The Big Sleep Analysis

"The Big Sleep" Extract Analysis

The extract of "The big sleep" tells the story of a man who gets away from her wife, it is interesting how he talks of death. He mentions that death is The Big Sleep, like there is no way of knowing how death is, the protagonist believes that it is like sleeping "You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep...", when we sleep, we don't feel anything, maybe we are dreaming but we remember the dreams when we wake up, not at the moment they are happening. The protagonist compares the situation of a dead human to his, does it really matter the where you are when dead? What matters is that you are dead, you are not there anymore. He feels like part of nastiness, and thinks that someone who is dead cant be bothered by things like this, it doesn't matter if he is in a dirty sump or in a marble tower, he wont be bothered. Thanks to certain elements in the text such as the feeling of nastiness of the protagonist, i can conclude he is somehow feeling identified by life and death, because of what happened with his wife.

Noam Chomsk's Theory Of Language

VoiceThread: Language and Parole

Activity: Practical Criticism

You fit into me

You fit into me

like a hook into an eye

A fish hook

An open eye.

1.- What is the relationship between the title and the rest of the poem?

The title in this case is the main idea to the poem, you fit into me or also the compatibility towards the persona.

2.- What words, if any, need to be defined?

Hook into an eye, at first i though it refers to the clothing hook into the eye, just as a women would fit to a man, but then when it says "A fish hook" I realized it was the fishing hook

3.- What relations do you see among any words in the poem?

Hook into an eye, and a fish hook. I don't know if its just me but every time I saw a fishing hook I would think about how many accidents of a hook into an eye there might be. 

4.- What are the various connotative meaning of the words in the poem? Do you see various shades of meaning help establish relationships or patterns in the text?

The hook into an eye, 2 expressions, one may be a fishing accident, and another one the clothing hook and eye. Yes, as answered before, until it said "A fish Hook", i thought it was referring to a clothing hood into an eye. 

5.- What symbols, images or figures of speech are used? What is the relationship between them?

The verses 1 and 2 let you think it is a compatibility towards the persona, a relationship, but then in verses 3 and 4 you realize its not.

6.- What elements of rhyme, meter or pattern can you discuss?

None, this poem has no rhyme. And no patterns, each verse has different amount of syllables. 

7.- What is the tone of the poem?

Remorse, and a bit of a  cold heart description.

8.- From what point of view is the content of the poem being told?

A women, who maybe believed the was with the perfect man for her, a perfect relationship, and everything ended up bad because a fishing hook into an eye cant be good.

9.- What tensions, ambiguities or paradoxes arise within the poem?

We can clearly see a ambiguity on the word Hook into an eye, as i told before, we first imagine the clothing hook into an eye, a perfect relationship, but then we realized its a fishing hook, a disaster.

10.- What do you believe the chief paradox or irony is in the text?

The suffering, sadness, maybe to learn to choose well, know well the person before getting into a relationship, or else you will be betrayed.

11.-How do all of the elements of the poem support and develop the primary paradox or irony?

Each element supports to express emotions and feelings of the persona. The irony is in the relation on a hook-into-an-eye and a loving couple or a horrifying accident.

Oral Presentation: Theories of Language

In groups, we did a oral presentation, the topic of my group was the Theories of Language, and in my group was Joaquin Rodriguez, Martin Macchiavello, and me. We prepared quite well, I talked about language itself, what is it, how it is. Martin talked about Noam Chomsky and his theory of Universal Grammar, and Joaquin talked about B.F Skinner. We created a PowerPoint presentation to guide us through the presentation.

Active Reading

Active Reading (CCp. 69)

“Simply reading and re-reading the course material in an unfocused way takes more time than you can afford, and it isn't an effective way to understand and learn. Active reading helps you get to grips with the content and can save you time in the long run.”

Important questions you must ask while reading:

What does it Say (What is going on, what is it about?)

What does it Mean (What does it suggest, imply, explain?)

Why is it valuable (or interesting, important, or engaging?)

Try these techniques to make your reading active:

Underline or highlight key words and phrases of text as you read. When you return to the text to take notes, or to research an assignment question, you can easily see which points you identified as important at the first reading. Be selective, as too much highlighting on a page won't help you.

Make annotations in the margin to summarise points, raise questions, challenge what you’ve read, jot down examples and so on. You can do this in books or texts. This takes more thought than highlighting, so you'll probably remember the content better.

Read critically by asking questions of the text. Who wrote it? When? Who is the intended audience? Does it link with other material you've studied in the course? Why do you think it was written? Is it an excerpt from a longer piece of text?

Try using sticky notes if you don't want to mark the text. Jot brief notes on one and add it to the page, partly sticking out so you can identify the page.

Test yourself by reading for half an hour, putting the text away and jotting down the key points from memory. Go back to the text to fill in gaps.

Look for ‘signposts’ that help you understand the text - words like ‘most importantly’, ‘in contrast’, ‘on the other hand’.

Explain what you’ve read to someone else.

Record yourself reading the course material or your notes, and listen to the recording while you’re travelling.

Retrieved from: http://www.open.ac.uk/skillsforstudy/active-reading.php

"An active reader explores, wonders, disentangles, reworks, and assembles an always imperfect meaning that can always be revisited, and is potentially revolutionary!" CC p.70

Critical Reading "The Catcher in The Rye"

Check out the following glogster with an excerpt from author J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye". While you read it, think of the following questions:

1. What is being shown or said in the text? Why is the text interesting?

It says that Holden believes that cementary has no sense at all, that when you die you are completely gone. Because of how can a boy think like this. 

2. What do you think and feel about the text?

I think and feel that Holden said this because of his brother Allie, who died, he somehow lost faith.

3. What particular elements in the text have led you to your conclusions?

Holden's words, he hopes that they do what he is telling, maybe he is thinking like this now and when Allie died he was just on of the others that went to the cementary, people who he now says do not make sense at all.

Critical Thinking

To become a critical reader, consider the following questions when facing a text (CC p. 45)

Whose views are being represented?

What or whose interests are being served?

What are the intentions behind the message?

What reading or speaking position are you being invited to take up? Are we asked to see the situation from a particular point of view?

What cultural assumptions are being taken from granted?

What or who is absent that one might expect to find?

Take a look at the following video called "Do You Think?". While you watch it, keep in mind the following questions:

1. Why is it necessary in today's society to be a critical thinker?

- Because, in today's society you need to understand others, and in order to do that you require the skill to understand someone else argument.

2. What do I need to do to become critical?

To become critical we need clarity, acurracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, and we need to give examples, elaborate, be specific and related.

Analyzing Images

- If you examine these images closely, you will notice they reveal a variety of possible narratives. What could these images suggest? How do you react to them? Try applying the critical analysis questions from CC p. 45 and write a paragraph response discussing why what appears to be a simple picture is rich with complexity. 

I believe that the message behind this image is showing how different both human being live. It shows a child, who with its condition in the image is on a critical state of life, and he is not the only one from his country, and a old man, who is still living at his age, health. A child should be much more healthy than a old man, but that's what this image is trying to show. A old man who at his age is more healthy and lives better than an innocent little boy.

Literature

1. From all the approaches we studied today, with which one do you feel more comfortable? Which one was the most difficult to understand? 

I believe that the one i feel more comfortable with is Structuralism (Saussure), and the most difficult PostStructulism, because if you say, It is not what is it, its what is not, if something is not this than it can be many other things.

2. Think you will teach one of the approaches to a 6th grader. How would you make it easier for him to understand? How would you teach it? Pick the one approach you like the most.

I would give a lot of examples, so they can imagine how it really is, not only the concept. I would teach them the one that in my case was the most comfortable, Structuralism.

Literature Studies Throughout Time

5th C. -> The Greeks

Greeks: Literature was concern with the human behavior and its relationship with the physical word, society and ethics.

Key Concepts: Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality.Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and limitations of knowledge. 

Early 19th C. -> Romanticism

Romanticism: a belief that higher orders of human truth were possible through transcending base concerns of pure reason, politics and world values. 

Key Ideas: Romantics believed in poetry as an expression of feeling, a reflection on everyday life and nature expressed through common language. 

Mid 19th C. -> Scientific Determinism

Scientific Determinism: It is the belief that the world-objects, actions, and forces-arises from clear causes that can be revealed through objective scientific inquiry. 
Key Ideas:: Science became the popular application to all questions including those of literature. Literary texts, then, became the object of scientific study.

Early 20th C. -> New Criticism
New Criticism: New Criticism has a focus on close reading with little to no concern for history, ideology, politics, biography, or other factors outside the text. Key Ideas: The text became the main focus. The text is a self-contained object that exists independently from all extrinsic forces, including the author.

Early 20th C. -> Reader-Response
Reader-Response: Moves the emphasis of textual analysis from a singular focus on the text to one where the reader works in concert with a text to produce an interpretation.
Key Ideas: Reader's personal experience might very well play a substantial role in enhancing an encounter with a text.

Early 20th C. -> Structuralism 
Saussure's work: Words were signs made up of two component parts: a signifier and a signified. Language is arbitrary: there is no inherent connection between any word and its referent.

Mid 20th C. -> Poststructuralism
Negotiating not what a sign is, but what a sign is not. We know through difference. Sometimes replaced by Postmodernism or Deconstruction.

Mid 20th C. -> Marxism
All texts contain subtexts which are extensions of historical and ideological conflict, the same conflicts being played out in real societies and not just in literary texts.
Key Ideas: The root of the conflicts is anchored in social class and economic differences.

Mid 20th C. -> Feminism (Gender Studies)
Feminism devoted to describing and interpreting (or reinterpreting) women's experience through literature.
Key Ideas: Uncovering essential differences between women and men, or challenging male representations of women and society, or rediscovering previously overlooked or ignored women writers and texts or any combination of the three.
Gender Studies explores sexual identity, questions of reproduction, sexuality, gender, family, love and marriage.

Mid 20th C. -> Cultural Poetics

History as the body of knowledge. Cultural poetics seeks to investigate these multiple discourses (history, law, economics, politics, and even literary analysis itself) in order to explore the connections between all human activities and their role in making life meaningful. 

Mid 20th C. ->  Post colonial criticism 
It is defined as an approach to texts produced in colonized countries.It derives from multiple critical approaches, through topics such as nationalism, ethnicity, language, history and how these issues are dealt with when two (or more) cultures clash, usually with one dominant and one deemed inferior (cultural imperialism).

What is Literature?

Literature: 

Merrian-Webster Online Dictionary: Writings in prose or verse; especially: writings having excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas for permanent or universal interest.

The Free Dictionary (Online): Written material such as poetry, novels, essays, etc., especially works of imagination characterized by excellence of style and expression and by themes of general enduring interest.

L&L Course Companion p.9: A highly developed use of language in that is the stylized manipulation of language for larger effect (purpose) and/or affect (emotional response) 

What is Literature?

Literature is a term used to describe written or spoken material. Broadly speaking, "literature" is used to describe anything from creative writing to more technical or scientific works, but the term is most commonly used to refer to works of the creative imagination, including works of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction.

Language And Parole

1. Which comes first: thought or language?

Elizabeth Spelke, professor of psychology, did experiments showing that children learn to think independently about objects before they learn language. She says its like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts?. Experts conclude that thought comes first. "Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects", "these concepts give meaning to the words they learn later". Speakers of different languages notice different things and by that they make different distinctions.

2. Can we think without language?

If you are not born deaf, it is very possible that you know language, and you may unconsciously think that you are not using language while thinking, so we will take the example of someone who was born deaf. It is obvious that deaf people who do not have language think, and how do they think?, they think with pictures and actions. When we think we think with word-thoughts and deaf people think with image-thoughts.

3. Is it possible that we think in images?

As I said in before, deaf people think with pictures and actions, or other words image-thoughts, if i tell you a scene, it is very unlikely that you think or imagine the words i am saying in a sentence, for example, if i tell you two bears fighting, will you think a white sheet of paper written "Two bears fighting" or will you think of an image of two bears fighting.

OR

Sources:

Harvard Studies - Thinking

Stereotypes

What are Stereotypes?

As we saw in class, stereotypes are a generalization of a group of people, this generalization may be true or false, very common stereotypes are the ones of seeing an Asian, and say he is Chinese, when he can be from Japan or Korea.

As people do not see the unique part of each individual of society, we focus on the things we know about them,  things we may seen in movies, documents, or even heard in some jokes. Stereotypes are the ignorance of knowledge towards a culture. 

Another example can be the amount of fat people in the U.S documentaries and studies say that one-third of U.S adults are obese. and 17% of the children are obese. Seeing this, when we generalize the U.S people, we say they are fat. 

Read every sign that different peoples from different cultures are holding.

What is Language?

Culture

1.- Which theorist would agree that culture is something we aspire to?

- We decided that Mattew Arnold agrees that culture is something we aspire to "... the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier..."

2.- Which theorist would believe that culture is something outside of us that we learn or are born into?

- Claude Levi-Strauss believes that culture is every capability and habits that the humans acquire by being a member of society.

3.- Which theorist would argue that culture is something developed by humans?

- Clifford Geertz, believes humans create language, and uses the example of a animal suspended in webs he has spun, and takes culture, to be those webs.

4.- Which definition comes close to your own view of culture?

My point of view is the same as Clifford Geertz, in few words, we, as human being, are the creators of culture.

Class Debate

We had to debate in groups, some groups had 2 members and others 3, my group was a debate of 3 persons per team. My team was Fernando Nuñez, Paul Eggeling, Jose Kitzing, Defending the motion: "Language is a learnt construct like the rules governing a sport" against the team of Martin Macchiavello, Joaquin Rodriguez and Benjamin Ugarte, they were defending the motion "Humans are born with a ability to create language" 

In our team, we used as Arguments that Language is a system based on Rules, Language is learnt because of these who sorround us, and other types of communication such as reading lips and Sign language.

It was a fun and competetive activity. Also good to develope speaking and atention, because you cant just go and say what you have written on paper or memorized, you have to comprehend what the other team is defending, so then, taking your point of view, say your opinion about it.

Theories of Language