T23:30:00.001-08:00

The passengers who had left Rome by the night express had had to stop until dawn at the small station of Fabriano in order to continue their journey by the small old fashioned local joining the main line with Sulmona.
At dawn, in a stuffy and smoky second-class carriage in which five people had already spent the night, a bulky woman in deep mourning was hosted in almost like a shapeless bundle. Behind her – puffing and moaning, followed her husband – tiny man; thin and weakly, his face death-white, his eyes small and bright and looking shy and uneasy.
Having a last taken a seat he politely thanked the passengers who had helped his wife and who had made room for her; then he turned round to the woman trying to pull down the collar of her coat and politely inquired:
“Are you all right, dear?”
The wife, instead of answering, pulled up her collar again to her eyes, so as to hide her face.
“Nasty world,” muttered the husband with sad smile.

And he felt it his duty to explain to his traveling companions that the poor woman was to be pitied for the war was taking away from her, her only son, a boy of twenty to whom both had devoted their entire life, even breaking up their home at Sulmona to follow him to Rome, where he had to go as a student, then allowing him to volunteer for war with an assurance, however, that at least sic months he would not be sent to the front and now, all of a sudden, receiving a wire saying that he was due to leave in three days’ time and asking them to go and see them off.
The woman under the big coat was twisting and wriggling, at times growling like a wild animal, feeling certain that all those explanations would not have aroused even a shadow of sympathy from those people who – mostly likely – were in the same plight as herself. One of them, who had been listening with particular attention said:
“You should thank God that your son is only leaving now for the front. Mine has been sent there the first day of the war. He has already come back twice wounded and been sent back again to the front.”
“What about me? I have two sons and three nephews at the front,” said another passenger.
“Maybe, but in our case it is our only son,” ventured the husband.
“What difference can it make? You may spoil your only son by excessive attentions, but you cannot love him more than you would all your other children if you had any. Parental love is not like bread that can be broken to pieces and split amongst the children in equal shares. A father gives all his love to each one of his children without discrimination, whether it be one or ten, and if I am suffering now for my two sons, I am not suffering half for each of them but double…”
“True… true…” sighed the embarrassed husband, “but suppose (of course we all hope it will never be your case) a father has two sons at the front and he loses one of them. There is still one left to console him… while...”
“Yes,” answered the other, getting cross, “a son left to console him but also a son left for whom he must survive, while in the case of the father of an only son if the son dies the father can die too and put an end to his distress. Which of the two positions is worse? Don’t you see how my case would be worse than yours?”
“Nonsense,” interrupted another traveler, a fat red-faced man with bloodshot eyes of the palest grey.
He was panting. From his bulging eyes seemed to spurt inner violence of an uncontrolled vitality which his weakened body could hardly contain.
“Nonsense,” he repeated trying to cover his mouth with his hand so as to hide two missing front teeth. “Non sense. Do we give life to our own children for our own benefit?”
The other travelers stared at him in distress. The one who had his son at the front since the first day of war sighed: “You are right. Our children do not belong to us; they belong to the country…”
“Bosh,” retorted the fat traveler. “Do we think of the country when we give life to our children? Our sons are born because… well, because they must be born and when they come to life they take our own life with them. This is the truth. We belong to them but they never belong to us. And when they reach twenty they are exactly what we were at their age. We too had a father and mother, but there were so many other things as well… girls, cigarettes, illusions, new ties… and the Country, of course, whose call we would have answered – when we were twenty – even if father and mother had said no. now, at our age, the love of our Country is still great, of course, but stronger that it is the love of our children. Is there any one of us here who wouldn’t gladly take his son’s place at the front if he could?”
There was a silence all round, everybody nodding as to approve.
“Why then,” continued the fat man, “should we consider the feelings of our children when they are twenty? Isn’t it natural that at their age they should consider the love for their Country (I am speaking of decent boys, of course) even greater than the love for us? Isn’t it natural necessity like bread of which each of us must eat in order not to die of hunger, somebody must go defend it. And our sons go, when they are twenty, and they don’t want tears, because if they die, they die inflamed and happy (I am speaking of decent boys, of course). Now if one dies young and happy, without having the ugly sides of life, the boredom of it, the pettiness, the bitterness of dissolution… what more can we ask for him? Everyone should stop crying; everyone should laugh, as I do… or at least thank God – as I do – because my son, before dying, sent me a message saying that he was dying, satisfied at having ended his life in the best way he could have ever wished. That is why, as you see, I do not even wear mourning…”
He shook his light fawn coat as to show it; his livid lip over his missing teeth was trembling, his eyes were watery and motionless, and soon after he ended with a shrill laugh which might well have been a sob.
“Quite so… quite so…” agreed the others.
The woman who, bundled in a corner under her coat, had been sitting and listening had – for the last three months – tried to find the words of her husband and her friends something to console her in her deep sorrow, something that might show her how a mother should resign herself to send her son not even to death but to a probably danger of life. Yet not a word had she found amongst the many that had been said… and her grief had been greater in seen that nobody – as she thought – could share her feelings.

But now the words of the traveler amazed and almost stunned her, he suddenly realized that it wasn’t the others who were wrong and could not understand her but herself who could not rise up to the same height of those fathers and mothers wiling to resign themselves, without crying, not only to the departure of their sons but even to their death.
She lifted her head; she bent over from her corner trying to listen with great attention to the details which the fat man was giving to his companions about the way his son had fallen as a hero, for his King and his Country, happy and without regrets. It seemed to her that she had stumbled into a world she had never dreamt of, a world so far unknown to her, and she was so pleased to hear everyone joining the congratulating that brave father who could so stoically speak of his child’s death.
Then suddenly, just as if she had heard nothing of what had been said and almost as if waking up from a dream, she turned to the old man, asking him:
“Then… is your son really dead?” Everyone stared at her. The old man, too, turned to look at her, facing his great bulging, heavily watery light gray eyes, deep in her face. For some time he tried to answer, but words failed him. He looked and looked at her, almost as if only then – at that silly, incongruous question – he had suddenly realized that his son was really dead – gone forever – forever. His face contracted, became horribly distorted, then he snatched in haste a handkerchief from his pocket and, to the amazement of everyone, broke into harrowing, heart breaking, and uncontrollable sobs.

Trifles by Susan Glaspell

2009-01-07T23:22:00.000-08:00

Scene: The kitchen in the now abandoned farmhouse of John Wright, a gloomy kitchen, and left without having been put in order--unwashed pans under the sink, a loaf of bread outside the breadbox, a dish towel on the table--other signs of incompleted work. At the rear the outer door opens, and the Sheriff comes in, followed by the county Attorney and Hale. The Sheriff and Hale are men in middle life, the county Attorney is a young man; all are much bundled up and go at once to the stove. They are followed by the two women--the Sheriff's Wife first; she is a slight wiry woman, a thin nervous face. Mrs. Hale is larger and would ordinarily be called more comfortable looking, but she is disturbed now and looks fearfully about as she enters. The women have come in slowly and stand close together near the door.
COUNTY ATTORNEY (rubbing his hands). This feels good. Come up to the fire, ladies.
MRS. PETERS (after taking a step forward). I'm not--cold.
SHERIFF (unbuttoning his overcoat and stepping away from the stove as if to the beginning of official business). Now, Mr. Hale, before we move things about, you explain to Mr. Henderson just what you saw when you came here yesterday morning.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. By the way, has anything been moved? Are things just as you left them yesterday?
SHERIFF (looking about). It's just the same. When it dropped below zer0 last night, I thought I'd better send Frank out this morning to make a fire for us--no use getting pneumonia with a big case on; but I told him not to touch anything except the stove--and you know Frank.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. Somebody should have been left here yesterday.
SHERIFF. Oh--yesterday. When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy--I want you to know I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by today, and as long as I went over everything here myself-
COUNTY ATTORNEY. Well, Mr. Hale, tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning.
HALE. Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes. We came along the road from my place; and as I got here, I said, "I'm going to see if I can't get John Wright to go in with me on a party telephone." I spoke to Wright about it once before, and he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet--I guess you know about how much he talked himself; but I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, though I said to Harry that I didn't know as
what his wife wanted made much difference to John--
COUNTY ATTORNEY. Let's talk about that later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but tell now just what happened when you got to the house.
HALE. I didn't hear or see anything; I knocked at the door, and still it was all quiet inside. I knew they must be up, it was past eight o'clock. so I knocked again, and I thought I heard somebody say, "Come in." I wasn't sure, I'm not sure yet, but I opened the door--this door (indicating the door by which the two women are still standing), and there in that rocker-- (pointing to it) sat Mrs. Wright. (They all look at the rocker.)
COUNTY ATTORNEY. What--was she doing?
HALE. She was rockin' back and forth. She had her apron in her hand and was kind of--pleating it.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. And how did she--look?
HALE. Well, she looked queer.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. How do you mean--queer?
HALE. Well, as if she didn't know what she was going to do next. And kind of done up.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. How did she seem to feel about your coming?
HALE. Why, I don't think she minded--one way or other. She didn't pay much attention. I said, "How do, Mrs. Wright, it's cold, ain't it?" And she said, "Is it?"--and went on kind of pleating at her apron. Well, I was surprised; she didn't ask me to come up to the stove, or to set down, but just sat there, not even looking at me, so I said, "I want to see John." And then she--laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh. I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said a little sharp:"Can't I see John?" "No," she says, kind o' dull like. "Ain't he home?" says I. "Yes," says she, "he's home." "Then why can't I see him?" I asked her, out of patience. "'Cause he's dead," says she. "Dead?" says I. She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin' back and forth. "Why--where is he?" says I, not knowing what to say. She just pointed upstairs--like that (himself pointing to the room above). I got up, with the idea of going up there. I talked from there to here--then I says, "Why, what did he die of?" "He died of a rope around his neck," says she, and just went on pleatin' at her apron. Well, I went out and called Harry. I thought I might--need help. We went upstairs, and there he was lying'--
COUNTY ATTORNEY. I think I'd rather have you go into that upstairs, where you can point in all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story.
HALE. Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. I looked...(Stops, his face twitches.)...but Harry, he went up to him, and he said, "No, he's dead all right, and we'd better not touch anything." So we went back downstairs. She was still sitting that same way. "Has anybody been notified?" I asked." "No," says she, unconcerned. "Who did this, Mrs. Wright?" said Harry. He said it business-like--and she stopped pleatin' of her apron. "I don't know," she says. "You don't know?" says Harry. "No," says she, "Weren't you sleepin' in the bed with him?" says Harry. "Yes," says she, "but I was on the inside." "Somebody slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him, and you didn't wake up?" says Harry. "I didn't wake up," she said after him. We must 'a looked as if we didn't see how that could be, for after a minute she said, "I sleep sound." Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to the coroner, or the sheriff, so Harry went fast as he could to Rivers' place, where there's a telephone.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. And what did Mrs. Wright do when she knew that you had gone for the coroner.
HALE. she moved from that chair to this over here... (Pointing to a small chair in the corner)...and just sat there with her hand held together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a telephone, and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me--scared.
(The County Attorney, who has had his notebook out, makes a note.) I dunno, maybe it wasn't scared. I wouldn't like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that's all I know that you don't.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. (looking around). I guess we'll go upstairs first--and then out to the barn and around there. (To the Sheriff). You're convinced that there was nothing important here--nothing that would point to any motive?
SHERIFF. Nothing here but kitchen things.
(The County Attorney, after again looking around the kitchen, opens the door of a cupboard closet. He gets up on a chair and looks on a shelf. Pulls his hand away, sticky.)
COUNTY ATTORNEY. Here's a nice mess.
(The women draw nearer.)
MRS. PETERS (to the other woman). Oh, her fruit; it did freeze. (To the Lawyer). She worried about that when it turned so cold. She said the fire'd go out and her jars would break.
SHERIFF. Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder and worryin' about her preserves.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. I guess before we're through she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about.
HALE. Well, women are used to worrying over trifles.
(The two women move a little closer together.)
COUNTY ATTORNEY (with the gallantry of a young politician). And yet, for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies? (The women do not unbend. He goes to the sink, takes dipperful of water form the pail and, pouring it into a basin, washes his hands. Starts to wipe them on the roller towel, turns it for a cleaner place.) Dirty towels! (Kicks his foot against the pans under the sink.) Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?
MRS. HALE (stiffly). There's a great deal of work to be done on a farm.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. To be sure. And yet... (With a little bow to her.) ...I know there are some Dickson county farmhouses which do not have such roller towels. (He gives it a pull to expose its full length again.)
MRS. HALE. Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men's hands aren't always as clean as they might be.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. Ah, loyal to your sex, I see. But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too.
MRS. HALE (shaking her head.) I've not seen much of her of late years. I've not been in this house--it's more than a year.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. And why was that? You didn't like her?
MRS. HALE. I liked her all well enough. Farmers' wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then--
COUNTY ATTORNEY. Yes--?
MRS. HALE (looking about.) It never seemed a very cheerful place.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. No--it's not cheerful. I shouldn't say she had the homemaking instinct.
MRS. HALE. Well, I don't know as Wright had, either.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. You mean that they didn't get on very well?
MRS. HALE. No, I don't mean anything. But I don't think a place'd be any cheerfuller for John Wright's being in it.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. I'd like to talk more of that a little later. I want to get the lay of things upstairs now. (He goes to the left, where three steps lead to a stair door.)
SHERIFF. I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does'll be all right. She was to take in some clothes for her, you know, and a few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. Yes, but I would like to see what you take, Mrs. Peters, and keep an eye out for anything that might be of use to us.
MRS. PETERS. Yes, Mr. Henderson.
(The women listen to the men's steps on the stairs, then look about the kitchen.)
MRS. HALE. I'd hate to have men coming into my kitchen, snooping around and criticizing. (She arranges the pans under sink which the Lawyer had shoved out of place.)
MRS. PETERS. Of course it's no more than their duty.
MRS. HALE. Duty's all right, but I guess that deputy sheriff that came out to make the fire might have got a little of this on. (Gives the roller towel a pull.) Wish I'd thought of that sooner. Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up when she had to come away in such a hurry.
MRS. PETERS. (who has gone to a small table in the left rear corner of the room, and lifted on end of a towel that covers a pan). She had bread set. (Stands still.)
MRS. HALE (eyes fixed on a loaf of bread beside the breadbox, which is on a low shelf at the other side of the room. Moves slowly toward it.)she was going to put this in there. (Picks up loaf, then abruptly drops it. In a manner of returning to familiar things.) It's a shame about her fruit. I wonder if it's all gone. (Gets up on the chair and looks.) I think there's some here that's all right, Mrs. Peters. Yes--here; (Holding it toward the window.) This is cherries, too. (Looking again.) I declare I believe that's the only one. (Gets down, bottle in her hand. Goes to the sink and wipes it off on the outside.) She'll feel awful bad after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer.
(She puts the bottle on the big kitchen table, center of the room, front table. With a sigh, is about to sit down in the rocking chair. Before she is seated realizes what chair it is; with a slow look at it, steps back. The chair, which she has touched, rocks back and forth.)
MRS. PETERS. Well, I must get those things from the front room closet. [She goes to the door at the right, but after looking into the other room, steps back.] You coming with me, Mrs. Hale? You could help me carry them. (They go into the other room; reappear, Mrs. Peters carrying a dress and skirt, Mrs. Hale following with a pair of shoes.)
MRS. PETERS. My, it's cold in there. (She puts the cloth on the big table, and hurries to the stove.)
MRS HALE (examining the skirt). Wright was close. I think maybe that's why she kept so much to herself. She didn't even belong to the Ladies' Aid. I suppose she felt she couldn't do her part, and then you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir. But that--oh, that was thirty years ago. This all you was to take?
MRS. PETERS. She said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want, for there isn't much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. She said they was in the top drawer in this cupboard. Yes, here. And then her little shawl that always hung behind the door. (Opens stair door and looks.) Yes, here it is. (Quickly shuts door leading upstairs..)
MRS. HALE (abruptly moving toward her.) Mrs. Peters?
MRS. PETERS. Do you think she did it?
MRS. PETERS (in a frightened voice.) Oh, I don't know.
MRS. HALE. Well, I don't think she did. Asking for an apron and her little shawl. Worrying about her fruit.
MRS. PETERS (starts to speak, glances up, where footsteps are heard in the room above. In a low voice.) Mrs. Peters says it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in speech, and he'll make fun of her sayin' she didn't wake up.
MRS. HALE. Well, I guess John Wright didn't wake when they was slipping that rope under his neck.
MRS. PETERS. No, it's strange. It must have been done awful crafty and still. They say it was such a --funny way to kill a man, rigging it all up like that.
MRS. HALE. That's just what Mr. Hale said. There was a gun in the house. He says that's what he can't understand.
MRS. PETERS. Mr. Henderson said coming out that what was needed for the case was a motive; something to show anger or--sudden feeling.
MRS. HALE (who is standing by the table). Well, I don't see any signs of anger around here. (she puts her hand on the dish towel which lies on the table, stands looking down at the table, one half of which is clean, the other half messy.) It's wiped here. (Makes a move as if to finish work, then turns and looks at loaf of bread outside the breadbox. Drops towel. In that voice of coming back to familiar things. ) Wonder how they are finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more there. You know, it seems kind of sneaking. Locking her up in town and then coming out here and trying to get her own house to turn against her!
MRS. PETERS. But, Mrs. Hale, the law is the law.
MRS. HALE. I s'pose 'tis. (Unbuttoning her coat.) Better loosen up your things, Mrs. Peters. You won't feel them when you go out. (Mrs. Peters takes off her fur tippet, goes to hang it on hook at the back of room, stands looking at the under part of the small corner table.)
MRS. PETERS. She was piecing a quilt. (She brings the large sewing basket, and they look at the bright pieces.)
MRS. HALE. It's log cabin pattern. Pretty, isn't it? I wonder if she was goin' to quilt or just knot it? (Footsteps have been heard coming down the stairs. The Sheriff enters, followed by Hale and the County Attorney.)
SHERIFF. They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it. (The men laugh, the women look abashed.)
COUNTY ATTORNEY (rubbing his hands over the stove). Frank's fire didn't do much up there, did it? Well, let's go out to the barn and get that cleared up. (The men go outside.)
MRS. HALE (resentfully). I don't know as there's anything so strange, our takin' up our time with little things while we're waiting for them to get the evidence. (She sits down at the big table, smoothing out a block with decision.) I don't see as it's anything to laugh about.
MRS. PETERS. (apologetically). Of course they've got awful important things on their minds. (Pulls up a chair and joins Mrs. Hale at the table.)
MRS. HALE (examining another block.) Mrs. Peters, look at this one. Here, this is the one she was working on, and look at the sewing! All the rest of it has been so nice and even. And look at this! It's all over the place! Why, it looks as if she didn't know what she was about! (After she has said this, they look at each other, then start to glance back at the door. After an instant Mrs. Hale has pulled at a knot and ripped the sewing.)
MRS. PETERS. Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?
MRS. HALE (mildly). Just pulling out a stitch or two that's not sewed very good. (Threading a needle). Bad sewing always made me fidgety.
MRS. PETERS. (nervously). I don't think we ought to touch things.
MRS. HALE. I'll just finish up this end. (Suddenly stopping and leaning forward.) Mrs. Peters?
MRS. PETERS. Yes, Mrs. Hale?
MRS. HALE. What do you suppose she was so nervous about?
MRS. PETERS. Oh--I don't know. I don't know as she was nervous. I sometimes sew awful queer when I'm just tired. (Mrs. Hale starts to say something looks at Mrs. Peters, then goes on sewing.) Well, I must get these things wrapped up. They may be through sooner than we think. (Putting apron and other things together.) I wonder where I can find a piece of paper, and string.
MRS. HALE. In that cupboard, maybe.
MRS. PETER. (looking in cupboard). Why, here's a birdcage. (Holds it up.) Did she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?
MRS. HALE. Why, I don't know whether she did or not--I've not been here for so long. There was a man around last year selling canaries cheap, but I don't know as she took one; maybe she did. She used to sing real pretty herself.
MRS. PETERS. (glancing around). Seems funny to think of a bird here. But she must have had one, or why should she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it?
MRS. HALE. I s'pose maybe the cat got it.
MRS. PETERS. No, she didn't have a cat. She's got that feeling some people have about cats--being afraid of them. My cat got in her room, and she was real upset and asked me to take it out.
MRS. HALE. My sister Bessie was like that. Queer, ain't it?
MRS. PETERS. (examining the cage). Why, look at this door. It's broke. One hinge is pulled apart.
MRS. HALE. (looking, too.) Looks as if someone must have been rough with it.
MRS. PETERS. Why, yes. (she brings the cage forward and puts it on the table.)
MRS. HALE. I wish if they're going to find any evidence they'd be about it. I don't like this place.
MRS. PETERS. But I'm awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale. It would be lonesome of me sitting here alone.
MRS. HALE. It would, wouldn't it? (Dropping her sewing). But I tell you what I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over sometimes she was here. I-- (Looking around the room.)--wish I had.
MRS. PETERS. But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale---your house and your children.
MRS. HALE. I could've come. I stayed away because it weren't cheerful--and that's why I ought to have come. I--I've never liked this place. Maybe because it's down in a hollow, and you don't see the road. I dunno what it is, but it's a lonesome place and always was. I wish I had come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now--(Shakes her head.)
MRS. PETERS. Well, you mustn't reproach yourself, Mrs. Hale. Somehow we just don't see how it is with other folks until--something comes up.
MRS. HALE. Not having children makes less work--but it makes a quiet house, and Wright out to work all day, and no company when he did come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs. Peters?
MRS. PETERS. Not to know him; I've seen him in town. They say he was a good man.
MRS. HALE. Yes--good; he didn't drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him. (Shivers.) Like a raw wind that gets to the bone. (Pauses, her eye falling on the cage.) I should think she would 'a wanted a bird. But what do you suppose went with it?
MRS. PETERS. I don't know, unless it got sick and died. (She reaches over and swings the broken door, swings it again; both women watch it.)
MRS.> HALE. She--come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself--real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and--fluttery. How--she--did--change. (Silence; then as if struck by a happy thought and relieved to get back to everyday things.) Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don't you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind.
MRS. PETERS. Why, I think that's a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale. There couldn't possible be any objection to it, could there? Now, just what would I take? I wonder if her patches are in here--and her things. (They look in the sewing basket.)
MRS. HALE. Here's some red. I expect this has got sewing things in it (Brings out a fancy box.) What a pretty box. Looks like something somebody would give you. Maybe her scissors are in here. (Opens box. Suddenly puts her hand to her nose.) Why-- (Mrs. Peters bend nearer, then turns her face away.) There's something wrapped up in this piece of silk.
MRS. PETERS. Why, this isn't her scissors.
MRS. HALE (lifting the silk.) Oh, Mrs. Peters--it's-- (Mrs. Peters bend closer.)
MRS. PETERS. It's the bird.
MRS. HALE (jumping up.) But, Mrs. Peters--look at it. Its neck! Look at its neck! It's all--other side to.
MRS. PETERS. Somebody--wrung--its neck.
(Their eyes meet. A look of growing comprehension of horror. Steps are heard outside. Mrs. Hale slips box under quilt pieces, and sinks into her chair. Enter Sheriff and County Attorney. Mrs. Peters rises.)
COUNTY ATTORNEY (as one turning from serious thing to little pleasantries). Well, ladies, have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?
MRS. PETERS. We think she was going to--knot it.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. Well, that's interesting, I'm sure. (Seeing the birdcage.) Has the bird flown?
MRS. HALE (putting more quilt pieces over the box.) We think the--cat got it.
COUNTY ATTORNEY (preoccupied). Is there a cat?
(Mrs. Hale glances in a quick covert way at Mrs. Peters.)
MRS. PETERS. Well, not now. They're superstitious, you know. They leave.
COUNTY ATTORNEY (to Sheriff Peters, continuing an interrupted conversation.) No sign at all of anyone having come from the outside. Their own rope. Now let's go up again and go over it piece by piece. (They start upstairs.) It would have to have been someone who knew just the—
(Mrs. Peters sits down. The two women sit there not looking at one another, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they talk now, it is the manner of feeling their way over strange ground, as if afraid of what they are saying, but as if they cannot help saying it.) MRS. HALE. She liked the bird. She was going to bury it in that pretty box.
MRS. PETERS. (in a whisper). When I was a girl--my kitten--there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes--and before I could get there--(Covers her face an instant.) If they hadn't held me back, I would have-- (Catches herself, looks upstairs, where steps are heard, falters weakly.)--hurt him.
MRS. HALE (with a slow look around her.) I wonder how it would seem never to have had any children around. (Pause.) No, Wright wouldn't like the bird--a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that, too.
MRS. PETERS (moving uneasily). We don't know who killed the bird.
MRS. HALE. I knew John Wright.
MRS. PETERS. It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale. Killing a man while he slept, slipping a rope around his neck that choked the life out of him.
MRS. HALE. His neck, Choked the life out of him.
(Her hand goes out and rests on the birdcage.) MRS. PETERS (with a rising voice). We don't know who killed him. We don't know.
MRS. HALE (her own feeling not interrupted.) If there'd been years and years of nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful--still, after the bird was still.
MRS. PETERS (something within her speaking). I know what stillness is. When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died--after he was two years old, and me with no other then--
MRS. HALE (moving). How soon do you suppose they'll be through, looking for evidence?
MRS. PETERS. I know what stillness is. (Pulling herself back). The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale.
MRS. HALE (not as if answering that). I wish you'd seen MInnie Foster when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons and stood up there in the choir and sang. (A look around the room). Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while! That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?
MRS. Peters (looking upstairs). We mustn't--take on.
MRS. HALE. I might have known she needed help! I know how things can be--for women. I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things--it's all just a different kind of the same thing. (Brushes her eyes, noticing the bottle of fruit, reaches out for it.) If I was you, I wouldn't tell her her fruit was gone. Tell her it ain't. Tell her it's all right. Take this in to prove it to her. She--she may never know whether it was broke or not.
MRS. PETERS (takes the bottle, looks about for something to wrap it in; takes petticoat from the clothes brought from the other room, very nervously begins winding this around the bottle. In a false voice). My, it's a good thing the men couldn't hear us. Wouldn't they just laugh! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a--dead canary. As if that could have anything to do with--with--wouldn't they laugh!
(The men are heard coming downstairs.) MRS. HALE (under her breath). Maybe they would--maybe they wouldn't.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. No, Peters, it's all perfectly clear except a reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing. Something to show--something to make a story about--a thing that would connect up with this strange way of doing it.
(The women's eyes meet for an instant. Enter Hale from outer door.)
HALE. Well, I've got the team around. Pretty cold out there.
COUNTY ATTORNEY. I'm going to stay here awhile by myself (To the Sheriff). You can send Frank out for me, can't you? I want to go over everything. I'm not satisfied that we can't do better.
SHERIFF. Do you want to see what Mrs. Peters is going to take in?
(The Lawyer goes to the table, picks up the apron, laughs.) COUNTY ATTORNEY. Oh I guess they're not very dangerous things the ladies have picked up. (Moves a few things about, disturbing the quilt pieces which cover the box. Steps back.) No, Mrs. Peters doesn't need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff's wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?
MRS. PETERS. Not--just that way.
SHERIFF (chuckling). Married to the law. (Moves toward the other room.) I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows.
COUNTY ATTORNEY (scoffingly). Oh, windows!
SHERIFF. We'll be right out, Mr. Hale.
(Hale goes outside. The Sheriff follows the County Attorney into the other room. Then Mrs. Hale rises, hands tight together, looking intensely at Mrs. Peters, whose eyes take a slow turn, finally meeting Mrs. Hale's. A moment Mrs. Hale holds her, then her own eyes point the way to where the box is concealed. Suddenly Mrs. Peters throws back quilt pieces and tries to put the box in the bag she is wearing. It is too big. She opens box, starts to take the bird out, cannot touch it, goes to pieces, stands there helpless. Sound of a knob turning in the other room. Mrs. Hale snatches the box and puts it in the pocket of her big coat. Enter County Attorney and Sheriff.)
COUNTY ATTORNEY (facetiously). Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to--what is it you call it, ladies! MRS. HALE (her hand against her pocket). We call it--knot it, Mr. Henderson.

The Blank Page by Isak Dinesen

2009-01-07T23:17:00.000-08:00

The Blank Page
Isak Dinesen

By the ancient city gate sat an old coffee-brown, black-veiled woman who made her living by telling stories.
She said:
"You want a tale, sweet lady and gentleman? Indeed I have told many tales, one more than a thousand, since that time when I first let young men tell me, myself, tales of a red rose, two smooth lily buds, and four silky, supple, deadly entwining snakes. It was my mother's mother, the black-eyed dancer, the often-embraced, who in the end -- wrinkled like a winter apple and crouching beneath the mercy of the veil -- took upon herself to teach me the art of story-telling. Her own mother's mother had taught it to her, and both were better storytellers than I am. But that, by now, is of no consequence, since to the people they and I have become one, and I am most highly honoured because I have told stories for two hundred years."
Now if she is well paid and in good spirits, she will go on.
"With my grandmother," she said, "I went through a hard school. 'Be loyal to the story,' the old hag would say to me. 'Be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story.' 'Why must I be that, Grandmother?' I asked her. 'Am I to furnish you with reasons, baggage?' she cried. 'And you mean to be a story-teller! Why, you are to become a story-teller, and I shall give you my reasons! Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.'
"Who then," she continues, "tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all -- where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page."
The old beldame for a while says nothing, only giggles a little and munches with her toothless mouth.
"We," she says at last, "the old women who tell stories, we know the story of the blank page. But we are somewhat averse to telling it, for it might well, among the uninitiated, weaken our own credit. All the same, I am going to make an exception with you, my sweet and pretty lady and gentleman of the generous hearts. I shall tell it to you."
High up in the blue mountains of Portugal there stands an old convent for sisters of the Carmelite order, which is an illustrious and austere order. In ancient times the convent was rich, the sisters were all noble ladies, and miracles took place there. But during the centuries highborn ladies grew less keen on fasting and prayer, the great dowries flowed into the treasury of the convent, and today the few portionless and humble sisters live in but one wing of the vast crumbling structure, which looks as if it longed to become one with the gray rock itself. Yet they are still a blithe and active sisterhood. They take much pleasure in their holy meditations, and will busy themselves joyfully with that one particular task which did once, long, long ago, obtain for the convent a unique and strange privilege: they grow the finest flax and manufacture the most exquisite linen of Portugal.
The long field below the convent is plowed with gentle-eyed, milk-white bullocks, and the seed is skillfully sown out by labour-hardened virginal hands with mold under the nails. At the time when the flax field flowers, the whole valley becomes air-blue, the very colour of the apron which the blessed virgin put on to go out and collect eggs within St. Anne's poultry yard, the moment before the Archangel Gabriel in mighty wing-strokes lowered himself onto the threshold of the house, and while high, high up a dove, neck-feathers raised and wings vibrating, stood like a small clear silver star in the sky. During this month the villagers many miles round raise their eyes to the flax field and ask one another: "Has the convent been lifted into heaven? Or have our good little sisters succeeded in pulling down heaven to them?"
Later in due course the flax is pulled, scutched and hackled; thereafter the delicate thread is spun, and the linen woven, and at the very end the fabric is laid out on the grass to bleach, and is watered time after time, until one may believe that snow has fallen round the convent walls. All this work is gone through with precision and piety and with such sprinklings and litanies as are the secret of the convent. For these reasons the linen, baled high on the backs of small gray donkeys and sent out through the convent gate, downwards and ever downwards to the towns, is as flower-white, smooth and dainty as was my own little foot when fourteen years old, I had washed it in the brook to go to a dance in the village.
Diligence, dear Master and Mistress, is a good thing, and religion is a good thing, but the very first germ of a story will come from some mystical place outside the story itself. Thus does the linen of the Convento Velho draw its true virtue from the fact that the very first linseed was brought home from the Holy Land itself by a crusader.
In the Bible, people who can read may learn about the lands of Lecha and Maresha, where flax is grown. I myself cannot read, and have never seen this book of which so much is spoken. But my grandmother's grandmother as a little girl was the pet of an old Jewish rabbi and the learning she received from him has been kept and passed on in our family. So you will read, in the book of Joshua, of how Achsah the daughter of Caleb lighted from her ass and cried unto her father: "Give me a blessing! For thou hast now given me land; give me also the blessing of springs of water!" And he gave her the upper springs and the nether springs. And in the fields of Lecha and Maresha lived, later on, the families of them that wrought the finest linen of all. Our Portuguese crusader, whose own ancestors had once been great linen weavers of Tomar, as he rode through these same fields was struck by the quality of the flax and so tied a bag of seeds to the pommel of his saddle.
From this circumstance originated the first privilege of the convent, which was to procure bridal sheets for all the young princesses of the royal house.
I will inform you, dear lady and gentleman, that in the country of Portugal in very old and noble families a venerable custom has been observed. On the morning after the wedding of a daughter of the house, and before the morning had yet been handed over, the Chamberlain or High Steward from a balcony of the palace would hang out the sheet of the night and would solemnly proclaim: Virginem eam tenemus -- "we declare her to have been a virgin." Such a sheet was never afterwards washed or again lain on.
This time-honoured custom was nowhere more strictly upheld than within the royal house itself, and it has there subsisted till within living memory.
Now for many hundred years the convent in the mountains, in appreciation of the excellent quality of the linen delivered, has held its second high privilege: that of receiving back that central piece of the snow-white sheet which bore witness to the honour of a royal bride.
In the tall main wing of the convent, which overlooks an immense landscape of hills and valleys, there is a long gallery with a black-and-white marble floor. On the walls of the gallery, side by side, hangs a long row of heavy, gilt frames, each of them adorned with a coroneted plate of pure gold, on which is engraved the name of a princess: Donna Christina, Donna Ines, Donna Jacintha Lenora, Donna Maria. And each of these frames encloses a square cut from a royal wedding sheet.
Within the faded markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility may read all the signs of the zodiac: the Scales, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword -- or even a heart pierced through with a sword.
In days of old it would occur that a long, stately, richly coloured procession wound its way through the stone-gray mountain scenery, upwards to the convent. Princesses of Portugal, who were now queens or queen dowagers of foreign countries, Archduchesses, or Electresses, with their splendid retinue, proceeded here on a pilgrimage which was by nature. both sacred and secretly gay. From the flax field upwards the road rises steeply; the royal lady would have to descend from her coach to be carried this last bit of the way in a palanquin presented to the convent for the very same purpose.
Later on, up to our own day, it has come to pass -- as it to pass when a sheet of paper is being burnt, that after all other sparks have run along the edge and died away, one last clear little spark will appear and hurry along after them -- that a very old highborn spinster undertakes the journey to Convento Velho. She has once, a long long time ago, been playmate, friend and maid-of-honour to a young princess of Portugal. As she makes her way to the convent she looks round to see the view widen to all sides. Within the building a sister conducts her to the gallery and to the plate bearing the name of the princess she has once served, and there takes leave of her, aware of her wish to be alone.
Slowly, slowly a row of recollections passes through the small, venerable, skull-like head under its mantilla of black lace, and it nods to them in amicable recognition. The loyal friend and confidante looks back upon the young bride's elevated married life with the elected royal consort. She takes stock of happy events and disappointments -- coronations and jubilees, court intrigues and wars, the birth of heirs to the throne, the alliances of younger generations of princes and princesses, the rise or decline of dynasties. The old lady will remember how once, from the markings on the canvas, omens were drawn; now she will be able to compare the fulfillment to the omen, sighing a little and smiling a little. Each separate canvas with its coroneted name-plate has a story to tell, and each has been set up in loyalty to the story. But in the midst of the long row there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to corner, a blank page.

Extra Credits for Finals!

2008-01-23T00:06:00.000-08:00

Here’s another chance for you to earn extra credits!
Watch any of the following productions at the Cultural Center of the Philippines:

Die Fledermaus , an Operetta (see details by clicking this link: http://www.clickthecity.com/event/detail.asp?evid=18975 )

Niel de Mesa’s “I Laugh You”
“Mga Obra ni Maestra” (Philippines’ 1st Animé play)

I am giving away extra credit of 20 points for class participation if you are going to see this one. There are only 3 requirements before you earn the contingency credits: 1. Inform me of the date when you are watching it (that means you are responsible in taking care of securing your own ticket booking.) 2. Watch it with your parents/guardians (This saves me the hassle of getting a parental consent. You may also consider this an opportunity to bond with them.) 3. Show me any proof that you saw it, otherwise, be prepared to answer my Q&A regarding the play. Your parents might want to read a review of the play before taking you. I post the article below sourced from clickthecity so you can read the other information about it.:

Koiné One Acts’ award winning play on courtship will be onstage at the CCP for Valentines! Niel de Mesa’s “I Laugh You” comedy and “Mga Obra ni Maestra” (Philippines’ 1st Animé play) will be onstage at the Huseng Batute on February 9 and 10.

Niel de Mesa’s Palanca award winning and critically acclaimed comedy, “I Laugh You” is back due to insistent public demand. A romantic farce about the psychological foibles of courtship, this “laugh-trip” play couples old Tagalog wordplay with speed dating. It will feature Koiné’s best actors; Eliza Agabin and Evert Gandarosa.

The one-act play will run in tandem with the revolutionary multimedia animé play, “Mga Obra ni Maestra”. Considered as one of the best plays of 2007 (PDI Dec 2007), this “Obra” earned standing ovations and accolades at the third Virgin Labfest which was held at the CCP last July 2007. The story revolves on three teens—with funky superpowers under the tutelage of the invincible Maestra. After receiving a text message that their nemesis, General Phorab, is on a rampage, the novice heroes eagerly muster their resolve to the society at large. The only “thing” discouraging them from doing so—are their parents. Will their stubborn resolve to save people suceed in the end or will the fear of being grounded overcome them? This play features the Koiné Elite Scholars; Nympha Gonzalez, Cashlyn Cuarez, and Abbey Gonzalez (cited as one of the best stage actresses of 2007). Both plays were designed by famed haute couturier, Edgar San Diego (President of FDAP). So bring your V-day dates or kids because there will definitely be something for everyone when Koiné comes back onstage this February.

Call 4337886 or (0917)972-6514 to reserve Koiné’s limited seats. Reserved seating only. You can vist Koiné One Acts at www.amazingkoineshows.com or email them at ktfi2001@yahoo.com. Tickets paid before January 15, 2008 can avail of our Php150 per ticket “early bird” promo price. Reserved and tickets bought at the CCP FOH / Box Office after January 15, 2007 will already be Php280 each. (NB: PLEASE ASK FOR STUDENT PRICE. DAPAT MAS MURA. 50% OFF siguro)

Week 10: Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka

2008-01-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

Week 10 Dividing lines: Differences in Class, race, Gender and Ideology

Telephone Conversation
by Wole Soyinka

The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises. Nothing remained
But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,
"I hate a wasted journey—I am African."
Silence. Silenced transmission of
Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,
Lipstick coated, long gold rolled
Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.
"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT
OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A.* Stench
Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.
Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered
Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed
By ill-mannered silence, surrender
Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.
Considerate she was, varying the emphasis--
"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.
"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?"
Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,
I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought,
"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding
"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."
"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused--
Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather
See for yourself?"

Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka uses irony to depict the absurdity of racism in his poem, "Telephone Conversation.

IRONY

the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, "How nice!" when I said I had to work all weekend.

a technique of indicating, as through character or plot development, an intention or attitude opposite to that which is actually or ostensibly stated.

(esp. in contemporary writing) a manner of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., esp. as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion.

Irony, sarcasm, satire indicate mockery of something or someone. The essential feature of irony is the indirect presentation of a contradiction between an action or expression and the context in which it occurs.

In the figure of speech, emphasis is placed on the opposition between the literal and intended meaning of a statement; one thing is said and its opposite implied, as in the comment, "Beautiful weather, isn't it?" made when it is raining or nasty.

Irony differs from sarcasm in greater subtlety and wit.

In sarcasm ridicule or mockery is used harshly, often crudely and contemptuously, for destructive purposes. It may be used in an indirect manner, and have the form of irony, as in "What a fine musician you turned out to be!" or it may be used in the form of a direct statement, "You couldn't play one piece correctly if you had two assistants." The distinctive quality of sarcasm is present in the spoken word and manifested chiefly by vocal inflection, whereas satire and irony, arising originally as literary and rhetorical forms, are exhibited in the organization or structuring of either language or literary material. Satire usually implies the use of irony or sarcasm for censorious or critical purposes and is often directed at public figures or institutions, conventional behavior, political situations, etc.

Some examples:

When something bad has happened:
"This is just great," or "That was just perfect."
In response to a bad joke: "That's just so funny," or obviously feigned (and often weak) laughter "Ha. Ha. Ha. NOT."
When a boring statement has been made: "Wow, great!"
When someone has thoroughly botched something: "Great job!" or "Congratulations!"
When somebody accuses another of something bad/wrong: "Do I get bonus points if I act like I care?"
Used when writing: I love school

The speaker of the poem, a dark West African man searching for a new apartment, tells the story of a telephone call he made to a potential landlady. Instead of discussing price, location, amenities, and other information significant to the apartment, they discussed the speaker's skin color.

The landlady is described as a polite, well-bred woman, even though she is shown to be shallowly racist. The speaker is described as being genuinely apologetic for his skin color, even though he has no reason to be sorry for something which he was born with and has no control over.

In this short poem, we can see that the speaker is an intelligent person by his use of high diction and quick wit, not the savage that the landlady assumes he is because of his skin color. All of these discrepancies between what appears to be and what really is create a sense of verbal irony that helps the poem display the ridiculousness of racism.

"The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent"

The first sentence of the poem includes a pun that introduces the theme of the following poem and also informs us that things are not going to be as straightforward as they appear. "The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent"

If we read over these lines quickly, we would assume that the speaker meant "Being neither good nor bad" by the use of the word indifferent . But, indifferent is also defined as "Characterized by a lack of partiality; unbiased." This other definition gives the sentence an entirely different meaning. Instead of the apartment's location being neither good or bad, we read that the apartment's location is unbiased and impartial.

However, we quickly learn in the following lines of the poem that the location of the apartment is the exact opposite of unbiased and impartial.

The speaker is rudely denied the ability to rent the property because of bias towards his skin color. This opening pun quickly grabs our attention and suggests that we as readers be on the lookout for more subtle uses of language that will alter the meaning of the poem.

"Caught I was, foully"

After this introduction, the speaker begins his "self-confession" about his skin color (line 4). It is ironic that this is called a self-confession since the speaker has nothing that he should have to confess since he has done nothing wrong. He warns the landlady that he is African, instead of just informing her. "Caught I was, foully" he says after listening to the silence the landlady had responded with.

I hate a wasted journey—I am African

Again, the word caught connotes that some wrong had been done, that the speaker was a criminal caught committing his crime. By making the speaker actually seem sorry for his skin color, Soyinka shows how ridiculous it really is for someone to apologize for his race. To modern Western thinkers, it seems almost comical that anyone should be so submissive when he has committed no wrongdoing.

ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?

Her goodness is seemingly confirmed later on when the speaker says that she was "considerate" in rephrasing her question (line 17). Her response to the caller's question included only "light / Impersonality" (lines 20-21). Although she was described as being a wealthy woman, she was seemingly considerate and only slightly impersonal. The speaker seems almost grateful for her demeanor. Of course, these kind descriptions of the woman are teeming with verbal irony. We know that she is being very shallowly judgmental even while she is seeming to be so pleasant.

The landlady, on the other hand, is described with nothing but positive terms. The speaker mentions her "good-breeding," "lipstick coated" voice, "long gold-rolled/Cigarette holder," all possessions that should make her a respectable lady (lines 7-9). These words describing her wealth are neutral in regard to her personal character, but allow that she could be a good person.
"How dark?,"

After recording the all-important question, "How dark?," the poem pauses for a moment and describes the surroundings to give a sense of reality that shows that the ridiculous question had really been asked (line 10). The speaker describes the buttons in the phone booth, the foul smell that seems to always coexist with public spaces, and a bus driving by outside. His description gives us an image of where the speaker is located: a public phone booth, probably somewhere in the United Kingdom.

The "Red booth," "Red pillar-box," and "Red double-tiered / Omnibus" are all things that one might find in Leeds, the British city in which Soyinka had been studying prior to writing this poem). In addition to the literal images that this description creates, a sense of the anger running through the speaker's mind is portrayed by the repeated use of the word red. This technique is the closest that that the speaker ever comes to openly showing anger in the poem. Although it is hidden with seemingly polite language, a glimpse of the speaker's anger appears in this quick pause in the conversation.

In the end, the landlady repeats her question and the speaker is forced to reveal how dark he is. "West African sepia," he says, citing his passport . She claims not to know what that means. She wants a quantifiable expression of his darkness. His response, feigning simplicity is that his face is "brunette," his hands and feet "peroxide blonde" and his bottom "raven black". He knows that she just wants a measure of his overall skin-color so that she can categorize him, but he refuses to give it to her. Instead he details the different colors of different parts of his body.

"wouldn't you rather / See for yourself?"

As it was meant to, this greatly annoys the landlady and she hangs up on him. In closing, he asks the then empty telephone line, "wouldn't you rather / See for yourself?" The speaker, still playing his ignorance of what the lady was truly asking, sounds as though he is asking whether the landlady would like to meet him in person to judge his skin color for herself. The irony in this question, though, lies in the fact that we know the speaker is actually referring to his black bottom when he asks the woman if she wants to see it for herself. Still feigning politeness, the speaker offers to show his backside to the racist landlady.

Throughout the poem, yet another form of irony is created by the speaker's use of high diction, which shows his education. Although the landlady refuses to rent an apartment to him because of his African heritage and the supposed savagery that accompanies it, the speaker is clearly a well educated individual.

Words like "pipped," "rancid," and "spectroscopic" are not words that a savage brute would have in his vocabulary (lines 9, 12, 23). The speaker's intelligence is further shown through his use of sarcasm and wit in response to the landlady's questions. Although he pretends politeness the entire time, he includes subtle meanings in his speech. The fact that a black man could outwit and make a white woman seem foolish shows the irony in judging people based on their skin color.

Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation" is packed with subtleties. The puns, irony, and sarcasm employed help him to show the ridiculousness of racism. The conversation we observe is comical, as is the entire notion that a man can be judged based on the color of his skin.

TRIFLES by Susan Glaspell

2008-01-22T23:57:00.000-08:00

The lecture below is based on the following papers:

The Treatment Of Women In Trifles
by Adam Krentzman

The Use of Symbols in Trifles
by A. Dawn Baire

Major Theme

Sexual: In this play women are pitted against men--Minnie against her husband, the two women against their husbands and the other men. The men are logical, arrogant, stupid; the women are sympathetic and drawn to empathize with Minnie and forgive her her crime.

Politics of Gender

The play, Trifles, which was originally entitled "Jury of Her Peers," was a vehicle for the expression of Glaspell's views on the treatment of women in the 1900's.

Through "Trifles" Glaspell is able to bring attention to the poor conditions women faced, and the sexual inequality they encountered.

The way that Glaspell accomplishes this is through the conversation of two women after a murder. The murder is that of John Wright. It is being investigated by the County Attorney and the Sheriff. Both are men and both believe that John Wright's wife killed him but they can't prove it, so they go to the house with Mr. Hale, who was first on the scene, looking for evidence. With them they bring two women, Mrs. Hale, Mr. Hale's wife and a neighbor to the Wright's, and Mrs. Peters, the sheriff's wife.

The men when they go into the house see a very different picture than what the women see. What the men see is a messy house that is poorly taken care of, but no reasons why Mrs. Wright would kill her husband.

Dirty towels

Broken jars of preserves

To the men such things are just " women's trifles" but the women know that Mrs. Peters must have worked hard to make the preserves. Mr. Hale just says, "Well, women are used to worrying over trifles." This is just another example of how the men saw women as inferior and the often hard work that they did as frivolous.

In the end the men are unable to find evidence but are going to convict Mrs. Wright anyway. However the women have found the evidence and know what happened. They conclude that Mrs. Wright was treated poorly by her husband, as many women of the time were, and she just couldn't take it any more. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters feel bad because they never visited Mrs. Wright and they both knew from experience how lonely it can be for a woman who has no children. The men could never come to this conclusion because they can't see a man treating a woman poorly.

The first symbol is found in Minnie's quilting.

Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale stumble across some squares that Minnie had sewed, all of which were sewn in a neat and orderly fashion, except one which was sewn haphazardly and carelessly. This befuddles the women and they wonder why she had evidently not cared about this particular square. "Why, it looks as if she didn't know what she was about!" Mrs. Hale comments. The women discuss it for a few moments and impulsively, Mrs. Hale decides to rip a few stitches and resew the piece. Mrs. Peters, who "is married to the law," is upset over Mrs. Hale's abrupt decision, wishing instead that she would leave things alone.

The women discuss whether or not Minnie hoped to quilt it or just knot it and decide she was probably going to knot it. Knotting is not only the easier of the quilting techniques, but is also the way in which John was killed. Minnie tells Mr. Hale that "he died of a rope round his neck" while he slept. Everyone feels this is a strange way to kill a man. Mrs. Peters notes "It must have been done awful crafty and still."

The other symbol is found in a dead bird wrapped in silk

Mrs. Hale says that "[Minnie] was kind of like a bird herself..." She also says that "when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir," she was full of life and probably a very happy and pretty girl. The women decide John would not have liked the bird because he was "close," "hard," and like a "raw wind that gets to the bone."

Mrs. Peters exclaims "Somebody-wrung-its-neck." Mrs. Hale says of Minnie, "She used to sing. [John] killed that, too." Although it is never implicitly stated, it is obvious that John killed the bird and because of the "stillness," isolation and loneliness Minnie felt, she killed John.
As previously stated, Glaspell uses symbols to further her theme. Had the men not degraded the women and their "trifles," they may have found the evidence they sought.

Why trifles?

The little things, the "trifles" that the men dismiss, are all that the women need to discern what happened to John Wright. The little bird with its neck wrung parallels John Wright's death. The same knots used in quilting are inferred to have strangled John, and the lack of attention he paid to his home, much less his wife, clearly shows that this man was like all the rest of the midwestern men--uncaring.

The uncaring concern and the lack of attention for detail are what Mr. Hale, the Sheriff, and the County Attorney do not have in their quest for evidence; therefore, everything else around them is petty and insignificant. This distinction includes the women as well.

"Trifles" emphasizes the actual dismissal of the women. If women were not merely relegated to running the farm, then perhaps they would not resort to killing their husbands in an effort to bring some peace into their lives.

Study questions

1. In Trifles how does the physical location of the characters help develop the theme? Who are more fully developed, the two women or the three men? Indicate several ways Susan Glaspell conditions the audience to accept the final decision.

2. In the play, Trifles, women are pitted against their husbands and other men. How are the men and women portrayed?

3. The play has mythic elements: the setting is a bleak landscape; the main characters are never seen on stage; the struggle between them is echoed by the two women and three men on stage. Do these elements lift the play, from its regionalism, and give it a universal importance?

The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Li Po (Translation by Ezra Pound)

2007-12-28T03:13:00.000-08:00

"The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter"

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.

Lines 1-6
This opening stanza of 6 lines is organized around a central image of the river-merchant and his wife as a child, confirmed by the first component of the central image: the picture of a little girl with her hair cut in bangs. (The mark of an adult woman in the ancient Chinese culture was elaborate arrangements of uncut long hair.)Each line contributes to a clearer understanding of the central image of the children. The repetition in three separate lines of the verb "playing" to describe the little girl's activity at the front gate, as well as the little boy's presence on stilts and his circling around where she sits, emphasizes the natural, contented activity of children — almost as a part of the natural world referred to here by "flowers" and "blue plums." This stanza establishes the presence of the "I" and the "you" in the world of the poem.

Lines 7-10
The second stanza places the girl and the boy, the "I" and the "you," as a woman and man in the adult world. In ancient cultures, and in some cultures today, early marriages are customary, and it is often also the custom for the wife to refer to her husband by a respectful title. In the case of this poem the formality of the title is softened by the direct address of "you" added right after it.

Lines 8-9
establish the child-wife's shyness in this formal adult situation by offering a picture of her bent head and averted eyes, a shyness so extreme that she could not respond to her husband, no matter how many efforts he made.

Lines 11-14
The central image of this stanza is the growth of love between the young husband and wife. Her face, which in the first stanza has the bangs of childhood across her forehead, in the second stanza is averted and unsmiling, "stops scowling" in the third stanza. The vows of the marriage ceremony, "till death us do part," are evoked in lines 12 and 13 and poignantly reinforced by the triple repetition in line 13 of "forever." It is unclear whether "climb the lookout" in line 14 is a reference to a ritual performed in this culture by a wife after death, perhaps to look for other offers to marry that might come her way. If it is, it means that the wife as a widow does not want to do this. In any case, it is clear that there is nothing she wishes for after the death of her husband, so deep is her love for him now.

Lines 15-18
An image of separation is developed in these lines as the husband takes on his role as a river-merchant and travels the waters, conducting his work in the world on a distant island. The wife's statement of the length of his absence is expressed in one line, giving it full and emphatic force. And in line 18 the effect of this long absence is brought to full comprehension by the use of the natural image of the sounds of the monkeys that reflect back to her the sound of her own sorrow. The sounds that monkeys make are generally interpreted as chirping, happy sounds, but the weight of the wife's sorrow is so great that she can only hear the monkeys' noise as "sorrowful."

Lines 19-21
The first three lines of this final 11-line stanza are centered on the image of the river-merchant's absence. Line 19 indicates that he was as averse to this separation as she was. In line 20 the phrase "by the gate" (perhaps the same gate they played about as children), indicates that she has returned to this gate and in her memory sees him reluctantly leaving again. For her it is the scene of the beginning of his absence. And evidently she knows this scene well: not only is there moss growing there, but she is aware that there are different kinds of mosses, which she has not cleared away since his departure. They are now too deep to clear away.

Lines 22-25
In line 22 the sadness of the river-merchant's wife is again reflected back to her by the natural world, by the falling leaves and wind of autumn. This image becomes more defined with her observation of the butterflies in the garden, for they are "paired" as she is not, and they are becoming "yellow" changing with the season, growing older together. The butterflies "hurt" her because they emphasize the pain of her realization that she is growing older, but alone, not with her husband.

Lines 26-29
In these closing lines of the poem and the "letter" the river-merchant's wife reaches out from her lonely world of sorrow to her husband in a direct request: Please let me know when and by what route you are returning, so that I may come to meet you. This, however, conveys more than it would at first appear. Her village is a suburb of Nanking and she is willing to walk to a beach several hundred miles upstream from there to meet her husband, so deeply does she yearn to close the distance between them.

Source: Exploring Poetry, Gale. © Gale Group Inc. 2001.

Telling Lives: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in NO NAME WOMAN by MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

2007-12-28T03:01:00.000-08:00

No Name Woman” is the first section of Maxine Hong Kingston’s earliest book, the acclaimed The Woman Warrior.

Analyze “No Name Woman” in terms of its genre. Make three lists demonstrating the ways “No Name Woman” can be characterized as 1) a memoir, 2) an essay, and 3) a short story (fiction).

These questions encourage you to relate your own life to the story that Kingston tells us in “No Name Woman.”

1. This cautionary tale is meant to persuade Kingston to conform to her parents’ values. What is the argument behind the narrative the mother tells? Does it make sense to you? What might be a contemporary argument in a middle-class American family?

2. Were you ever put at an “outcast table” or anything comparable in your house or school? Did you ever hear of such a ritual? What did happen when you were punished? What kinds of things were you punished for? Why do you think these specific things were chosen?

3. Our syllabus directs us to take this selection following the theme of gender and sexuality (Telling Lives: Exploring Gender and Sexuality), how is this a tale about gender inequality? How does Kingston suggest this? How are relations between men and women portrayed here?

4. Kingston talks a good deal about spirits and ghosts. How do they function in this essay? Which parts of this piece seem true to you? Which seem fictional? Why does she blend these elements together?

5. Sexual mores change over time and from country to country. What specifically about the aunt’s context made her transgression so severe? How would her “crime” be viewed in contemporary America? Why? What do you think an ideal response would be?

Thanks to Dr. Kelli Olson and Mary Clare DiGiacomono at Piedmont Virginia Community College for the guide questions

The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2007-12-28T02:20:00.002-08:00

"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" is a short story about the body of a dead man that washed ashore in a town that desperately needed something to believe in. Through the literary effect of magical realism, the drowned man comes to symbolize all the beauty of life.
The children first saw the body that washed upon the shore. When they initially spotted it, the children thought it was an enemy ship or a whale, but when they removed the seaweed and other ocean debris that had become attached during its journey, there was no mistaking the fact that the large object was indeed a human body.

The children played with the body all afternoon and were stopped only when a passing adult happened to see them. Word that there was a body on the beach spread quickly throughout the village and, before long, the dead man was taken to the nearest house. The men who moved the man noticed that he was heavier than any body they had carried before, which caused them to assume that he had been floating in the sea for a long time. Because he was very tall, the villagers wondered if some people had the ability to continue growing even in death.

The village was quite small, about twenty houses in all. Because of this, all the residents knew each other and it did not take long for the residents to know that the dead man was not one of their own. The village was situated on a small cape with little land and no flowers. Because there was little spare land, villagers that died were buried at sea.

When night came, the men did not go out to work at sea as they normally did. Instead, they went to the neighboring villages to see if there was anyone missing. Meanwhile, the women of the village remained behind to clean the drowned man's body. As they removed the vegetation that had attached to him during his journey, they noticed that the plants and grasses were from faraway oceans. They also noticed that not only did he have a peaceful look on his face, but also that he was quite possibly the strongest and best built man they had ever seen.

Because the man was so big, the villagers had trouble finding a suitable manner in which to hold his wake. There was no bed big enough in the entire village, nor were there clothes that would fit him. As a result, the women decided to make him clothes from a piece of sail and some bridal linen. As they sewed his clothes, each woman wondered in silence what it would have been like to have the man live among them; they supposed his home would have been the biggest in the village and that his wife would have been the happiest woman in the entire village. They also imagined that he would have had the ability to draw water from the barren ground and that their village would be adorned with flowers. As the woman imagined all the great deeds this dead man could have accomplished, they dismissed their own husbands as weak, incapable men.

The women's thoughts were eventually interrupted by the oldest among them who pronounced that the man should be called "Esteban." While most of the women agreed with this decision, there were some who imagined him to be "Lautaro;" nonetheless, they conceded to the old woman's wishes and began to refer to the dead man as "Esteban."

After the women were finished dressing the man, they began to dread the thought of dragging him along the ground when the time came to give him his at-sea burial. As they contemplated this, they began to imagine how the man's size must have affected his life: having to duck his head through doorways, and always opting to stand during visits rather than risk breaking a chair. They imagined how people must have pitied him for his size.

The women's despair became even more pronounced when they covered the man's face with a handkerchief. With his face covered, there was no mistaking the fact that the man was dead and this brought many of the women to tears. Their tears turned to jubilation when the men of the village returned with the news that the drowned man was not known in any of the neighboring villages.

The men were puzzled by this reaction; for to them, the drowned man was just another thing to be dealt with. Anxious to dispose of him before the heat of the day bore down on them, the men began the task of constructing a device on which to carry the man to the cliff. They pondered whether they should tie a ship's anchor to him so that there would be no chance of his returning to their shore. Yet, as anxious as the men were to complete their task, the women found ways to delay the burial. They spent so much time decorating the drowned man's body with relics and other items that the men began to voice their impatience. In response to this, one of the women lifted the handkerchief from the dead man's face, an act that left the men as awestruck as the women by the drowned man's presence.

Now that they are united in their purpose, the men and women set out to hold the most spectacular funeral that the village had ever experienced. One woman went to a neighboring village for flowers and returned with another woman who had come to see the drowned man. This set off a steady stream of visitors and curiosity-seekers, all of whom came bearing flowers. Soon, there were so many flowers in the tiny village that it was difficult to walk.

Wanting to ensure that the drowned man had a family, the villagers selected a mother and father for him as well as aunts, uncles and cousins from among the village's remaining residents. When the time came to return the man to the sea, many fought for the privilege of carrying him to the cliff. As they walked with the drowned man through the village they became aware, perhaps for the first time, of how desolate and barren their streets really were.

Despite their earlier insistence that they would tie the heaviest anchor they could find to the drowned man, they reconsidered so that the man could come back whenever he wished. As they threw the drowned man back into the sea, they did so with the realization that he would forever be a part of them and that from this moment on, their village would no longer be complete. They also knew that Esteban's memory would forever remain with them. They would ensure this by painting their homes bright colors, digging for springs to irrigate their barren land so that they could adorn the village with more flowers than one could possibly imagine. They would do this all in the hope that, in years to come, their little village would become known as the place where Esteban lived.

litsum.com/handsomest-drowned-man-in-the-world

The Management of Grief by Bharati Mukherjee

2007-12-28T02:20:00.001-08:00

Some questions you need to answer:

What does the title "Management of Grief" mean?
How do the characters deal with their, or the others', grief?
How is Canadian government criticized?

I. Theory-- Stages of Grief Management in the story:

1. Rejection,
2. depression, (Depressed Acceptance)
3. Acceptance,
4. reconstruction

What is not considered? guilt/regret,
hope, prefers ignorance, or their own versions

mourning process: searching, waiting.

II. Characters:

The narrator (Mrs. Shaila Bhave)
Pam, escape, feeling neglected.
Kusum, accept fate.
Dr. Ranganathan, another kind of escape, while keeping the connection
the elderly couple leave it to their god; insist on their own way and believe themselves "strong."

III. The Moments: -- mourning -- release

IV. The Canadian government -- evasive, indifferent
Irish giving flowers and showing sympathy <--> not blaming on the whole group of people
because of some individuals
Judith Templeton--considers them ignorant, a mess.

On June 23, 1985, an Air India Boeing 747 left Toronto for London Heathrow, the first stop on its scheduled journey to Bombay. As the plane prepared to descend into London, it was destroyed by an on board bomb, sending the craft on a fiery path into the Irish Sea. All 329 passengers, ninety percent of whom were Canadians of Indian ancestry, were killed. From the outset, Sikh extremists were thought to be the perpetrators of the worst terrorist event in the years prior to the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

"Management of Grief" begins in the aftermath of that horrible day in June 1985. The narrative voice, and in many respects the conscience of the story, is Shaila Bhave, a Hindu Canadian who knows that both her husband Vikram and her two sons were on the plane when it was lost. In the opening two pages, images of death and horror are the backdrop to the haphazard but well intentioned attempts by the Indian community of Toronto to help the families of the victims. Various neighbors, the president of the Indo-Canadian Society and children move in and out of the scene, which is driven forward by the observations by Shaila as to the confusion about the cause of the crash, and her own fanciful but maternal hopes that her family remain alive.

The opening pages of "Management of Grief" also set out the immersion of traditional Indian values and social mores into secular Canadian society-- the agony over the loss, the strangers in her kitchen making tea "the Indian way", the coming of a reporter to conduct an interview about the disaster, Shaila's desire to scream in the midst of the confusion, and her recall as to how they had initially come to Ontario-- all woven together, where the reader can imagine the riot of emotion that day.

The first segment of the story concludes with Shaila and her neighbor, Kusum, sitting together holding hands while the other well-intentioned members of their community move about them. Kusum has also lost her husband and a daughter who were on the Air India flight. Shaila tells us of the depth of Kusum's grief, a confrontation between Kusum's elder daughter Pam and Kusum as Shaila sits with her on the stairs, a challenge from the teenager that her mother was really wondering , "why not her?" Pam is a westernized teenager, who by example declares that she will take the Canada's "Wonderland" amusement park and the North American image it projects over Bombay. Her challenge goes unanswered by Kusum - she gives voice to the feeling of most of humanity when they suffer a personal loss - " 'Why does God give us so much if all along he intended to take it away?"

The second segment commences with Shaila meeting with a representative of the provincial government, an earnest and well intentioned young social worker named Judith Templeton. Templeton has contacted Shaila in the hope that Shaila can help her reach out to members of the Indian community whose family were killed in the Air India crash, but who are more isolated from the Ontario mainstream, through the barriers of language and Indian culture, than people like Shaila. Templeton tells Shaila that she has sought Shaila out because it is the opinion of the Toronto Indian community that Shaila is a very strong, resolute person in the face her family tragedy. Shaila outwardly is polite and obliging to Templeton, observing all of the social niceties, but to Templeton's suggestion that she is a stalwart.

Shaila concludes her meeting with Templeton offering to meet with her again, conflicted between the "terrible calm" she feels and how others have perceived her in the aftermath of the tragedy.

The third segment of "Management of Grief" continues four days later, on the coast of Ireland, overlooking the place where the Air India jet crashed in to the Irish Sea. Shaila has come to this place, joining Kusum and other mourners, to grieve and to identify the bodies of victims as they are recovered.

In this segment, Shaila recounts the contrasts between the hard facts of the ongoing police investigation - the cause and the fact that death would have been instantaneous, with the fanciful, abstracted words of Kusum as she sits on the edge of the sea, looking across the water. Shaila seeks relief from Valium; Kusum has consulted with a swami in Toronto, who has told her that all of the victims, Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Muslim, Parsi and atheists - all were fated to die together here in the Irish Sea..."They are in a better place than we are...my swami says that depression is a sign of our selfishness"

Shaila, half fanciful, tells us that they pretend to spot their loved ones on the waves at sea from their vantage point on the cliff. At one point, both Kusum and Shaila go into the water, hoping for a miracle, that perhaps there are survivors pinned under a rock close by, or that the swimming prowess of Shaila's sons might have resulted in a miraculous escape from the crash. Another mourner, an electrical engineer, joins them and asserts that he had not yet surrendered hope. Moments later, the engineer while talking about how a good, strong swimmer of 14 years of age might be able to rescue a younger child, he throws rose petals on the surface of the sea, the ancient Indian symbol to honor death.

Shaila returns to the hospital where the bodies of the crash victims are being taken for identification. It is the intention of those who can identify a loved one that the body will be transported to India for a proper burial ceremony. Shaila is asked to identify photographs of a boy recovered from the water - she cannot. Shaila says that it is only the "unlucky ones" who leave without their children's bodies. She travels to India with Kusum, to assist her with her own efforts to honor and bury her dead family members.

Shaila describes her return to India. On arrival, with Kusum, who had the carriage of the coffins of her husband and daughter, Shaila engages in a bitter row with a customs official - "Once upon a time we were well brought up women; we were dutiful wives who kept our heads veiled, our voices shy and sweet" - a contrast to the horror of the Air India crash and the stark sense of loss described in Ireland.

In India for three months after the disaster, Shaila then sets out some thing of a reversion from her Canadian life - she returns to the role of the only child in a family of wealthy, ailing parents. Shaila describes herself in this life of conflict between her Indian roots and her newer Canadian reality, as "I am trapped between two modes of knowledge. At thirty six, I am too old to start over and too young to give up. Like my husband's spirit, I flutter between worlds." Shaila describes the imperatives of custom felt by some of the men widowed by the Air India crash, the pressure to immediately re marry, and her own comparative luck in that no one will be seeking her, an unlucky widow, as a new bride.

Six months after the crash, Shaila describes how she saw her husband while making an offering at a temple to animist gods. Her husband is wearing the clothing he wore prior to the flight, and he tells Shaila, "You must finish alone what we started together." Shaila resolves to return to Canada.

In the next segment, Shaila describes how the relatives and loved ones of the Air India crash victims maintain their own sense of connection and community. She speaks with some affection for the efforts of those left behind to persevere. She also details her further contacts with Judith Templeton, the social worker who continues to endeavor to assist members of the Toronto Indian community who either refuse to accept the loss of their family members, or who have no ability to operate effectively in a Canadian culture of legal requirements, bank documents and government forms.

Templeton tells Shaila that the government want nothing more that to help the family members "accept" loss - acceptance she defines by moving ahead, taking college courses and receiving support from various agencies in the community. Templeton asks for Shaila's help in reaching out to a particular couple whose sons were killed, but who have evidently refused to sign anything presented by the government for fear such an act truly means there is no hope for their son's lives.

Shaila agrees to assist Templeton, with her own undercurrent of misgivings - the couple are Sikh, as were the alleged bombers of the Flight 182. As they sit having tea in the small apartment, Shaila describes the contrast between the attitudes of Templeton, who is sincere in her desire to advance what she sees as the interest of people who have suffered a loss, and the Sikh couple, whose attitude to Templeton and her efforts is stated as "God will provide, not government. . . When our boys return. . . . I will not pretend that I accept (their deaths)."
Templeton is hopeful that Shaila will similarly assist her with other of her difficult cases in the Indian community. Shaila does not; she simply walks away from Templeton and the efforts of officialdom to reach out to these people.

The story concludes with Shaila's observation regarding the irony in her families initial arrival in Canada to avoid religious and political problems, and the fact that they in fact became victims of that precise issue. She describes her walk on a winter day in Toronto, when she heard voices of her family telling her that her time has come and that she must be brave. Shaila, uncertain as to her direction, heeds their advice.

http:/litsum.com/management-of-grief

CATCHING UP

2007-12-28T02:20:00.000-08:00

Like I said, some selections that should have been taken up in our last few meetings should just be taken up in brief. Instead of scheduling a make up class due to the class disruptions brought about by extra curricular activities such as the HRM event (SCOR-4H5?), Outreach activities(1POL), parties, etc, we will just catch up online. It would now be our individual responsibilities to catch up (especially those classes affected.) I post the texts, my researches, old lectures and readings. You read, assimilate and understand and prepare for the major quiz and major exam for later :)

CRITICAL / SEMINAR PAPERS SUBMISSION

2007-12-27T08:42:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays to everyone! Thought you might need some pointers on how to go about your critical/seminar papers due for submission next year. You are welcome to visit my LIT102 website for pointers (www.ithmlit102.blogspot.com). Just click on the link and you will be redirected to the site. I have posted some pointers and guidelines in the site. Most of it, I actually just sourced from the internet too, so if you are following a format from another source (i.e. a book, or another internet site), please feel free to do so.

Chabella Wedding Cake from Like Water For Chocolate by laura Esquivel

2007-12-15T01:07:00.000-08:00

The novel “Like Water For Chocolate” deals with the shift from a traditional to a modern society & women’s liberation from the oppressive judgment of the society & the traditions that degrade them as well.

The novel falls under the genre magical realism. In magical realism, fantasy & other coexisting forces contradicting religion are infused into a story to uniquely illustrate a certain condition. Latin American writers commonly use this genre or writing style. Laura Esquivel perfectly & appropriately applied this writing style in her novel, which has received critical acclaim as it surfaced during the mid 90s.

Magical realism is a writing style in which fantasy and reality are combined to create a fantastic image or occurrence.

“Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor”

The quote describes an occurrence of childbirth. The author has combined the reality of childbirth with the fantasy of a baby being washed into the world on a large body of water. The deeper meaning of the quote is that Tita is born prematurely due to a sensitivity to onions which foreshadows the pain she will endure in life. An aesthetic image is created by contrasting the strong, sharp smell and taste of an onion instead of stating that Mama Elena will be cruel to Tita because she did not want her. While Mama Elena in her treatment of Tita could easily be compared to the step-mother in Cinderella, the author has used magical realism to show the cruelness in a unique way.

“That afternoon, when the uproar had subsided and the water had been dried up by the sun, Nacha swept up the residue the tears had left on the red stone floor. There was enough salt to fill a ten-pound sack—it was enough salt….long time”

Simile & Metaphor

A simile is a comparison between two basically dissimilar things. Similes use the words “as” or “like” to make a comparison. “A face like marbles.”

A metaphor is also a comparison but one that does not use the words “as” or “like.” “A heart of stone.” The implied or indirect comparison here is that the heart is as hard as a stone.

“How unfortunate that black holes in space had not yet been discovered, for then she might have understood the black hole in the center of her chest, infinite coldness flowing through it”

“Her hands were shaking and she was dripping sweat and her stomach was swooping like a kite on the wind”

lExplain how Tita’s relationship with Mama Elena is different from her relationship with Nacha.

lDescribe the elaborate banquet Tita prepared for Rosaura’s wedding.

How was Mama Elena able to obtain the French silk for Rosaura’s wedding sheet?

Who is the Chinaman? How was he able to become a millionaire during revolution?

What is your reaction to Mama Elena throwing such an elaborate wedding for Rosaura in the midst of the revolution? What conclusion can be made about Mama Elena?

What causes Nacha’s death?

How is Tita’s life similar to Nacha’s?

"Like Water for Chocolate" is a Mexican revolutionary-era "Heartburn," an overly rich fable on the mysterious link between sex and food. It aims to portray the onset of Mexican feminism in 1910, but it's really just another hearth-set Cinderella story, one that connects cooking to sorcery and servitude.

The tale focuses on Tita, a lovelorn cook who finds that the way to a man's heart is slightly south of his border. Tita, the youngest of the wealthy widow Mama Elena's three daughters, literally grew up in the kitchen "amidst the smell of chicken soup, thyme, bay laurel, steamed milk, garlic and, of course, onion." But, by family custom, Tita must forgo marriage to care for her mother till the day the wretched woman finally dies. Tita is consigned to the ranch's enormous kitchen, where she is expected to live out her days as a spinster.

But Tita is a scrumptious dish, a taco belle who has already won the heart of a handsome rancher, Pedro (gwapo ba?), whose request for Tita's hand is refused by Mama Elena. Instead Elena proposes he marry her eldest daughter, Rosaura , a selfish beanpole who dreams of a traditional life as mother and wife. "You can't just exchange tacos for enchiladas!" cries the middle daughter, Gertrudis, the spitfire of the bunch.

But Mama Elena is meaner than a tequila hangover, and Pedro, like his fairy tale forebears, is handsome but dumber than a half-baked adobe brick. To be near Tita, he agrees to the ill-fated marriage, which begins with a telling omen. When the guests at the wedding feast partake of the chabella cake prepared by Tita, they are overcome with tears and then nausea. Tita had wept into the batter, thereby flavoring it with her own sadness and barely suppressed desires.

Raised by the family's part-Indian cook, Nacha Tita learned not only the chemical but the alchemical reactions brought on by cooking. And these the film's narrator relates to the heroine's own heated state:

"Preparing the mole, Tita knew how contact with fire alters elements, how dough becomes a tortilla and that a breast untouched by love just isn't a breast but a useless ball of dough."

For all the metaphorical oven-stoking, the film isn't especially raunchy since most of Tita's specialties cause gastrointestinal distress. Her recipe for quail and rose petal sauce, however, made everyone felt the heat of her passions.

The sauce, which she squeezes from a bouquet given to her by Pedro, literally sends her sister Gertrudis into heat. In trying to cool down, she sets the bathhouse on fire. This draws the attention of a handsome revolutionary who happens to be passing by and lifts the naked woman onto his saddle and gallops off into the Mexican kabukiran.

The diverse characters in the novel “Like Water For Chocolate” have different significations in the society. Moreover, their characters can be appropriate in any race, culture or country that is also suffering from the strict dictates of tradition & society.

Tita is the protagonist & the central character of the novel. She signifies any ordinary woman in the society with her own principles & identity. However these women are subject to violence, not just by men but also by other women in the society, and to the traditions & other killing social norms. Given this kind of situation, she cannot assert her individuality, and thus, mislays her identity.

Since these women are subject to the harsh dictates of the society, and also traditions & other social norms, they repress their emotions. They are anxious on what the society might throw into them and they fear condemnation. However, in their own little ways, they try to fight oppression by simply objecting to it.

Mama Elena represents the traditions & the closed minded, harmful & violent society. She exudes the strong power & force that the society over its individuals through the reinforcement of social norms & standards, and the pressure of conforming to all of it.
Furthermore, she also reveals the epitome of a woman who grew into repression & bitterness. With those things, she forgot what real love truly means, the same way the society has forgotten the simple pleasures in life that could cause happiness due to the existing problems they encounter & the difficult life.

Her relationship with Tita reveals the hierarchy in the family, that there is a gap between parents & children. However this hierarchy is expressed in a very exaggerated manner.

Rosaura represents the continuing force of traditional society in the modern days. She is an ugly, unappealing remnant of the old society that has to be abolished & forgotten, and be replaced by a new approach that is more logical, rational & empowering.
The character of Pedro signifies those people who willingly & actually fight the control of the oppressing traditions. He symbolizes a revolutionary. Even if what he does is wrong, he would still go for it for the satisfaction of his passion & desires.

The half witty half sister of Tita represents the liberated type of women, more commonly called as the “woman of the world”. Although they are not the ideal women & they are denounced by the society, they are still contented with what they have become in their successes & triumphs. They are the women who have the strength to fight the suppressing cultural & social norms & inappropriate traditions of a certain society for the better expression of herself. Her character “embodies reckless indulgence of individual needs & disregard for societal norms”.

PATTERNS by Amy Lowell

2007-12-15T01:03:00.000-08:00

"It makes you want to rip your clothes right off and run about naked."
-from a blogger

Of the many images in this poem, the constant motions of the flowers and water drops, the dress the woman is wearing, and her daydreams of her lover are most crucial in developing this theme of freedom.

In "Patterns," Amy Lowell explores the hopeful liberty of women in the early
20th century through a central theme. A woman’s dream of escaping the boundaries that society has placed on her dissipates when she learns of her lover’s untimely death.

Consider the daffodils and other types of flowers moving freely in the wind. Using imagery to appeal to the reader’s sense of sight, these flowers are given motion, and they are described as, "…blowing," and "Flutter[ing] in the breeze,". This creates a sense of freedom and flexibility. The woman in the poem, presumably Amy, wishes to be like the moving flowers, carefree and jaunty.

The, "…plashing of water drops," and, "…plopping of the water drops," describe liquid in motion.
The fact that she notices such little details in a fountain shows how intent the woman is on being free and able to move about as she pleases. The unconstrained movement of the flowers and the water manifest a way of life that the woman would like to live. What is keeping her from the liberation that she longs for?

The images in the poem name the binding dress as the culprit, but upon reading deeper into the signs of the imagery, one will find that there is a more complicated reason for her misery. The "…stiff, brocaded gown" is mentioned many times throughout the poem. Of course, back in that time, the woman was not only in a rigid, uncomfortable dress in the heat of summer, but she was also most likely wearing a corset.

The Random House Webster’s College Dictionary gives the definition of brocaded as, "a fabric woven with an elaborate raised design, often using gold or silver thread." This stiff, imprisoning piece of clothing symbolizes the boundaries that society has placed on women during their time. They had to act properly, look nice, and uphold all standards—especially if they were to be courted and married to a respectable man.

"…the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel,"

This training leaves behind a blemish, or stain, of high order (pink) and eloquence (silver) that she merely knows how to uphold, and does not want to be a part of her true self. She feels that learning the way the public wants her to act and look has somehow hindered her true being.

"… run along the paths
And he would stumble after"

" ..choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths".

These lines show how the presence of her lover allows her to lead him, thereby breaking free from the boundaries held on her. She is also running through a maze, not walking along the paths. This shows that she is no longer doing what others have done and have told her to do, but she is creating her own path and displaying free will.

This imagery is used to show that in her future with this man, she will not have to live her life the way others have patterned it out for her. Through his love for her, she will be allowed to break the mold and be her own person. Unfortunately, her lover dies at war and she is back to where she began, wearing a stiff dress, following the paths already made, and waiting for another man to come along to rescue her from this prison cell.

what do you think became of this woman in the poem?

"In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?"

reveals that the speaker, much like the author views society's "patterns" in a negative way.

The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin

2007-12-15T01:01:00.000-08:00

Some Guide questions:

What is your personal response to "The Story of an Hour"? To Mrs. Mallard? In what ways do you think that your own experiences have affected your response?

What sort of person do you picture Mrs. Mallard to be? What sort of marriage do you think she has? Does her behavior seem plausible to you?

Were you surprised by the ending? Did you see any foreshadowing hints in the story?

Foreshadowing is used in written art and film to give hints about things to come in later plot developments. It can be very broad and easily understood, or it may be complex use of symbols, that are then connected to later turns in the plot. Sometimes an author may deliberately use false hints, called red herrings, to send readers or viewers off in the wrong direction.

A red herring refers to a device or diversion used to distract the onlooker from the original idea. Red herrings are often seen in films, adventure games, and puzzles. However, the most common use for a red herring is in literature, especially mystery and thriller stories.

Simply put, a red herring is an item which has no use in the story except to distract the reader from the real culprit. The red herring can take the form of a character, which the reader may believe to be the killer, only to discover later that he is innocent. Or it can take the form of an item which readers believe to be the clue to a discovery, but which turns out to be worthless.

What details of the story are especially significant? What questions do you have about the story at this point?

Readings for the 5th week

2007-11-29T11:36:00.000-08:00

PASSION FRUIT: GARDEN OF LOVE AND ROMANCE

SONNET #43, FROM THE PORTUGUESE
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints!---I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!---and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet 29
William Shakespeare

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,--and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings'.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines
Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Readings for this week

2007-11-26T20:25:00.000-08:00

Please note Reading Assignment. We shall take these selections after our discussion on the Joy Luck Club on Wednesday (MWF classes) /Thursday (TTH classes)

The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin
Patterns by Amy Lowell
Sandra by Barry Manilow

JOY LUCK CLUB

2007-11-23T19:48:00.000-08:00

*Will recap Initiations: Of Social Process and Institutions
*Group discussion on Joy Luck Club.
*Bingo/ Teaching Amy Tan’s novel as Literary/Filmic Text

Film Viewing: Joy Luck Club. Joy Luck Club will also be shown on Star Movies (available on Sky local cable) at 9:00 AM, November 25, Sunday morning. Tuesday will be the last day of Viewing. Other classes may also sit in my TTH classes during their vacant period on November 27. My Schedule on Tuesday:

100-230 Rm 308 Speech Lab
230-400 look for me on the 4th floor
400-530 Rm 310 (this is a rather big class, siksikan na sa klase, but ur still welcome. i'm sure class 3T1 will not mind, diba?)

From JOY LUCK CLUB
based upon the novel by Amy Tan
Film Showing

The Joy Luck Club, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1989, presents the stories of four Chinese-immigrant women and their American-born daughters. Each of the four Chinese women has her own view of the world based on her experiences in China and wants to share that vision with her daughter. The daughters try to understand and appreciate their mothers' pasts, adapt to the American way of life, and win their mothers' acceptance. The book's name comes from the club formed in China by one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, in order to lift her friends' spirits and distract them from their problems during the Japanese invasion. Suyuan continued the club when she came to the United States—hoping to bring luck to her family and friends and finding joy in that hope.

Amy Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club to try to understand her own relationship with her mother. Tan's Chinese parents wanted Americanized children but expected them to think like Chinese. Tan found this particularly difficult as an adolescent. While the generational differences were like those experienced by other mothers and daughters, the cultural distinctions added another dimension. Thus, Tan wrote not only to sort out her cultural heritage but to learn how she and her mother could get along better.

Critics appreciate Tan's straightforward manner as well as the skill with which she talks about Chinese culture and mother/daughter relationships. Readers also love The Joy Luck Club: women of all ages identify with Tan's characters and their conflicts with their families, while men have an opportunity through this novel to better understand their own behaviors towards women. Any reader can appreciate Tan's humor, fairness, and objectivity.

Themes: Initiations: Of Social Process and Institutions
Choices and Consequences

The Joy Luck Club presents the stories of four Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters. All of their lives, the Chinese mothers in The Joy Luck Club have struggled to make their own decisions and establish their own identities in a culture where obedience and conformity are expected. For example, when Suyuan Woo is a refugee during the Japanese invasion, she decides that she will not be a passive victim and will choose her own happiness.

"The Joy Luck Club: Introduction." Novels for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1998. eNotes.com. January 2006. 24 November 2007. .

An Introduction by Kamala Das

2007-11-14T05:43:00.000-08:00

An Introduction
Kamala Das

I don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.
I amIndian, very brown, born inMalabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don’t write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, halfIndian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre. I was child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
WhenI asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother’s trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. Don’t play pretending games.
Don’t play at schizophrenia or be a
Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when
Jilted in love … I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans’ tireless
Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,
The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,
Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I
In this world, he is tightly packed like the
Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.

The Myth of Sisyphus

2007-11-14T05:39:00.000-08:00

Week 2

B. Holding Up the Mirror: Towards Self-Discovery/Recovery

The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Aegina, the daughter of Aesopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Aesopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of the conqueror.

It is said also that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of the earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the aburd hero. He is,as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and th sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same time, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Oedipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without attempting to write a manual of happiness. "What! by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that silent pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Literary Glossary

2007-11-08T05:12:00.000-08:00

LITERARY GLOSSARY

setting
the time and place of the action in a story, poem, or play.

(authorial time is distinct from plot time and reader time, authorial time denotes the influence that the time in which the author was writing had upon the conception and style of the text.)

in medias res
"in the midst of things"; refers to opening a story in the middle of the action, necessitating filling in past details by exposition or flashback.

flashback
a plot-structuring device whereby a scene from the fictional past is inserted into the fictional present or dramatized out of order.

PLOT

plot/plot structure
the arrangement of the action.

plot summary
a description of the arrangement of the action in the order in which it actually appears in a story. The term is popularly used to mean the description of the history, or chronological order, of the action as it would have appeared in reality. It is important to indicate exactly in which sense you are using the term.

plot time
the temporal setting in which the action takes place in a story or play.

PLOT STRUCTURE

exposition
that part of the structure that sets the scene, introduces and identifies characters, and establishes the situation at the beginning of a story or play. Additional exposition is often scattered throughout the work.
rising action
the second of the five parts of plot structure, in which events complicate the situation that existed at the beginning of a work, intensifying the conflict or introducing new conflict.
falling action
the fourth part of plot structure, in which the complications of the rising action are untangled.
turning point
the third part of plot structure, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing. Also called climax.
conclusion
the fifth part of plot structure, the point at which the situation that was destabilized at the beginning of the story becomes stable once more.

CHARACTER

character
(1) a fictional personage who acts, appears, or is referred to in a work;
(2) a combination of a person’s qualities, especially moral qualities, so that such terms as "good" and "bad," "strong" and "weak," often apply.

major (main) characters those characters whom we see and learn about the most.

minor characters those figures who fill out the story but who do not figure prominently in it.

hero/heroine the leading male/female character, usually larger than life, sometimes almost godlike.

protagonist the main character in a work, who may be male or female, heroic or not heroic. Protagonist is the most neutral term.

antagonist a neutral term for a character who opposes the leading male or female character. Also the villain.

CHARACTERIZATION
characterization the fictional or artistic presentation of a fictional personage. A term like "a good character" can, then, be ambig-uous—it may mean that the personage is virtuous or that he or she is well presented regardless of his or her characteristics or moral qualities.

flat character a fictional character, often but not always a minor character, who is relatively simple; who is presented as having few, though sometimes dominant, traits; and who thus does not change much in the course of a story.

round characters complex characters, often major characters, who can grow and change and "surprise convincingly"—that is, act in a way that you did not expect from what had gone before but now accept as possible, even probable, and "realistic."
more on characterization

stereotype a characterization based on conscious or unconscious assumptions that some one aspect—such as gender, age, ethnic or national identity, religion, occupation, marital status, and so on—is predictably accompanied by certain character traits, actions, even values.
persona and personality

persona the voice or figure of the author who tells and structures the story and who may or may not share the values of the actual author.

personality that which distinguishes or individualizes a person; its qualities are judged not so much in terms of their moral value, as in "character," but as to whether they are "pleasing" or "unpleasing."

narrator
the character who "tells" the story.

first-person narrator a character, "I," who tells the story and necessarily has a limited point of view; may also be an unreliable narrator.

second-person narrator a character, "you," who tells the story and necessarily has a limited point of view; may be seen as an extension of the reader, an external figure acting out a story, or an auditor; may also be an unreliable narrator.
narrator

third-person narrator a character, "he" or "she," who "tells" the story; may have either a limited point of view or an omniscient point of view; may also be an unreliable narrator.

The unreliable narrator

unreliable narrator
a speaker or voice whose vision or version of the details of a story are consciously or unconsciously deceiving; such a narrator’s version is usually subtly undermined by details in the story or the reader’s general knowledge of facts outside the story. If, for example, the narrator were to tell you that Magellan was Spanish (not Portugese) and that he discovered the Philippines in the fourteenth century when his ship the Victoria landed on the coast of Palawan near present-day Boracay, you might not trust other things he tells you.

implied author
the guiding personality or value system behind a text; the implied author is not necessarily synonymous with the actual author

voice the acknowledged or unacknowledged source of a story’s words; the speaker; the "person" telling the story.

Focus and point of view

focus
the point from which people, events, and other details in a story are viewed. This term is sometimes used to include both focus and voice.

point of view also called focus; the point from which people, events, and other details in a story are viewed.

point of view variations

omniscient point of view also called unlimited point of view; a perspective that can be seen from one character’s view, then another’s, then another’s, or can be moved in or out of any character’s mind at any time. Organization in which the reader has access to the perceptions and thoughts of all the characters in the story.

limited point of view or limited focus a perspective pinned to a single character, whether a first-person-or a third-person-centered consciousness, so that we cannot know for sure what is going on in the minds of other characters; thus, when the focal character leaves the room in a story we must go, too, and cannot know what is going on while our "eyes" or "camera" is gone. A variation on this, which generally has no name and is often lumped with the omniscient point of view, is the point of view that can wander like a camera from one character to another and close in or move back but cannot (or at least does not) get inside anyone’s head and does not present from the inside any character’s thoughts.

unlimited point of view also called omniscient point of view; a perspective that can be seen from one character’s view, then another’s, then another’s, or can be moved in or out of any character’s mind at any time. Organization in which the reader has access to the perceptions and thoughts of all the characters in the story.
centered (central) consciousness a limited third-person point of view, one tied to a single character throughout the story; this character often reveals his or her inner thoughts but is unable to read the thoughts of others.

theme (1) a generalized, abstract paraphrase of the inferred central or dominant idea or concern of a work; (2) the statement a poem makes about its subject.

subject (1) the concrete and literal description of what a story is about; (2) the general or specific area of concern of a poem—also called topic; (3) also used in fiction commentary to denote a character whose inner thoughts and feelings are recounted

genre the largest category for classifying literature—fiction, poetry, drama.
motif a recurrent device, formula, or situation that deliberately connects a poem with common patterns of existing thought.

canon when applied to an individual author, canon (like oeuvre) means the sum total of works written by that author. When used generally, it means the range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers, and readers of a particular time and culture consider "great" or "major." This second sense of the word is a matter of debate since the literary canon in Europe and America has long been dominated by the works of white men. During the last several decades, the canon in the United States has expanded considerably to include more works by women and writers from various ethnic and racial backgrounds.

tragedy a drama in which a character (usually a good and noble person of high rank) is brought to a disastrous end in his or her confrontation with a superior force (fortune, the gods, social forces, universal values), but also comes to understand the meaning of his or her deeds and to accept an appropriate punishment. Often the protagonist’s downfall is a direct result of a fatal flaw in his or her character.

high (verbal) comedy
humor that employs subtlety, wit, or the representation of refined life.

low (physical) comedy
humor that employs burlesque, horseplay, or the representation of unrefined life.

memory devices also called mnemonic devices; these devices—including rhyme, repetitive phrasing, and meter—when part of the structure of a longer work, make that work easier to memorize.

imagery
broadly defined, any sensory detail or evocation in a work; more narrowly, the use of figurative language to evoke a feeling, to call to mind an idea, or to describe an object.

irony
a situation or statement characterized by a significant difference between what is expected or understood and what actually happens or is meant. See cosmic irony, dramatic irony, and situational irony.

Glossary Courtesy of W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC

Course Syllabus LIT205A for ITHM

2007-11-07T15:14:00.000-08:00

LIT205A Course Syllabus: World Literature
Instructor: Timothy Sanchez
Official website: www.lit205A.blogspot.com

General Course Objectives

The purpose of this course is to promote intellectual growth by strengthening students' abilities to read analytically and creatively, by filing in or reinforcing students' knowledge of the outlines of history, and by making students conversant with many major cultural landmarks and developing their sensitivity to cultural diversity through a critical study of the literatures of the world. This course intends to develop among students the ability to read, understand and appreciate the literatures of the world in order to deepen their knowledge of the complexities of human life and nature, and to inculcate among them the respect for people and cultures, love for nature, desire for peace and passion for truth and justice, which will, eventually, contribute to the enhancement of a compassionate, competent and committed global Thomasian.

Specific Course Objectives

At the end of the course, the students are expected to:

Identify, comprehend and value the different types and forms of literature across cultures;

Appreciate the significant human experiences exemplified in the different literary works;

Gain insights on the complexities of human nature, cultures, and practices through a close reading of world literatures;

Write a critique paper on a novel, drama or epic; and

Creatively transform literature to other artistic forms.

Learning Outcomes and Competencies

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to demonstrate the following on appropriate testing/evaluation instruments:

1. An ability to analyze a piece of literature and effectively write about it using appropriate critical strategies and other materials that I require.

2. An ability to appreciate literature in its broader social context and thereby garner insights into the human condition through examination of such fundamental relationships as those between man and self, man and society, and man and Nature.

3. An appreciation for the historical context of literature, how it affects and reflects the age in which it was written, and how it is linked to broader historical currents in politics, philosophy, psychology, science and art as well as how it resonates within contemporary culture.

Intellectual Competencies Expected of all Students Enrolled in General Education Courses in English and the Humanities

Students will find that although they are only taking this General Education course in their Junior class (General Education Course is supposed to be taken up in their freshman and sophomore years), this course will afford them the opportunity to refine their existing skills in the following six areas:

Reading: Reading at the college level means the ability to analyze and interpret a variety of printed materials.

Writing: Competency in writing is the ability to produce clear, correct, and coherent prose adapted to purpose, occasion and audience.

Speaking: Competence in speaking is the ability to communicate orally in clear, coherent, and persuasive language appropriate to purpose, occasion, and audience.

Listening: Listening at the college level means the ability to analyze and interpret various forms of spoken communication.

Critical Thinking: Critical thinking embraces methods for applying both qualitative and quantitative skills analytically and creatively to subject matter in order to evaluate arguments and to construct alternative strategies.

Computer Literacy: Computer literacy at the college level means the ability to use computer-based technology in communicating, solving problems, and acquiring information.

**Since ITHM Tourism students are taking this course in their Junior year, there is a much higher expectation from them especially since they have already taken up ENG1, SPEECH, LIT102, ETC.

Assessment Procedures

Students will listen to lectures, participate in class discussions through reporting, and write about the authors and works through activities that include essay exams and critical papers. Successful essays and papers must respond to the requirements established by the assignment prompt.

Traditional academic essays must contain a clearly stated arguable thesis, effective evidence used in support of the thesis, a clear organizational pattern, adequate paragraph development, paragraph unity and coherence, and appropriate and accurate documentation, including paraphrasing, quoting, and a "works cited" list at the end when requested by the prompt.

All essays, in quizzes and in papers must be written according to conventional standards of English grammar and punctuation and should not contain errors that significantly harm or diminish meaning. The following are considered major grammatical errors: sentence boundaries, subject/verb disagreement, and verb tense and form. All essays and papers must be written for the appropriate reader and the subject, occasion, and purpose of writing. They must contain complex sentence structure and effective word choice and include a title.

Consultation Hours
Office: ITHM Faculty Room E-mail: timi_sanchez@yahoo.com
Monday-Thursday, 2-3 p.m.

Grading
Students may earn a maximum of 435 points, and grades are based on the percentage of those points a student earns. The percentage is traditional. Grades are broken down as follows:

Writing Assignments, Group/Individual Reporting, Quizzes
135 pts., or 30% of your grade.
Prelim Examination
100 pts., or 40% of your grade.
Final Examination
100 pts., or 40% of your grade.
Attendance/Participation
100 pts., or 30% of your grade.

(Keep track of the points you have earned for the assignments listed above and convert them into a percentage to determine your grade. For more information on calculating your grade in class, see the information on Quizzes and Grade Calculation below.)

Quizzes and Grade Calculation

Quizzes will usually be worth ten points. I will not announce quizzes in advance; students should expect one at the beginning of every class period. Students will be given ample time to complete quizzes if they arrived to class on time, but if a student is late for class he/she will have less time to complete the quiz. In a 10-minute quiz, for instance, if a student arrives 8 minutes late, he/she will only have 2 minutes to complete the quiz. If the student arrives after the quiz is over or if the student is absent, he/she will not be allowed to make up the quiz. At the end of the semester I may have one make-up/replacement quiz to allow the student to improve his/her quiz score or make-up a quiz he/she has missed.

Prepare for quizzes by using the (1) course pack reader, (2)lectures in our official website (www.lit205A.blogspot.com) and (3) by reading taken lecture notes.

Lecture Notes

Taking notes from lecture is a required part of class and an essential habit of serious students. On any given class period I may ask the student to show me his/her notes for that class period. May merit or demerit points in class participation.

Attendance and Class Participation Rules and Point Deductions

Attendance is mandatory; absences should be rare; tardiness and leaving early will be penalized; disrupting class is unacceptable. Each student will begin the term with 100 points for attendance and participation; these are the points to lose for violating class rules:-15 points per absence-10 points for arriving late or leaving early-10 points for failing to bring your course pack and required materials-5 points for failing to take lecture notes or completing homework-10 points for disrupting class (examples are cell phones going off in class, having private conversations while class is in session, leaving your seat without permission in the middle of lecture, discussion, or other class activities, etc.)-100 points for cheating or plagiarizing, + failure for the assignment (notice that this means that if you cheat, you will most certainly fail the course. I reserve the right to refer you to the Prefect of Discipline as well.)If a student has accumulated more than -100 points, he/she will earn 0 points for this portion of the grade and the remaining points will be deducted from his/her overall grade. I expect active rather than passive learning. All students must be prepared for class. All students in this course must be prepared to ask and answer questions and participate in class discussion.

Reading Assignment as Homework

Essentially, the homework of students in this course is to read assigned texts. In between each class period, students are expected to review their lecture notes and the material covered in the previous class period, in addition to completing all assignments for the next class period.

Writing Assignment

Students enrolled in this course will write one paper during the term. I will provide separate assignment sheet for the writing assignment. The paper is due at the beginning of the class period on the date listed on the syllabus. Late paper will not be accepted. Writing assignments will be worth 50 points.

Exams

All exams may consist of identification, true-false, and short answer and essay sections. Exams may consist of open and closed book portions. My students will need an envelope to compile all quizzes and exams.

Academic Dishonesty

Student Responsibility: Students are expected to be above reproach in all scholastic activities. Students who engage in scholastic dishonesty are subject to disciplinary penalties, including the possibility of failure in the course and dismissal from the university. Scholastic dishonesty includes but is not limited to cheating, plagiarism, collusion, the submission for credit of any work or materials that are attributable in whole or in part to another person, taking an examination for another person, any act designed to give unfair advantage to a student or the attempt to commit such acts. Since scholastic dishonesty harms the individual, all students, and the integrity of the university, policies on scholastic dishonesty will be strictly enforced. (Refer to the Student Handbook for more information.)

Emergency Academic Continuity Program

Academic courses, partially, will hopefully be made available on the ELEAP Blackboard Academic Suite management system before PRELIMS (meanwhile, please refer to the subject’s official website at www.lit205A.blogspot.com)

This will allow me and my students to continue my teaching and learning via UST E-Learning Access Program (E-LeAP), UST BLACKBOARD Academic Suite management system, in case the university shuts down as a result of a typhoon or any other natural disaster. If the university is forced to shut down, I will notify my students using Blackboard (and/or via the official website) on how to proceed with the course. To receive credit for a course, it is the student's responsibility to complete all the requirements for that course. Failure to access course materials once reasonably possible can result in a reduction of the student’s overall grade in the class. To facilitate the completion of classes, most or all of the communication between students and the institution, the instructor, and fellow classmates will take place using the features in the E-LeAP Blackboard and/or though the course’s website.

In the event of a disaster or other disruptions of normal operations that would result to the suspension of classes, all students must make every effort to access an internet-enabled computer as often as possible to continue the learning process.

Contingency

Extra Credit To make up for absences, failing quizzes and examinations, or poor grades in the writing activities, students may earn extra credit by participating in any Literature-related cultural and literary activities at UST and the community; or by submitting additional written work (movie reviews; book reviews, etc.) about Literary-related topics. This may ONLY be resorted to after consultation with the instructor.

From time to time, I shall announce to class some related cultural and literary events which students may participate in and subsequently earn extra credit from.