The Imaginary Invalid

When I attended this play I was really excited to see a live play because it's been a while since I've been to a play. My church puts on productions for Christmas and ester which is the last play that I've really seen. I think it brings something to the storyline to see it live acted out and experience the actors in the living flesh. I was pleasantly surprised at what the cast brought to the story and quite grateful that I got the chance to go. As I sat and watched the play I was even more surprised to learn how much talent we had here among us at Southeastern. The cast did a wonderful job by bringing the play to life and really telling a story not only with their words and expressions but by their body language and facial expressions.

I went to the play not knowing anything about the story line at all and the only thing I really had to go off of was the quote on the front of the program. It read, "It is for my sake that I give her this doctor, and a good daughter ought to be delighted to marry for the sake of her father's health..." From that I made the assumption that the story would be about a daughter not wanting to marry a specific man but her family forcing her too which is along the lines of what happened. The father, Argan, was ill (which even that was questionable seeing as how his actual doctor at the time was a little on the mad/evil scientist side of the spectrum) and he got an offer from a man to marry his daughter off to a future doctor; which in his mind was a wonderful plan to ensure his treatments in life. But his daughter was in love with another boy she had met named Cleante. The daughter, Angelique, wanted nothing to do with this other boy because she was in love with Cleante who was a music person whom she had met and fallen for. The story goes on trying to get the father to understand that since he truly does love his daughter he should let her marry whom she loves rather than marry to suffice his needs in life.

I tried to put myself in her shoes and just really thought about how appalled I would be if my father tried to marry me off to a man just to ensure his health in the future. That is a horrible base for arranged marriage and is not fair to anyone in that situation. But in the end her father realizes how much he loves her and then they "trick" him into becoming his own doctor and life is all at peace and the two get married.

The play was very enjoyable in my opinion. I loved the casting of the play and the talent that shined out of it. The set was amazing how they used a doll house type setting where the house literally opened up when the scene was taking place within the house. The one thing that I thought was cute but really didn't understand was the extra dancers in the play. They were cute and the definitely added to the play but I didn't understand what they were representative of? They were an interesting addition to the play but I didn't really understand their role in all of it...

Pass

I'm choosing to use my first pass for this post.

Have a great day :)

Blogging

The instructions for the blog are very specific yet give a lot of room for expanding and creativity in our blogs. The instructions are instructing us to get into the books that we read and get deep with the reading so that as we write our blogs we show an understanding for the text. Through blogging we are showing how in-depth we got with the text or how serious we took the reading. Just like how on Friday we were reading the blogs from other people, you can tell whether a person actually read the text and then just wrote the blog but then you can actually tell the people that took the text and read the words and interacted with it and wrote out of their heart how the text impacted them. Every time we interact with text in class is a new way that we can get perspective on the text and interact with it. The activities that we do in this class are very different and out of the box ways to interact with the text which makes you understand things in a different light with different senses even. We are applying what we are learning through how we are learning to relate to the text and then living it out with every text that we read as time goes on.

Blogging extends the reading process by us reading the text and then lingering more in the thought of what we read because now we are relaying the information on our blogs and "speaking' in a sense, about what we read. It's like the morning that we went to the cafeteria for breakfast and we discussed a book that changed our lives and what it meant to us. This is a new way to interact with the text because we are telling people about the text and how it impacted our thinking and way of life sometimes. When we blog it's like telling others about the text that we just read and what we thought about it and how it changed the way we thought about something or the way we view the text that we were reading. This blogging project for me has been a new way to discuss the literature that we have been reading. I don't sit around and talk about the literature that I read very often, it's more like in passing I talk to people and tell them to read something that I've read before. Literary discussion is definitely something new for me so this blogging has really helped me to process the readings that we do and then either summarizes what I got out of it or just to figure out what I did get out of it and relay that to other people through this blog. I like the idea of blogging my interaction with the text because then as I type the words I can realize "O wow that's what I thought I read but actually it affected me in this way." Blogging has opened my eyes up a little more to the actual importance of literature and what a big role it really does play in our society. Before movies, before technology, before all that, literature has been something that has been with us for multiple years and it's something that many people have taken in but it's something that in our society we take for granite now-a-days and we must stop. We must stop our busy schedules and sit and read some of the great literature to let it wreck our lives and change our outlook on life.

"I went to the Lakeview, Roselawn and Tiger Flowers cemetery complex for this fieldtrip, and I stayed there for at least 40 minutes."

This trip for me was amazing. It really puts life into perspective when we think about how we simply burry our dead and we "lay them to rest" and then in a few weeks we go on about our buisness. We think about them here and there, but then our time comes and we get "laid to rest" and it is just a continuous process. Why do we hold onto our dead? Why do we create a memorial stone in their honor? Are our memories of them not enough? Do we just forget them after a period of time and so we have a stone put in the ground and grave yards to hold them so that we don't forget about them? I love going to a burrial site and seeing what a legacy people have on their tomb stones. It's sad but refreshing to see that there were people before us and that life isn't just about the here and now. There were millions of people that lived before us and we so often get wrapped up in our own little word and forget that there were many significant people that lived full lives before us. It's such a peaceful place to be yet we make it out to be such a wierd place to go and visit. Maybe if we paid a little more respect for our dead and realized that it's not just about the piece of stone in the ground that honors them but rather the memories that make their legacy so strong then we can truely begin to appreciate those before us.

"When Lylacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

As I laid there and read this poem out loud to my roommate I couldn't help but think about how the author was writing this poem and how eloquent it was that he could write about a subject so dreary in such depth. Walt Whitman's words are so unique to today's culture and I even said it out loud that these words seem so outdated but this is the way people communicated back in those days. When I read the poem at first it was hard in the beginning to realize it was about a funeral but then as I got into the poem more and more I realized that's what Whitman was talking about. His words are so well put together and I enjoyed reading them but at times they were hard to understand. He paints a picture in our minds of people mourning by the train station and just the many faces of sadness and it really puts into perspective how this one funeral of one man affected an entire nation.

In the activity that we wrote down our favorite parts and our difficult parts it really helped me to understand something’s. I wrote down as my favorite part:

O western orb sailing the heaven,

Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk'd,

As I walk'd in silence the transparent shadowy night,

As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,

As you droop'd from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other starts all look'd on)

I read this and just imagined the galaxy talking to him about the death that he was encountering which when we think about it is kind of what happens when death occurs in our lives. We feel like the world should stop in remembrance of the deceased person but it doesn't and these words jus show how in our own world time does stop when someone dies. Even if the death is someone that is not that close to you (in this case the president) death still makes time stand still if even for a little.. everything just pauses in remembrance of that person...

Painting my interpretations

In class on Wednesday we had the opportunity to respond to the text in the way of art. When professor Corrigan said that we would be painting I thought to myself, I am going to suck at this because I just can't paint. Even that morning, as I was walk to class with my suitemate, I was telling her I should just not go to class because I can't paint anyways so what's the point of going to try. She responded that that was a poor excuse to not go to class. Painting in response to literature doesn't have to be perfect. We have to realize that when we respond to something, it is through our own interpretation of whatever it is that we are responding to.

"You will have plenty to eat and be satisfied

And praise the name of the LORD your God,

Who has dealt wondrously with you;

Then My people will never be put to shame. "

This was the text that I was responding to and I honestly couldn't have told you what I was painting as I picked up that cheap brush and dunked it in the yellow paint on my desk. I took the first stroke and still felt like a little kindergartener just painting to paint. But as I trusted myself and made myself understand that whatever comes of this picture is what is meant to come out, it was then that I was aware that it didn't matter the end result, as long as I was expressing what I felt when I thought about the text. As I made more strokes and added more color I began to feel more confident and the end result that came out really made me feel good about myself. It was no longer about not being able to paint, but it was now about expressing myself through the painting and telling my group about how the text touched my heart. It was an expression of my heart at the time because it was about praising God for His goodness and provisions that He makes for His people and the color and loudness of my painting expressed that. It was a great way to stretch us as readers and really helped me become comfortable with expressing my feelings towards a text in different ways.

Joel

First off I want to express how thankful I am that God has blessed me, us, to be able to come to a school where reading and discussing scripture is a norm and getting deep into the text is something that happens in every classroom. This has never been a norm in my life because I've been going to public school my entire life. Prayer and scripture reading was something that never happened in the classroom, rather just in Sunday school and as the pastor read it in service during his sermons.

Reading Joel was a little different because you see a lot of down points in the text but then it also talks about the faithfulness of God and how He is going to provide for His people. Reading the text out loud in class on Monday was helpful to me because I feel like sometimes we just read the text in our devotions or just read it to ourselves and we don't get the full impact of everything the text is saying. When we read it out loud it gives power to the text and life to the text. As people read Joel out loud I began to pick up on some things that I hadn't when I read it just by myself. But now that I think of it, I even read some of the text out loud to my roommate when I was preparing for class this weekend. We want to share things that touch our hearts; and that's what I was doing as I read verses that I wanted to proclaim out loud because it was so impactful in my reading the literature. So reading the words out loud in class was almost like me reading them to the girls in my room as I read it the night before. It was a great activity and I’m glad we had a chance to experience the text like that.

Theme

Whether it’s a reoccurring theme in our daily lives, in a TV show we are watching, or in a book we are reading; we see theme's everywhere. When I read the chapter on theme and realized that even in a little story that we all know, such as little red writing hood, we can see so many themes that can come out of it. The first version was a generic, typical, and basically the story that we are used of hearing. Then there was the second version of the story where the ending was different (the girl shot the wolf) and the moral was a one liner and very blunt. These stories here show how themes of stories can really change the mood of the story and what the reader gets out of the story. When I read the second version of the story I about fell out of my seat at the ending that the author wrote because I couldn't believe that the author wrote that kind of an ending. This ending puts such a different theme on the story which is such a big part of reading a piece of literature. When reading Lewis' 'Grief Observed' you don't sit and smile as you read it, the theme presents a saddened feel and at moments you feel like crying. Theme is something we never get away from. We have good days, bad days, in between days, and all around days. Its such a big part of our lives and such a big part of literature so we really have to understand it when/as we read the literature we read. When we understand the theme we better understand what the author is trying to convey and what they are trying to have us understand through the theme. If a story has no theme, is it still a story? Are we interested in stories without themes?...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much literature I actually read outside of class and it really has put a new perspective on things. I want to read more literature by authors that really have something to say like C.S. Lewis. I’ve only read one of his books and already I’m hooked and want to see what else he has written. I know that he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and I haven’t even seen those movies but I know they did very well in the box office and a lot of people that saw it told me the movies were really well done. I’ve talked before about how movies really don’t give justice to the authors words on the page and I think this is a motivating factor for me to read the books before I see the movie. Literature has not been a big part of my life except for the fictional stories when I was younger and then some Christian writings as I’ve gotten older but I just feel like I’ve missed out on some good literature. I thank God for the opportunity to be in school and read the literature I have. But reading the book by C.S. Lewis has challenged me to read more and more literature that is going to further my education and be beneficial to me being social when it comes to literature; such as when we went to breakfast and spoke in groups about literature that we had read and that had made an impact on our lives. I want to be able to do that more and I can now a little more because I’ve read one of Lewis’ books. But again I feel like I just need to grow more in reading more literature and to become cultured a little more in the literature realm.