Reading for Wed., 12/2

Read pages 465-479, Precision and Ambiguity & Picturing: The Language of Description.

Also, start working on your last response, handed out in class and available for download on Oasis. Below are the two websites from which you will find your personally-chosen poem to explicate:

• Verse Daily
• Poetry Daily

Homework: For next Monday, 11/30:

1. Read both Tone and Situation and Setting (p. 416-430 and p. 446-464)
2. Answer the question that follow these poems (typed out, single-spaced is fine):

• Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” (427)
• Agha Shahid Ali’s “Postcard from Kashmir” (428)
• Plath’s “Morning Song” (460)
• Thom Gunn’s “A Map of the City” (463-464)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Mimicking the Artist 2 (30pts): Drama

Due: Monday, November 23, 2009, worth 30 pts.

Guidelines:

- Write a 1-2 page, single-spaced short story (perhaps one brief scene from a larger piece) that serves as a creative homage to a writer you admire (or don’t!). In other words, you are writing an imitation of a famous, published writer.

- You can imitate a playwright we’ve read, or with teacher’s permission, a writer you’ve read and feel you understand what craftsmanship they are known for.

- Imitate/parody the author’s writing style – the literary device(s) that make them famous (plots, characters, language – dialect, syntax, word choice, dialogue –, theme, symbolism, tone, suspense, allegory, etc.)

- At the top, on left-hand side, head your paper with:
• Your name
• Mimicking _______ (insert their name)
• ID what in their play you’re mimicking (Plot, Language, Characterization, etc.)


Writerly Inspirations:

- Re-create one of the scenes from the play, only update plot, character, etc.

- Before OR after. Imagine the characters as they lived prior to when play starts, or take off with where play ends.

• Tom Stoppard’s famous play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is an example of writers doing this. He imagined the two characters interaction in the moments they were offstage in Hamlet!
• Ever heard of “fan fiction”?
• These are supporting characters in one play, made MCs in the new!

- Another way to play with the play: go the absurd route – Jane Austen must be flattered from the grave, as not only do people still write about the imagined married life of Elizabeth Bennett…Darcy, but there are also people who have completely taken over two of her famous novels to write Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

- Steal their themes. Feminism, the American Dream.

- Turn a tragedy into a comedy (which is another way of saying “go the absurd route”!)

Friday Reading Event for Students

The following was in my e-mail, and may interest you. I saw Coval read once, and it was quite entertaining.

Columbia's Silver Tongue and Verbatim present:
KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY
featuring Kevin Coval and Ismail Khalidi

FRIDAY, November 20th, 6:00pm
Quincy Wong Center, 623 S. Wabash, 1st Floor.

FREE and Open To The Public

6:00 -- SILVER TONGUE -- student readings followed by a poetic conversation about Israel and Palestine with Kevin Coval and Ismail Khalidi.
7:00 -- Discussion with Coval and Khalidi, dinner from Jimmy Johns.
8:00 -- SLAM -- hosted by VERBATIM. Come sign-up to participate!

KEVIN COVAL is the author of everyday people (EM Press, Nov.'08) and slingshots (a hip-hop poetica) (EM Press, Nov. '05), named Book of the Year-finalist by The American Library Association. Coval's poems have appeared in many periodicals and journals, on radio and TV, and have been performed on four continents in seven countries. Co-founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival, the largest youth poetry festival in the world, Coval is poet-in-residence at The Jane Addams’ Hull House Museum at The University of Illinois-Chicago and poet-in-residence at The University of Chicago’s Newberger Hillel Center. He also teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Playwright and performer ISMAIL KHALIDI graduated from Macalester College in 2005. He made his playwriting debut with Truth Serum Blues at the Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis. Khalidi has performed in several theatrical productions, including With Love from Ramalla and his work has been published in Mizna and Electronic Intifada. He recently received the Playwright Center's Many Voices residency award, a SASE/Jerome greant, and an Emerging Voices grant.

SILVER TONGUE is a student-curated series featuring word-based readings of any genre.

VERBATIM provides students with the opportunity to experience, learn, and create performance poetry beyond the classroom setting as a means of expression and self-exploration.

For more information, or to submit to participate in this SILVER TONGUE reading, please contact:
Dave Snyder -- dsnyder@colum.edu, 312-369-7459

Blog Links

Dear Students,

I have added (never too late in the game) some links to literature magazines, local important establishments' (Poetry Magazine, Poetry Center of Chicago) websites.

bests,

Chris

another cancellation: Wed., 11/4

Dear Students,

I am going to have to cancel today's class. I apologize for not making the announcement sooner, but I was intending to fight through the coughs. However, I really can't talk, and rest seems the best course.

For next Monday, finish Death of a Salesman. We will begin our Drama Unit on Monday.

Sincerely,

Christopher