Emily Dickinson blog, Dec 9

For this last blog post, I give you a short prompt:

Emily Dickinson's poetry: deceptively simple OR simply deceptive? Which one, and why? 300 words.

blogs of grass, dec 4

For this blog, I want you to get inside the formal poetic fabric of Whitman's Song of Myself. Take 1-3 strophes that you found really compelling and inviting as you read the piece. While it is true that Whitman is renowned for his Free Verse poetry, this does not mean that there aren't many poetic forms functioning within his poetry. He does not write with regular end rhyme or meter, but he does deploy assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, alliteration, etc. We'll refresh some of these terms before you do the reading, and then I want you to deploy them as you write your 300-word blog on the strophe(s) that you've chosen.

Another Melville Re-Mediation

Here it is: Emoji Dick

Projecting Benito Cereno

Here are the links to your truly inspired and admirable projects: http://captaindelanoposts.tumblr.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDxyLhLCpxw And on Twitter: Usernames: BenitoCereno55 captain_delano babolicious55 Password: benitocereno123 "Babo's Song" coming soon...

Douglass blog for Nov 18

For your 400-word blog on Douglass, you have a few options. You might compare the slave drivers he describes. How do they differ? Why would Douglass show this range of slave drivers? How does Douglass use "beast" and other animal terms to articulate his argument against slavery? Can you put this into conversation with Carpentier's uses of animal imagery? How does Douglass deploy geography, what we might call "social geography," in his writing to analyze slavery in the USA? Please post before class on Monday.

The Pond in Winter

For this blog, you have to do a little research inside and outside. Inside research is to see what you can learn of the history of Lindeman Pond. How long has it been here? Why is it here? What does it do in the ecosystem? These are questions to encourage you, but you don't need to answer them all. Outside research is to go to the Pond. Hang out, stand on your head, close your eyes, open your nose, touch it, look into it at it on it--all it contains and all it reflects. Then write: 350-450 words. See if you can put your inside and outside research into conversation as you write as a way of understanding Thoreau's technique. Please post before Monday's class.

Emerson Blog, Due 13 Nov.

Now that you've created one or more Emerson-text-based inspirational posters, I'd like you to write a 250-350 word reflective blog on one of them. Please write about how the poster does capture a spirit of Emerson. Explain your understanding of this spirit of Emerson and how the image and the image-plus-text-dynamic embody it. ALSO, I want you to explain how the poster misses some of the complexity that is in the context out of which you pulled your quote. Emerson's one-liners are embedded and enmeshed in the paragraph, in the multi-paragraph chunk, and the text as a whole. You don't need to address all 3 of these contextual strata, but I do want you to talk about at least one to show how the posterification of Emerson does lose something.