Understanding Literature: You Learn it, You Love it!

Submitted by Briahnna Bass on Tue, 05/03/2016 - 03:08

UNDERSTANDING LITERATURE:

YOU LEARN IT, YOU LOVE IT!

BY BRIAHNNA BASS

 

As an Exercise and Sport Science major, I found out rather late in my academic career that I had a love and passion for English. A passion that I tried for so many years to suppress due to laziness. I truly love and cherish the skills and creative aspects of myself that I have pulled from this course for if it were not for ENGL 150 I would have never known my strengths in technology, analyzation, and creativity.

To understand literature, is to pick apart different works and interpret them in such a way that you are able to make sense of, not only in the author's regard but in your own regard as well. Once you learn literature, you tend to love it (that's my motto, and I'm sticking to it! wink) Each piece presented in my portfolio tells you a little about what I enjoy doing with my understanding of literature as well my interpretations of different mediums of work whether it be print or electronic, of which I have enjoyed electronic poetry the most.

Below I will list a Table of Contents that will guide you through my portfolio. My hope is that it will be enjoyable, insightful and inspiring.

 

Table of Contents

I. "Crucial Ambiguity"

II. E-Poetry (Tweets included)

III. Film Review

IV. Watchmen

V. Portfolio Video

VI. Website Comments

VII. Other Projects

 

 

"Crucial Ambiguity"

Poetry Essay Draft

DRAFTS: My essay draft was a very rough sketch of my literature skills and was used to begin a chapter of poetry analysis that I've grown fond of over the past year, especially in my ENGL 125 course. For my draft, I chose a very simple approach. I chose one poem by one of my favorite authors, read the piece a couple of times, then analyzed it based on information I found in some scholarly sources. The challenge of this piece was that I felt rushed because I waited until last minute, so the work I produced was not up to par. Thankfully, a second revision gave me the opportunity to polish up some of those rough edges and build on a better piece.

Poetry Essay Revision 1

REVISIONS: I think my revision was much more polished than my draft, and I used the time to include more information in my thesis to make my angle more clear to the reader, as well as added more details in the following paragraphs to gain a better understanding of this Crucial Ambiguity I aimed to portray in my work.

Poetry Essay Final Draft

THE FINALE: Special thanks to Professor Dan Anderson for helping me polish and smooth out my writing so that it flowed better. Though my angle geared toward Crucial Ambiguity stayed the same, simply fixing some grammatical errors here and there as well as changing a few sentences around really made all the difference.

 

 

**Below is the poem that I chose to write my poetry essay on. I am a huge fan of Sylvia Plath. All of her work is so mysterious and gut-wrenching, yet so powerful in nature. I love how she writes about nature and uses different metaphors to build on her work. Sometimes you can make sense of it, other times you cannot, but each piece is rewarding to read in its own way.

Composing poetry essays had the greatest impact on my understanding of literature. Not only did it allow me to write about some of my favorite poetry, but it also allowed me to explore different elements of literature that help me understand poetry better.

 

Ariel

By Sylvia Plath
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue   
Pour of tor and distances.
 
God’s lioness,   
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
 
Splits and passes, sister to   
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
 
Nigger-eye   
Berries cast dark   
Hooks—
 
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,   
Shadows.
Something else
 
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
 
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
 
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.   
The child’s cry
 
Melts in the wall.   
And I
Am the arrow,
 
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive   
Into the red
 
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
 

 

 
Roses are Red E-poem:
 
So before I started my own e-poetry adventure, I thought it would be neat to create a random e-poem using the Camtasia software just to see how it would look. Needless to say, I was very impressed with all that Camtasia could do, especially on my 5 year old Lenovo, so I call this in my intro project. I'm glad that I did a test-run first because it showed me what can be altered, what will transfer smoothly and what will not.
 

 

 

Blackberrying
 
By Sylvia Plath
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,   
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
 
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.   
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
 
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,   
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me   
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock   
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space   
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths   

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

 

Blackberrying E-poem:
Moving right along, below you will find my original, very first, official e-poem composed on my chose of poetry. As you can see, I chose, once again, a poem by Sylvia Plath entitled, Blackberrying. Using an electronic medium helped me portray the piece in ways I would have never imagined. I loved that I could bring in different videos, pictures, words, and animations to make the poem come to life. This, like my poetry essay draft, was a very rough sketch of my work and skills and was really meant to introduce myself to the finer uses of Camtasia. I struggled a lot because my computer is really old and cannot do a lot of what the newer model computers can do, but I would say this is pretty decent for a beginner, don't you think? I hope so!
 

 

Blackberrying Walkthrough:

I really enjoyed doing this walkthrough because, one, I got to talk a lot LOL, and two, I got to explore deeply all of the elements that I used to compose my original e-poem. Combining sounds of the ocean with the buzzing of flies to eerie forest music are just a few elements that I used to bring life to Blackberrying. Things I struggled with were again, because my computer is old, my microphone did not work, so I had to record everything on my phone and upload to my email then transfer that to Camtasia. Time consuming? VERY! Worth it? ABSOLUTELY! My voice-overs were crystal clear and I was able to add them exactly where I needed to.

 

 

Blackberrying Revision:

My final revision of my e-poem has to be my absolute favorite. I was able to choose a video from my favorite song by Chris Brown and Justin Beibs "Right Next to You," and incorporate that into my final work. Being able to transition from a video scene to nature gave my e-poetry the balance that I had searched for. It also made it flow more smoothly from beginning to end. I really wanted to mess around with some layering, so I added two layers of screens while messing around with the opacity, and I think it came together pretty polished and clean. I even tweeted about it as you can see below, because I was just that proud of myself. GO ME!

I'm not sure what happened when I tried to embed my tweets, but I kept getting an error message, so I just took a screenshot and added it to my portfolio.

https://twitter.com/briahnna_bass16/status/720787411748462592

 

 

Citation/Revisions Video:

This video helped me to compile all of my sources into one area, and that is something I really needed. After doing so, I realized that with my revision, I did not use half of the resources that I used originally, so for me that meant I was making better use out of small amount of resources, which in comparison with my original e-poem worked to my advantage. It helped me focus on one angle and use my few resources to build on that angle.

 

The purpose of my e-poetry was to fuse together an electronic medium representation with my own interpretations, which is exactly what understanding literature can do. One can simply write out their interpretations of literature and view them one-sided, but placing your skills and interpretations in a video makes them more complex, less grounded, more broad, larger than large. It creates a completely different realm of literature that brings new understanding to poetry.

 

 

 

No Country for Old Men Film Review:

I must say, this film review, for me was the most difficult portion of the class. I know, weird, right? It took me the longest to complete and it was the most difficult to compile together as I could not figure out if I wanted to take an angle from the book or pull an angle from the movie or do both. Well, I ended up choosing an angle from the movie as I felt that made the most sense in my head. I thought it was interesting how the events between Chigurh and Moss literally turned into a cat and mouse chase. Once it was Moss as the mouse and Chigurh as the cat, then it was Moss as the cat and Chigurh as the mouse. It was insane! Each flip of the page, each scene in the movie only added to the suspense. In the end, we saw that Chigurh did in fact kill Moss and he lived. But the part that really did it for me was Ed Tom Bell's closing lines:

 

 

 

No Country for Old Men Film Review

 

 

Thoughts on Watchmen:

I think Watchmen may actually be one of the most interesting, intriguing, yet confusing pieces I have ever read. The way the plot builds with each chapter, some events more obvious than others, it is interesting how you almost end up exactly where you started from beginning to end. This superhero complex mixed with historical allegations of the Vietnam war is unheard of and crazy brilliant. Using the medium of a comic book style to tell a story allows myself as a reader to appreciate literature in all of its styles as this piece in particular helped me view literature in a different regard that also made me analyze the piece more since it was more difficult to understand due to its medium.

 

 

Portfolio Video:

This video has done the most justice for me through out this course because it helped me to tie my poetry essays and e-poems into one theme that I have the pleasure of expressing as "Understanding Literature." The sources I included, bring small elements of an understanding of literature into my work that I hope you as the reader/viewer have been able to pull from this portfolio as a whole.

As someone who is very adamant about English, I feel that it was somewhat of duty to portray my portfolio in the realms of literature as a means of creating a better understanding of such. Literature is all around us, every day, whether we realize it or not. There are different forms, so many genres, so many mediums, so many elements, the list goes on for miles.

 

I hope this portfolio has brought you some insight, and has peaked your interestt if not already for literature because as I always say, "You Learn it, Your Love it!"

 

Website Comments:

I must say I am very impressed with your interpretation and review on such a popular and compelling poem. I, personally, have never read the poem all the way through but from your descriptions, I feel as though I've already read it once before myself. I like how you delicately incorporated Angelou's own history along with history of oppression to not only link it with the issues that are still prevalent today but also use it as a tool to enhance your understanding of her work. I think this was thoroughly put together, and the research behind it helps to pull your writing together.

Great job!

I think I recognized the instrumental correctly, but Take Me to Church as the background music really set a nice gentle tone for your piece. I like your literal translation of the poem with the inclusion of moon images as reinforcement. My suggestion for next time would be to really pay attention when editing your tracks otherwise you will not catch those ads that popped up in your images. Overall though, great piece! I enjoyed it.

I really love how you used a lot of overlapping to really build on your e-poem. It introduced an element that I would not have thought to use. I think replaying the same instrumental through out your piece helps viewers to really focus on your message and not get so distracted by different sounds/music. It seems that you really wanted to the viewer to pay attention to your images and the words of the poem. I'm thoroughly impressed. Great job!

EXSS 385 Final Project

 

I used Camtasia and some skills I learned in ENGL 150 to compose a video for my Biomechanics class. It made working on the project fun and gave a load off compared to what we had done in the class prior to. I "Love" that I "Learned" about Camtasia because I am able to use it in other classes and for recreational purposes as well.