This is the picture that has appeared on your Edline account all year. Your assignment: Wha...?

Consider all the approaches to understanding a text that we have studied this year.

1. We've examined overall effects/moods and tried to figure out which details helped get us to those moods, and how.

2. We've examined questions raised by texts, and author's judgments of those question.

3. We've examined tensions created by texts, and author's conclusions about those tensions.

Using some or all of these approaches, examine: What is this text doing? What are its conclusions? Then tell us how did you came to your analysis.

One comment, one response to a comment. Deadline: June 3, 2007. Midnight.

It has been said that there is only one story in the world.
We humans just keep retelling that story a million different ways.

Based on what we have read this year,
what is that one story?

For credit, please make at least 2 comments --
and at least one of those should ADD and RESPOND to someone else's comment

deadline: May 21. midnight

THE FINAL SCENE OF FENCES: what are its conclusions about individuals, society?

GABE: Hey, Rose. It's time. It's time to tell St. Peter to open the gates. Troy, you ready? You ready, Troy. I'm gonna tell St. Peter to open the gates. You get ready now. (Gabriel, with great fanfare, braces himself to blow. The trumpet is without a mouthpiece. He puts the end of it into his mouth and blows with great force, like a man who has been waiting some twenty-odd years for this single moment. No sound comes out of the trumpet. He braces himself and blows again with the same result. A third time he blows. There is a weight of impossible description that falls away and leaves him bare and exposed to a frightful realization. It is a trauma that a sane and normal mind would be unable to withstand. He begins to dance. A slow, strange dance, eerie and life-giving. A dance of atavistic signature and ritual. LYONS attempts to embrace him. GABRIEL pushes LYONS away. He begins to howl in what is an attempt at song, or perhaps a song turning back into itself in an attempt at speech. He finishes his dance and the gates of heaven stand open as wide as God's closet. )

That's the way that go!

Based on your reading of this play, what might be the "weight of impossible description that falls away," and what might be the "frightful realization"?


How do the above choices, as well as the author's particular images, symbols, choices of particular words help to enhance the overall conclusions made in this play?

TRAGEDY AND BEAUTY

"The closest thing I know to the feeling at the end of a tragedy is the one that comes with the sudden, unexpected appearance of something beautiful"
-- Joe Sachs, scholar and translator of Aristotle.

Which of three plays we've read in the last two months best fulfills Joe Sachs' definition of the feeling at the end of a tragedy? Explain your response to this two parted question. I also invite you to nominate any film or book you've ever seen or read as a tragedy that offers the sudden, unexpected appearance of something beautiful.

AND...

Who best fulfills criteria for tragic hero?
Troy Maxson? Willy Loman? Tom Wingfield? You explain.

"Meursault is "the only Christ we deserve"

What do you think Camus meant by this?