It's been a while...

...since my last blog. Many events have happened since then, I won't go into all them at the moment though. My summer was great! Chase and I went to South Carolina in July to visit his grandparents and other family. They were all such friendly and caring people. Charleston is an amazing city!! So old and full of history!
I didn't have school this summer, so all I did was work.

Recent news however is not so good. I was bitten by a brown recluse spider and had a pretty bad reaction...so bad I have to have plastic surgery on the bite which is now a pretty good sized hole in my leg!!! It really sucks. I go see the surgeon on Monday (11-12) for an evaluation and hope to God they do the surgery this week!

Well...

Even though the semester is over I still plan on using this blog. So...my new job, I love it!!! My coworkers all seem very nice and I love the kids!!! The facility is very nice and professional, I am really enjoying it!! This week is Teacher appreciation week and today the parents put on a dinner for the teachers, it was a lot of fun and very sweet of them! So....


Having lots of fun!!!

(Week 16) End of the semester

I have really enjoyed this class and doing this blog. I plan on keeping it and adding to it what I read in the future. It has been an interesting class full of great discussions! I hope Dr. Hoc. and all my fellow classmates have a wonderful summer!!!


For Week 17----Good luck on finals everyone:)

(Week 15) More Mrs. Dalloway

The questions asked for Week 15 on Moodle where very interesting ones and dealt a lot with the psychology of the novel. I didn't realize how much psychology is emphasized until I answered those questions. What makes the novel psychological is the incorporation of Woolf's own life through many of the characters. I think this really heightens the stream of consciousness aspect!

(Week 14) Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway

Since I did Virginia and Leonard Woolf for my website, I did a bit more research on her. I enjoyed sharing my knowledge to other students; many of them didn't realize that Mrs. Dalloway was based on events in Woolf's life! And did she have an interesting life!!!

(Here's my website if anyone's interested:
http://www.geocities.com/soonerlady85/
marriedauthors.html)

One thing I like about Woolf, her style of writing and Mrs. Dalloway is her use of stream of consciousness. I love how authors reveal what characters are thinking, it is so very real!
*note in this image of the book, Mrs. Dalloway, who the publisher is...Hogarth Press. This was created by Virginia and Leonard Woolf!!! Just an interesting fact:)

(Week 13) James Joyce

I had a little trouble with James Joyce "The Dead." I enjoyed reading it but trying to understand what the author was intending was difficult. I thought the questions the class was to answer on Moodle helped dive into the story deeper. The comments from other students showed me more to the story.

(Week 12) Eliot and Pound

In my American Lit. class we discusses the relationship between T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. I didn't think much of it until I read Eliot's The Waste Land which Eliot dedicated it to Pound- "il miglior fabbro"-the better craftsman. I researched more about The Waste land and found that Eliot had shown Pound the first draft. Upon Pound's suggestions Eliot edited much of the poem, (I also learned Eliot's wife helped edit the poem)and mentored him. Even though there are many aspects that are different between the two's writing, but readers can see how each one helped and influenced one another.

(Week 11) Spring Break

For spring break I was able to go to Santa Fe!!! It was a lot of fun and I got to see so many wonderful places and eat at so many delicious resaturates! The weather was wonderful the entire time! I stayed at the Loretto Hotel which is connected to the famous Loretto Church. That staircase is truly amazing!

(Week 10) Yeats and Innisfree

After reading the poem, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" I became interested in "Innisfree" considering I had no idea what it was! I stumbled upon this information...


"I had [in London] various women friends on whom I would call towards five o'clock mainly to discuss my thoughts that I could not bring to a man without meeting some competing thought, but partly because their tea and toast saved my pennies for the bus ride home; but with women, apart from their intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. I was sitting on a seat in front of the British Museum feeding pigeons when a couple of girls sat near and began enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to one another, and I looked straight in front of me, very indignant, and presently went into the Museum without turning my head towards them. Since then I have often wondered if they were pretty or merely very young. Sometimes I told myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem "Innisfree," my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I could not have written that first line with its conventional archaism -- "Arise and go" -- nor the inversion of the last stanza." -from Origin of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
by W. B. Yeats, from his Autobiography

source: http://thoreau.eserver.org/yeats.html

(Week 9) Greater Depth of Great Expectations

Every time I read Great Expectations I like it more and more! I’m just a big Dickens fan!! I’m glad I was able to read it again in collage, I feel like I have dug deeper into the story, especially regarding Miss Havisham and Estella. I really enjoyed reading the response about her (Estella) in the discussions on Moodle. I felt I was a little harsh on Estella when I didn’t feel real sympathetic to her, but turns out, many others felt the same way!

(Week 8) Great Expectations

This week one of our questions was about feeling sympathy for Estella which I hadn’t given much thought because I never really cared for her character. But I have been thinking about her more and her personality. She didn’t have a normal child hood which could have contributed to her cruel emotionless attitude towards Pip and others. As I’m rereading the book, I have been paying more attention to her and feel a bit more sympathy for her but then I think of Pip as a stronger character because he didn’t let the abuse of his childhood consume his life; even though Pip has his own issues, he’s not going around beating up people!

(Week 7) Whispers of Modernism

I have always been a fan of Browning but this week I read a new poem by him, and saw a different side of him! "The Last Duchess" was a much darker poem then others I have read. They were usually love poems, but this one is very different. I enjoyed reading it very much and it shows(to me) how talented Browning is! I went to wikipedia.org where the site had an audio clip-hearing the poem out loud is amazing! I can really hear the emotion of Browning.

I also enjoyed the poem by Matthew Arnold, The Forsaken Merman. I like the symbolism of the poem and what Arnold was writing between the lines! I felt this weeks reading had hints of modernism, it shows many people where thinking of change.

(Week 6) The Victorian Age

The Victorian Age is one of my favorite literary periods. It includes some of my favorite authors such as Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy. This week I have really enjoyed reading about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she is a favorite author of mine along with her husband. I love the history surrounding the Brownings, for example how they met and keeping their relationship a secret.
My group for the website have been discussing and have come up with a theme for our website project; it is husband/wife authors of the English lit. since 1800. My couple is Virginia and Leonard Woolf. I’m excited about researching them, I already know a bit about her life, but there is always more to learn!

(Week 5) Poor, Helpless, Miserable Wretch

Poor, Helpless, Miserable Wretch

"But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me. . . . What was I?"
The Monster
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818

Mary Shelley gave her monster feelings and intelligence. Fatherless and motherless, the monster struggles to find his place in human society, struggles with the most fundamental questions of identity and personal history. Alone, he learns to speak, to read, and to ponder "his accursed origins." All the while, he suffers from the loneliness of never seeing anyone resembling himself. (from www.nlm.nih.gov/.../frank_modern_2.html)



Image: Madness, or A Man Bound with Chains
Artist unknown

(Week 4) Frankenstein

I have been reading Frankenstein and enjoying it. My fiancé however read the excerpt about social class and didn’t like Shelley’s writing style, claiming she was trying to hard to sound intelligent or scholarly. I didn’t think that when I read, but after hearing him read it out loud, he was right. Regardless, I am still enjoying the story, and I told Chase (my fiancé) that she was pretty young when she wrote Frankenstein and it was a first novel. After this discussion, I have become interested in Shelley’s other works, so I will see if her writings grew with her, which I don’t doubt.

(Week 3) Shelley and Keats

I enjoyed the works we read of Shelley and Keats, though I didn’t get a chance to read more of their works. I did read some of Queen Mab by Shelley, which I’m still reading.
From the two poems we read I favored Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, I just couldn’t get into the flow of Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, but I do love many of his other poems!
I have been reading Frankenstein and have been fascinated with Mary Shelley’s writing style, especially for her day! More to come about the novel...

(Week Two) Lord Byron

I have always enjoyed Lord Byron, particularly his Romance Poems. Since the beginning of week two I have been reading from The Love Poems of Lord Byron: A Romantic’s Passion. I read the introduction by David Stanford Burr, which informs readers quite a bit of the poet’s life. Many things I was already aware of, for example, Lord Byron’s many romantic liaisons with both men and women and his fight with gonorrhea. However, I was surprised by one of his lovers, Augusta, who was Byron’s half sister. According to Burr, throughout Byron’s life, he always loved Augusta. Many other women were jealous of the affection he showed his sister and their relationship was publicized and caused a scandal. This did not stop Byron completing some of his famous works such as Don Juan. And it did not stop the people from enjoying and respecting the talents of the poet.
Though I was surprised by his relationship with Augusta, this does not stop me either from enjoying the beautifully written poetry of Lord Byron.

MLK Day

"But I tell you, fellah christuns,
Things 'll happen mighty strange;
Now, de Lawd done dis fu' Isrul,
An' his ways don't nevah change,
An' de love he showed to Isrul
Was n't all on Isrul spent;
Now don't run an' tell yo' mastahs
Dat I 's preachin' discontent.

'Cause I is n't; I 'se a-judgin'
Bible people by deir ac's;
I 'se a-givin' you de Scriptuah,
I 'se a-handin' you de fac's.
Cose ole Pher'oh b'lieved in slav'ry,
But de Lawd he let him see,
Dat de people he put bref in,--
Evah mothah's son was free."

-from "An Ante-Bellum Sermon" by Paul Dunbar

(Week One) Wordsworth and Nature

I have really enjoyed reading Wordsworth's poetry-I'm a big fan of lyrical poetry. I just never could get into the poetry that is prose put into stanzas. I have noticed that a lot of classical poetry is lyrical.
One of the things I like best about Wordsworth is his incorporation of nature. He captures the relationship with humans and nature so beautifully with his words. I love nature...that is why his poetry touches me so. He can capture all sorts of emotions within the realms of nature.

“A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods
At noon; and mid the calm of summer nights,
When, by the margin of the trembling Lake,
Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine”- from "Influence of Natural Objects"

Getting Started

Well, this is a start! I'm new at this so here it goes...