Final Thoughts...

Dear oib class,
Good luck on your written exams!  Remember:

1. Write a specific thesis, not a general one.  If you find yourself writing these works have similar ideas in different ways, try subsituting your vague nouns and ajectives with specific ones until you have a real thesis.

2.  Approach your paragraphs logically:

First, make a point about a book.
Second, cite an example..You can say "for example, when...."
Third, analyze your example in terms of your point.

3. Prepare by making a list of:
--contexts
--key scenes for your "for examples"
--two literary elements that you can use to analyze the texts, either in terms of the point you are making or to illustrate why/how an author is interested in this point.  is this part of the conflict of the work? is it part of the work's major theme? if so, what does this theme relate to?  is there something of interest in the point of view of the work?  Think: literature=literary elements.

Be sure to have at least 7 works to choose from so you don't find yourself stuck!

Ambiguity...

But since why is too difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.  The Bluest Eye...

Poetry

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair."
Make links to the curriculum....

As I Lay Dying and The Odyssey--title allusion

From Book XI
"As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades."

I lay dying upon the earth with the sword in my body and raised my hands to kill the slut of a murderess, but she slipped away from me; she would not even close my lips nor my eyes when I was dying, for there is nothing so cruel and so shameless as  a woman when she has fallen into such guilt as hers."--Agamemnon to Odysseus in the Underworld about Clytemnestra who murdered him upon his return from Troy.

Quote of the day: tragic flaws...Hamlet, Act I, scene 4, lines 26 ff

So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By the o'ergrowth of some complexion
(Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason),
Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens
The form of plausive manners--that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature's livery or fortune's star,
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

Madness, Darl

"Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint.  Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that a way.  It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it."--Cash

Melancholia