My Writing: Shelby Dana

This semester was really beneficial for me as a writer and a literary critic.  I learned a lot of different techniques that I had never considered using before!  While some of them I didn’t love, many were really helpful and I’ll definitely use them in the future.

One of my favorite things we did this semester was study the poetry of John Donne and then watch the movie W;t.  It was so good for me to see the difference between a play and film adaptation and all of the different aspects of it  (found here) I found myself not only going deeper into the film itself, but understanding the poem better because of the interpretations of the producers and actors, etc.

Another thing I really loved that we did this semester was working on thesis statements.  (Blog post found here.) This was useful for me because I learned that the type of thesis statement I use can very easily determine the direction that my paper will take.  I liked that there is a formula for us to follow because that helps me to figure things out better and organize them in my mind before I even start writing my paper.  This was a great tip.

Our process in the last paper was perhaps the most helpful for me.  Working with a partner helped me reevaluate my work and clarify my ideas.  I found that when I had to explain what I was thinking about to someone else, I was able to weed out things that were unnecessary, didn’t make sense, or didn’t contribute to the idea of my paper effectively.  Lizzi was an encouraging partner, and that motivation made all the difference!  I also really liked it when Kayla read through my paper and gave me a few ideas for edits that should be made. A fresh pair of eyes makes a world of difference!

While writing the last paper, I discovered a technique that made a semi-intimidating assignment a little easier to handle. At first it was really scary and I didn't do well, but the second time I tried was much better! Here's proof how bad it was.  I decided to just open up a separate Word Doc for each point I planned on making in the paper.  When I looked at it in chunks instead of thinking about the paper as a giant, scary whole, it was easier for me to complete. 

All in all, this was a good class that helped me grow as a writer and I’m glad that I was able to take it! 

Improving by the Hour

As if to make up for the disaster that was my last attempt at timed writing for this piece, my process went so smoothly today!  I was really happy with how far I got.  Instead of looking at it as a monster paper that makes me want to hide under my bed, I broke it into bits.  Each point got its own Word Doc and I was able to stitch them together at the end of today.  Now, I just need to do the intro and conclusion and I'll have a pretty decent draft of this guy!

Here's what I've come up with:

Next Steps and Draft: The Yellow Wallpaper

I'm ready to just get this paper done, out of my system, and off of my to-do list!  A rough draft will be good to help me finally get everything organized and written out in cohesive ideas. Talking through my plans with Dr. Burton was so effective on Monday! He helped me realize that my initial ideas were..uhh...pretty cliche.  Soooo some revision was necessary.  Luckily, he showed me a different option that could also be great and pretty unique, so now my subject will be: "Women and Hysteria: Relating Mental Health and Women's Issues through the Lens of 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" This isn't the title because it's not super engaging at all, but it's a start.

Annotated Bibliography for "Please, Death, Do Us Part"

I was able to use the sources and databases that we learned about in our library sessions this week and they were so effective!  I  decided to title my essay, "Please, Death, Do Us Part" because I want to focus on author Charlotte Perkins Gilman's opinion of marriage and how it shines through in her work, "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Working Thesis:  As a pioneer work of feminist literature, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, asserts that due to their oppressed roles, women can never find true happiness or satisfaction in marriage.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Julia Reidhead. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013. 485-497. Print. [Primary Text]

Chohra, Riadh. “The Yellow Wallpaper (Summary and Analysis)”. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 15 Oct. 2015. Web. 16 March 2016. [YouTube Video]

• ·       This video was a great find for me!  It goes into detail on the life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and then compares it to the life of the narrator in the story.  Since the author really wrote herself into the work, it provides some awesome ties and relations that will be useful in my paper.

Dock, Julie Bates. "'but One Expects that': Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'the Yellow Wallpaper' and the Shifting Light of Scholarship." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 111.1 (1996): 52-65. Print. [Journal Article]

• ·       This is a peer-reviewed journal article from back in 1996 that discusses how “The Yellow Wallpaper” went from being read as a ghost story to a work of feminist literature after it was rediscovered in the 70’s.  The author explores how scholarship is just as grounded in historical biases as literature, which will be useful if I want to talk about the obstacles that the author faced to get her work published in a male-dominated system.

Glaspell, Susan. “Trifles.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Julia Reidhead. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013. 743-752. Print. [Intertextual Story]

• ·       This was a text that I also read in my 293 class.  Its storyline is another example of the oppression that women faced in marriage and the lack of trust between husbands and their wives.  This is an intertextual source and will provide strong supporting evidence that Gilman wasn’t the only one who had a problem with the marital system.

González Mínguez, María Teresa1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'the Yellow Wallpaper': On how Female Creativity Combats Madness and Domestic Oppression., 2014. Print. [Academic Journal]

• ·       I found this source from the Humanities database. It’s an article from a Spanish academic journal published in 2014.  The author makes some interesting points about how female instinct combats domestic oppression and depression.  This could work when I talk about some of the methods women employed to improve their conditions in an unhappy marriage.

Nenadovic, Milutin M. "Development of Hospital Treatment of Persons with Mental Disorders." Srpski arhiv za celokupno lekarstvo 139 Suppl 1 (2011): 6-9. Print. [Academic Journal]

• ·       I really wanted to explore the mental health aspect of this topic as well, and I was able to find some great information from this article so far. It details the development of treatment for mental health and how it became seen as a real ailment, not just an imagined disease.  This realization occurred around the setting for “The Yellow Wallpaper” and is very relevant.

Davis, Cynthia J. Charlotte Perkins Gilman : A Biography. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. [Author Biography]

• ·       This eBook is gold. It gives a detailed biography into the life of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman and discusses “new insights into the life of a remarkable woman whose public solutions often belied her private anxieties.” I think that by learning more about the author and her history, I will better understand her case for women’s rights and equality in marriage.

Shel's Trip to the Symposium

I was fortunate enough to attend the address of the keynote speaker, Riley Lorimer, for BYU’s English Symposium in March of 2016.  The session was held at 11:00am in room 1060 of the Harold B. Lee Library.  Ms. Lorimer is a professional editor and works for the Church on The Joseph Smith Papers project in Salt Lake City. She described her work as ensuring that the Papers were accurately and elegantly presented to the public. Her work, to me, seemed really intense, though tedious at times.  She talked about how she and her staff had deliberated for hours over the correct placement of a comma when referring to the polygamist wives of Brigham Young.  It blew me away to realize how much thought goes into the preparation of documents for the Church.

Ms. Lorimer’s main focus in her address was about learning to ask questions.  She talked about how, through her work, she has learned to question and interrogate people so that their stories can come through clearly.  She then related the questions that she asked to the work that she did on The Joseph Smith Papers at work.  She talked about how the deep investigation on historical records often led to some uneasy questions, but we cannot be afraid of them. I loved when she talked about learning to be comfortable with unanswered questions, because I believe that’s part of maturely looking at the world.  She stated that “The best response to black and white thinking isn’t shades of gray, it’s vibrant color.” By looking at the world with color, we are able to learn so much more and avoid the muddled middle-ness of grays.

Riley finished up by talking about the power of empathy.  She said that by asking questions, we learn that the struggles that we think make us “unique” actually end up connecting us to the rest of humanity.  By coming to understand the ideas of others and their pasts, dreams, and insights, we are able to become more compassionate.  I loved listening to her opinions and learned so much from this session!

Listen Up! The Yellow Wallpaper Pre-Write

So I had a lot of fun with the voice-changer on my phone. Also I couldn't figure out how to do just an audio, so I had to put a picture with it to make it a video so the darn thing would go onto YouTube. Thus, we have this lovely webcam pic :P Anyway, enjoy!

Why "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

For this project, I've chosen to research a short story that I first read in my English 293 class, "The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  This isn't one of my all-time favorite stories, but I found it really interesting and want to research it more.  It was one of the first works to really expose the oppression that women faced back in the early 19th century, and the lack of understanding and acceptance of mental conditions such as post-partum depression.

There are a lot of audiences that are very interested in these topics.  I haven't decided the route that I specifically want to take yet, whether it be feminism or post-partum depression, but I know that there are various options for either. Some include:

• Goodreads discussion boards
• #theyellowwallpaper, #ppd, #feminism, etc.
• This blog: http://www.everythinghurts.me/blog/2016/2/6/a-story-of-our-pain-then-and-now
• Facebook pages: "women's studies," "feminism," "post-partum depression"
• I also have a few friends that are very interested in women's studies.  I'm excited to bounce ideas off of them and get some live feedback.

I was really worried about the book I'd find for this project, but now I know that there will be a lot of research and information available on this topic and I can't wait to learn more about it.

Research Report

Today is basically my only day to get any homework done, so I decided to knock the whole essay out while I was in the library.  I was able to find a lot of good sources, though it was hard to narrow down which ones I wanted to use and which directions I would take for the paper.  Eventually, I decided on focusing on the uses and a little of the history of metaphysical conceit.  I also released my inner grammar nerd and researched the uses of commas and semicolons and their distinct uses.

I'll admit, it was kind of hard to find a not-so-recent journal article! At least, harder than I expected.  But it happened, so that's all that matters.

Today has been really productive, though I don't love sitting in the library forever, especially when it's such a great day outside ;) Maybe this is what Vivian felt like as a college student.

Possible Relevant Sources for Justin

Options for Justin’s Essay 

These were found on the BYU HBLL database.

Music in film – soundtracks:

Goldmark, Daniel, Richard Leppert, and Lawrence Kramer. Beyond the Soundtrack : Representing Music in Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Print.

This is a great resource for the influence of music in film.  It discusses how directors use soundtracks to shape the movie experience for viewers.

Poetry Incarnate

With a bit more time, I really want to flesh out the ideas of this essay because they've got quite a bit of support that I could work in.  However, the time constraints have let me off the hook for now:)

Here's what we've got:

One of the most effective ways to learn is to take a concept about which you know nothing and compare it to something you understand well.  In Margaret Edson’s play, W;t, the protagonist, Dr. Vivian Bearing, is a hardened scholar who has devoted her life to studying the poetry of John Donne. Her world is upended after learning that she has cancer, and Vivian agrees to be studied and scrutinized in order to better understand the disease—just as she once picked apart Donne’s Holy Sonnets.  Throughout the story, Vivian recites lines from one poem in particular: Holy Sonnet X.  Edson ingeniously portrays Vivian herself as a form of metaphysical conceit—a physical representation for the meaning of the poem.

Forming an Analysis About Form

Elements of Form:

1.       Music. In the movie, mood is controlled by sharp changes in the music. It varies from being simple piano melodies to screaming violins when the scene changes. Sometimes the lack of music indicates that audiences should pay closer attention to a particular conversation or scene.

2.       Zooming. When audiences need to direct their attention to a certain character, the camera zooms way up on their face. In this film, there is little action. The story therefore moves based on reactions from the characters captured by the zoom.

3.       Contrast of E.M. Ashford. Written, acted, or filmed, Professor Ashford is juxtaposed against Vivian as an example of what her life could be like if she understood the difference between the comma and the exclamation mark back in college.

Fooling Around with Someone Else's Thesis

The thesis I chose to re-do was in the paper “'Almost at times, the Fool': Shakespeare’s Fool as a Rhetorical Device in Modern Media".  I thought that this paper was interesting and it was good to read it, but the thesis was a little weak (in my expertise :P)  The premise is that fools are used to tell the truth in Shakespeare's comedies.  While that is definitely true, it's something I've learned in every English class I've ever taken.  Not really something to get educated people at each other's throats.  I thought that this thesis could use a bit more bite, so I changed it up like so:

Original Evaluation Claim: Fools, represented by Feste in Twelfth Night, are carefully crafted in Shakespeare’s comedies to comment on established institutions because their outsider status insulates them from consequences and frees them to be truth tellers for the characters and translators for the audience.

Edited Evaluation Claim: By using fools to tell the truth in his plays, Shakespeare asserts that those outside of social norms are insulated from negative consequences.

Meet This Thesis.

Wow, that was a terrible pun and an awful title.  Oh well!

Thesis statements are important. ßNot a great thesis statement for the blog post, but it gets the job done and this is informal writing so it doesn’t matter and I can do what I want.  Even spel things wrong.  No one’s mad! 

Dr. Burton’s slideshow was pretty sweet and helped me get a grip on thesis statements.  It also gave me more motivation to write my paper for American Lit that I’ve put off for a month, so that’s also a win.  It was good for me to try to think of ways to make W;t something that smart people would argue about because it forced me to think about things actively instead of just let the literature happen to me, ya know?

Shown, Not Told

Death is something that makes people reevaluate their lives and their priorities.  In Margaret Edson’s play, Wit, Dr. Vivian Bearing is made to reevaluate life just like she does the poetry of John Donne. 

One of the best parts of reading this as a play, I think, was being able to get insight about Dr. Bearing’s character from descriptions by other people.  For example, in most works, you’re able to understand the protagonist because of the way that they think or describe events that happen in the storyline.  While Vivian does give insight to the audience by monologues sprinkled throughout, we are able to learn so much about her from the way that she interacts with the doctors and nurses that care for her. 

Writing Plan and Record: Shelby Dana

Thursday, January 14, 2015 - 11:39 am.

There are a few ways of analysis that came to mind as I reread The Valediction: Forbidding Mourning and The Extasie.  Clearly, the genre of lyric poetry needs to be mentioned.  What these poems lack in length, they make up for in emotion (hallmarks of a lyric poem.)  Since both fall into this category, that could be a good place to start comparing their similarities and explore why Donne chooses to create some key differences as well.  Language is also a big player here and contributes greatly to the tone.  I could choose to go off of the metaphysical ideas that we discussed in class and highlight the use in each poem.  In The Extasie, I could discuss the reason why Donne creates a sexual undertone in order to help readers understand the intimacy of the speaker's non-physical relationship with his beloved.

11:50 am

The Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
After listening to Richard Burton read this work, I was able to better understand the rhyme patterns in the poem.  I really liked how Burton didn't read it and pause after each line, like most readers, but he carried ideas all the way through and then gave pause (if that make sense.)  To me, the poem had a fairly steady rhythm throughout that matches the consistent rhyme scheme.  The iambs are consistent as well here and, since the poem is meant to be comforting, Donne avoids any jarring discrepancies.

The Extasie
Since this poem is not separated by stanzas of four lines, it seemed to me that Donne grouped ideas in lines of two when I listened to Burton's reading. Though the rhyme scheme is ABAB, the main concepts of the phrases can be understood in groups of two.  Again, this poem is very similar to the first in reference to its aural qualities.  The meter is steady and gives a pleasing lilt to the words.  In this reading, it was easy for me to pick out the change in direction of the poem when Donne says "But O alas, so long, so farre Our bodies why doe wee forbeare?" and begins talking about the physical aspect of intimacy.

12:40 am

The brainstorm and initial evidence of the draft:

January 19th, 7:42pm

So I actually finished up my paper last Saturday night and forgot to blog about it.  It ended up being around 900 words and took about an hour and a half or so to write.  I didn't think it was as bad as I expected, mostly because I was able to think of the ideas as I read and annotated the poem.  After that, it was just carrying it along. It wasn't exactly the most fun experience of my life, but it's progress!

Let's Give It a Shot!

Here's a first attempt at literary analysis of John Donne's poem Valediction: A Forbidding Mourning.  Coming up with all the aspects of the analysis was difficult, but I'm glad that we'd gone over a few of them in class.  I did, however, have some difficulty finding quotes from the poem for some points.

1.       Genre

        This is a 36-line poem broken into nine stanzas with an ABAB rhyme scheme.  This is an abstract poem, since it describes love, which can't be seen.  However, Donne uses various rhetorical tools and concrete images, like "stiff twin compasses" or "gold beat to airy thinness" to help readers understand the depth of his feeling.

2.       Narrator

         The narrator of this poem can be assumed as Donne.  He wrote it to his wife, Anne, before leaving on a long trip as a way to comfort her.  Donne is very tender in these lines, as opposed to his saucier poems like The Flea; especially when he refers to their separation as “not yet a breach, but an expansion.”

Analyzing My Analyzation

Shelby is slightly an overachiever, or she likes to think she is.  She like to think that she’s good at her major and all the stuff associated with it, like reading and writing and analyzation.  She sometimes just thinks she’s the cats pajamas, but then she does stupid stuff like writing a whole blog post for her 295 class and then realizing at the end that the whole thing should have been written in third person.  Things like that help her understand that her analyzation skills are probably not where they should be.

Shelby didn’t always enjoy doing reading assignments.  In high school, whenever a test began by saying “Read and analyze the following passage,” her heart sank right down into her stomach.  Analyze.  Assess.  Criticize.  Evaluate.  Gross.

Maturation

School, work, responsibility—it all sucks away your soul.  As a child, I could read for days on end.  On Christmas, birthdays, any holiday you can think of, my favorite present was always the newest installment of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” or whatever series had most recently tickled my fancy.  My dad built a special bookshelf for my room to hold the hundreds of books I’d collected over the years…I had way more books than friends, to be honest! But I wasn’t upset.  Life was good, and I was happy!

However, as I grew taller, my responsibilities began to grow as well, and my time spent with the books began to shrink.