Blog 2

How is it going to all who choose to read my blogs, I hope that mental answer is good!

After reading the directions of this week I was quite excited all to the sole fact of this week’s topic, and this topic my friends is symbolism. I like symbolism or the idea of symbolism because it looks beyond the superficial things of the world/society. I click with the idea of symbolism quite easily do to my great obsession with comic books and anime for as long as I can remember. In comics, a person usually reads about a super hero. Superficially a superhero is just a hero on steroids, that is someone who “saves the day" but looking at the hero symbolically they are symbolic for justice and altruism. This is the opposite for villains. What gets me going even more when a person looks at it in an even bigger picture everyone wants a good battle of good versus evil but they want good to always prevail. When it comes to heroes down to it the hero always beats the villain. Which ties into the comic makers giving into what the society wants which is good prevailing.

 This solidifies the reason why I love the literary element symbolism because symbolism can apply to everything in life and society, such as the typical modern family. Fathers for instance in the nuclear family are considered the paternal birthing unit but symbolically a father is a person of structure and security. This also can apply to mothers of a nuclear family. Mothers are superficially considered the maternal birthing unit, but symbolically they are the unspoken care givers and nourish the environment for eloquent minds.

John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums” is a perfect example of symbolism. At a first superficial glance, the text is just about an   apparently beautiful lady   tending to chrysanthemums. Looking at the   text symbolically reveals that the chrysanthemums and the woman attending to them are connected in much deeper way.  The woman attending to the chrysanthemums at first glance looks fragile and at that time period very weak due to her female biology (society view of woman at that time). The woman is very similar to the chrysanthemums in that way looking fragile and dainty, but  actually  when a person take a closer  look the woman is putting a "man's effort” into tending the chrysanthemums showing she is quite tough deep on the inside just as the chrysanthemums are touch at the roots but aren’t seen. Once the woman goes inside after talking to a visitor she looks dirty and worn, the woman begins to wash them vigorously to return to her pristine sate as how society wanted woman to be.  Once clean the woman walks around puffing out her chest like a man. To me this seeming strange behavior, pose of inner conflict within her, the conflict in her maintaining society’s view how woman should be or her pursing her aspirations to be touch and wild.

To me symbolism is a comparison of two things that eventually brought to an underlying concept. I’ve begun researching central ideas of symbolism of people, organizations and even bed stories. Anything, no matter how diverse those aspects of society may be.

Once again that is all for now fellow bloggers. Till next time cheers

Cheers!

Bog #1

Hello, to everyone reading.

 This is first of a series of blogs I will be writing for my English class. Over the next couple of weeks I will be just posting my ideas on the discussions we have in my online class. This week we divulged deeper into the core of a story which is plot, character and setting, at least in my opinion.

I analyzed the plot of the story “A rose for Emily” by Ernest Hemingway.  As I read on through the story the plot wasn’t set up in the usual manner following the chronological order of rising action, denouement, falling action etc...

The plot had all its parts, but how the author displayed the events in the story seemed to backwards. How so a person may make ask? Well   from the start of the story I discovered the main character was already dead and everyone was at her funeral!  This was probably the calmest or uneventful part of the story, the rest of the story just kept getting more and more intense and intriguing. As if the falling action came before the rising action which again I found perplexing but interesting.  But I digress back to the story of Emily; the author began to reveal the history of Emily and who she really was and why she was like that. I noticed the more I read the more  grotesque/awkward this woman named Emily was. The more I read the text  the more tension acquired,  knowing just by a guess something tragic and weird would probably take place. So all my anxiety paid off Emily had died and the climax of the entire story was that Emily had killed her suitor unfortunately and was sleeping with his dead carcass which was a complete shocker! But, out of this strange ending I finally realized the way the author developed this plot really captured my attention. As I sit back and ponder on the plot of this text a few questions danced along my mind. The question that arose from me immediately from this strange plot organization is that does plot have a chronological order and that it must obey it? Such as the falling action must come before the rising action? Also, does scrambling the order of plot, at times give a more successful story or does it hinder it?

The next big issue/subject of this week is setting and character. Even though I believe plot drives the story on to progress to a form of resolution, I’m at a standstill whether character or setting  gives life and emotion to a story that a reader feels when reading a story. When I say life, I mean a sense of understanding the situation of the story a form empathy I suppose. This week I also read Ernest Hemingway’s “A Soldier’s Home" to further understand character and stetting. In this text “A soldier’s Home" A soldier, who is the main character, returns home from war. The solider is distant to his family and seemingly grief stricken or in mental turmoil over something. The soldier’s mental turmoil causes his family much stress especially his mother. The mother in this story is extremely pivotal due without her none of soldier’s feelings could be picked up easily the mother served as the medium. The main character , the soldier, to me gave life to the plot because I could now understand the feelings this story i tried to portary.  My problem immedately arose right after this realization, did the setting of post war have anything to do with making the plot and story come alive?  After a few hours of thinking I’ve made up my mind, character and setting in a way coexist to bring alive the story to capture a readers emotions in my opinion. My final frontier for these discussions I’ve been having over the last few weeks is my fiction analysis paper, I wonder what text I will be given to analyze.

Well this is the end of my technically first blog, till next time my fellow bloggers.

Cheers!