Response to Course Material 1/13

This past month, we have covered a lot of material.  Probably most notably, we have read, annotated and watched Hamlet.  The annotating was especially tedious in this play because the language of Shakespeare is so different from our normal speech.  It was also hard to find specific diction and syntax examples because I wasn’t sure whether something was significant or if that was just the way they were supposed to talk.  The two versions of the movie we have watched have been very different.  The first version was very traditional and simple.  It was put on similarly to how I imagine it would have in Shakespeare’s time.  The actors mostly focused on the lines of the play and the meanings of the lines.  There were also very few props, costumes and scene changes.  The second version was more modern and had lots of fancy costumes, elaborate sets and different camera shots.  There were also several directorial choices that were different, such as the interpretations of relationships between different characters (incest, etc.).   The second one was more enjoyable as a movie, however, I think the first one made me think about the play more and interpret it in my own way.

In the text book, we read several poems in Chapter 5.  Then, we did some forum posts.  I liked these forums because we had to post three times, but it had to stay on the same thread.  This created a longer thread that was more like a conversation, rather just a post with two or three comments like it usually is with forums.  I posted on the thread about Anne Bradstreet’s “Before the Birth of One of her Children.”  We talked about the theme and how the poem relates to a character in one of the plays we have read.  Most people in the thread seemed to think that the narrator was most like Willy Loman, but now that we have analyzed Hamlet, I think that the attitude was more like Hamlet.  The narrator seems uneasy about the future, but she accepts whatever happens.  Hamlet is similar to this in that he accepts his fate and just does whatever he needs to get revenge for his father.  I didn’t think about this while I was doing the forums, but I didn’t so I posted it here.

Lately, instead of tone words, we have started to do mood/atmosphere practices.  I really like these exercises because they combine what we have learned about diction, imagery, and syntax and give us a chance to apply them.  Also, when we did the tone words, I often didn’t remember them the next day, but with the mood/atmosphere activities, I can remember the picture and what specifically we did.  For example, we had a gray-scale picture of an alleyway surrounded by houses.  For diction, we used, simple, low-energy words; for syntax, we used plain, simple sentences and for imagery, we emphasized the gray and white bleakness of the picture. 

All in all, this has been an information packed month!