Response to Course Material #2

This is going to be tricky to write. Well, trickier than the first Response to Course Material, anyway, since we’ve covered so much more in the last month than we did the month before. I’ll try to hit on most of the major concepts.

The DIDLS exercises took up most of the class time for a week, which just shows how important it must be for us to know DIDLS on the AP test. Although they gave us a chance to put into practice what we had only covered in lessons, I didn’t find them to be too helpful. Because the passages we were analyzing tended to be excerpts from longer works, like novels, it was hard to tell what was important in the context of the whole work. And because we couldn’t find important examples of DIDLS throughout the whole work, it felt more like I had to strain to find enough examples of DIDLS within the short excerpt rather than naturally coming across meaningful ones. (I felt like one of my previous English teachers, telling the class that some minutia was actually a complex symbol.) It was easier to annotate with DIDLS when we looked at The Century Quilt, since that was a whole work and I could see how the work was structured as a whole, what its overall meaning was, and which words from a specific section had connections to another part.

I guess the tone exercises were contrived to help us see how to answer the other part of the key question – DIDLS are techniques; tone is an effect. Personally, I’ve always been bad at identifying tone in printed text. Those questions are the ones that give me the most trouble on standardized tests. I can get some of them; it’s when the tone is really subtle or two answer choices are similar that I get stuck. I hope these exercises will help, but it feels like I’m just taking a test again. I know we’re talking through them as a class, but it sometimes feels like no one else is sure of the answer either. There is some subjectivity involved when discussing tone, of course, but even so, there is a lot of disagreement at times and it isn’t always resolved.

The critical lenses presentation was mostly a review for me, although it did cover a few things that weren’t in American and British Lit. The quiz was just free points. I’m not sure how applicable the different lenses will be, since we’ll be doing analysis on the AP test, not labeling it. I think the literary movement presentation will be much more helpful. Although we haven’t applied it yet, knowing the literary movement a piece of literature is from will probably help us know what to look for and focus on while DIDLS-ing and while looking for the meaning of the work.

The allusions presentations were functionally similar to the literary movement presentation. Just as the literary movement tells us what techniques and meanings to look for in certain works, just knowing these allusions helps us recognize them when we see them. And in many cases, the author depends on the audience to have this background knowledge already. (This is something all those papers on humor mentioned, too.) I was familiar with most of the allusions already, but there were some allusions to more obscure pieces of mythology in there as well, which I should now start trying to look for in literature. The more you know, I guess.

And of course, we spent a couple of days reading one of the five major works we study this year – The American Dream, by Edward Albee. I’ll be honest – I’m not looking forward to this close reading. I guess the Theater of the Absurd is interesting to read, to say the least. Sometimes it borders on enjoyable, with its occasional points of dialogue so absurd they’re funny. But I’ll have to think a lot about what meaning The American Dream has. Were it truly Theater of the Absurd, maybe I could claim that it has no meaning at all. But as one of the articles we read pointed out, it diverges a little and matches conventional literature more closely. It has some sort of a plot arc – something that I noticed and that bothered me when we were reading. I say it bothered me because every so often, I would feel like I knew what was going on, but then the dialogue would abruptly shift again and I would lose my train of thought. Hopefully, the literary movement presentation will come in handy here, because making sense out of this play with no context is pretty difficult.

I know I’ve skipped some of the smaller activities, but I think this covers the major concepts from the last few weeks. We seem to be focusing on learning more and more information so that we can apply it later. I just hope I don’t forget it all by the time we do.