Alissa's Blog

I have completed the backups and checkups for this course and I did all my declarations this week, including the extra credit ones. I'm caught up for the week and the semester.

I couldn't be more relieved about this class finally being over! This semester was for sure my hardest semester at LMC and this is my third year here. I get to transfer this year and I'm so excited. These past 17 weeks in this class were tough with all the weekly readings and analysis'. I didn't really enjoy the whole commenting on each other's blogs because it took up a lot my time and I don't have much time to begin with. I took 5 classes this semester and I work so now that all my classes are over I can finally just focus on work without worrying about homework during my shifts. I hope everyone had a wonderful semester and good luck to all those taking classes in the summer and/or in the fall! Completing this class feels like a huge accomplishment.

Recitatif  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recitatif "Recitatif" is Toni Morrison's only published short story. It was first published in 1983 in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women,  an anthology edited by Amiri Baraka and his wife Amina Baraka. Opera  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera Opera is a form of theatre in which music has a leading role and the parts are taken by singers. The work is a collaboration  between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting scenery, costumes and sometimes dance or ballet. Singing   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice and augments regular speech by the use of sustained tonality, rhythm, and a variety of vocal techniques. A person who sings is a singer or vocalist. Pop Music  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_music Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern fo...

The growth mindset challenge I chose to do was explore the random growth mindset cats. The cats are so cute! I kept refreshing the page until I found a picture I really liked. The one I landed on was this image of a cat leaning on a fence with the caption "Everyone can change and grow through application and experience." I believe that quote is very true because without experience, you don't grow as a person and your mind can't develop new things.

Extra Credit - Mo Yan (1188-1198) Mo Yan burst onto China's literary scene in 1986 with the publication of his novel Red Sorghum , which won high critical praise and was subsequently made into a film directed by Zhang Yimou since then he has published a host of novels and short stories, many of which have been translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, his longtime laborator much of Yan's fictions is set in his native Gaomi County, in Shandong province- a real place, albeit one that Mo Yan's fictions enhance and transform almost into a myth many critics describe Mo Yan's work as exemplary of the literary movement called "Roots Seeking" this movement arose in the 1980s, one of many waves of response to China to the collective experience of swift modernization in the preceding decades the Roots school tends to favor a masculine aesthetic, celebrating raw potency, toughness, and bravado, a tone that some feminist critics have challenged  the story, ...

Mahasweta Devi (1147-1165) Mahasweta Devi is the most important fiction and prose weiter in the Bangali language since India's decolonization (1147) she is also the premier social activist in Asia of the past fifty years dedicated to the cause of aboriginal peoples, having worked tirelessly for the little-known Lodhas and Shabars on West Bengal her unflinching novels, stories, plays, and essays about these and other disenfranchised people provided the literary foundations for what would later be called "subaltern studies" Devi was born in 1926 into a Hindu brahmana family in Dhaka, then in East Bengal in British India, and now the capital of Bangladesh her proper name is is Mahasweta, as devi is simply an honorific term attached to many Indian female names she was educated in schools in East Bengal and at Viswa Bharati, the experimental institution established by Rabomdranath Tagore her graduate studies in English literature at Calcutta University, in the mid-194...

Salman Rushdie (1129-1143) Rushdie was born into a wealthy Muslim business family in Bombay in 1947, a few weeks before the end of British colonial rule and the Partition of the subcontinent into the two new nations of India and Pakistan he published his 4th novel, The Satanic Verses,  in England in September 1988 after early education in the city, Rushdie attended boarding school in England and received his undergraduate and master's degree from the University of Cambridge, where he studied Islamic history he worked in advertising in London for several years, and wrote his first book with the publication of Midnight's Children  (1980) and its immense literary and commercial success, however, Rushdie was able to turn writing full time, contributing to periodicals throughout the anglophone world in the 1980s while producing his next 2 novels, Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses Rushdie described himself as a "historian of ideas," and many of his novels are ...

This week was pretty busy. Since it is the week before the last week, all of my classes gave me a lot of homework. I have a final tomorrow and a final on Saturday. I have a lot of studying to do and it is kind of stressing me out but I keep reminding myself that I only have one week left before summer. I was going to take summer classes but the classes I need are not offered this summer so I'm waiting for the Fall semester. None of the readings this week stood out to me. Usually I find at least one of the reading interesting but for some reason they were all kind of boring to me. I find a lot of the readings in this class to be either very interesting or very dull. I hope I'm able to complete all my work this week and get an A in this class. I've done a lot of the extra credit and I will continue to do them because I know I slacked off a bit and forgot to do some assignments so I just want to make sure I'm in the clear. I've also been working a lot so that has been ...

Close Reading on Morrison's "Recitatif" (1172-1187) This short story, "Recitatif," by Morrison was intriguing as a wholesome because this story doesn't mention the specifics. For example, the readers aren't exactly sure if they are prejudiced toward white people or black people. Morrison wrote this story in such a way that it forces the readers to confront their own assumptions and prejudices about race. A passage that stood out to me was on page 1174, when Twyla's mother, Mary, would "every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell [Twyla] something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny." Mary was talking about Roberta's race. I think this passage just shows you that no one is born prejudiced, but they can simply be taught prejudice ways towards another race. The relationship between Twyla and Roberta didn't start off too well because Twyla admits that w...

Oe Kenzaburo (1115-1128) Oe was born in a rural area on Shikoki, the smallest of the four main Japanese Islands Oe ranks among the most important Japanese writers in the later decades of the 20th century the second Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize in 1994 he remains active in Japanese letters as a prolific author, a public intellectual, and a provocative moral voice (1115) in 1954, Oe entered the University of Tokyo, where he majored in French literature and wrote a senior thesis on the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre he began publishing stories while still a university student 2 events shook his life in 1963: he visited Hiroshima to attend a world conference against the atomic and hydrogen bombs; and his wife gave birth to a son with severe brain damage the major themes and motifs he worked on were the threat of nuclear weapons to human survival, and the role of individual choice and responsibility in response to overwhelming issues (1116) the Ja...

Toni Morrison (1172-1187) Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio and took the saint's name Anthony, but later shortened it to Toni) she combines realistic depictions of African American experience with a strong sense of the past's hold on the present  she often conveys this sensitivity to the power of history by invoking magic or supernatural occurrences (1172) her family participated in the Great Migration of African Americans from the South in the early decades of the century she studied English at Howard University, where she was active in student theater her master's thesis, at Cornell University, examined the role of suicide in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkneer her later fictional practice made use both of the subject of violent death and supernatural, drawing from oral tradition such as the ghost stories her family told her as a child, to create characters who can fly or talk to the dead (1173) Beloved treats a still earlier period of African Am...

This week wasn't too bad with assignments, even though the semester is coming to an end, I didn't have too much work. I think all my work is pretty spread out for all 5 of my classes so it makes things easier. My due dates for work are all on different days which is helpful for me because I can take one step at a time with each assignment. I completed every single extra credit assignment this week because I know I missed some readings in the past, so I'm just trying to make up for it. I didn't really have a favorite reading this week. Usually one story sticks out to me but for some reason, this week was kind of boring. I read some great analysis of my classmates this week. I think everyone writes in a different style and I think that's cool because you learn different techniques when reading them. It's interesting to what my classmates have to say about some of the readings. They make me think of things I've never thought of before. I enjoy reading other p...

I backed up my blog. I haven't done a take stock since week 3 so I had a lot of edited pages to save since my last back-up. I haven't missed a declaration so far for the assignments I've done. I scrolled through the assignments for this week so I'm pretty much caught up on everything except for the project submission.

Leslie Marmon Silko Silko was born March 5, 1948 and is a Laguna Pueblo writer. She currently resides in Tucson, Arizona. She was one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln called the Native American Renaissance. Laguna Pueblo Laguna Pueblo is a federally organized tribe of Native American people in west-central New Mexico. Laguna in spanish means small lake and derives from the lake located on their reservation. New Mexico New Mexico is a state in the Southwestern Region of the United Sates of America. It has a population of nearly 2 million people. New Mexico is the 36th most populous state. Populous State California, the most populous state, contains more people than the 21 least populous states combined and Wyoming is the least populous state with a population less than the 31 most populous U.S. cities.

For this growth mindset challenge, I chose to make up my own acronym. I decided to make up: Learning Is Forever Essential Obviously this acronym spells out LIFE and that's because I think life is full of learning opportunities that can forever help you grow as a person. 

(extra credit) El Saadawi (1104-1114) Egyptian novelist, Nawal El Saadawi writes that she realized early in her life how gender discrimination limits the opportunities of women in the Arab-Islamic world "I had been born a female in a world that wanted only males" (1104) she was born in 1931 in Kafir Tahla, a small village on the banks of the Nile, into a well middle class family with strong connections to the ruling elite of the country after her graduation in 1955, she practiced as a psychiatrist before being appointed to the Ministry of Health, where she rose to become director of public health she was dismissed from her post in 1972, after the publication of her book Woman and Sex it arose displeasure of the Egyptian authorities for its frank treatment of a subject that was considered taboo after losing her government position, El Saadawi devoted herself to research on women she also worked for a year with the United Nations as an advisor on women's developme...

Literary Analysis of Kincaid (1144-1146) The speaker of "Girl" (1978), is a mother giving instructions to her daughter on the rules and rite of womanhood. The setting in the story takes place in Antigua. The mother is an interesting character because the mother believes she is the only one who can save her daughter from living a promiscuous life. She thinks her daughter is headed down this path because of the way she sits and walks. She talks about keeping the house clean, enduring a cruel husband, and aborting unwanted pregnancies (1145). During the lecture, she stresses how important it is for young woman to maintain a sense of sexual propriety. The frustration of the mother is taken out on the daughter but still thinks her wisdom will not make a difference on her daughter because her daughter is already headed down a promiscuous life. The mother believes that a woman's reputation determines the quality of her life in the community. She wants her daughter to realize th...

Jamaica Kincaid (1144-1146) Jamaica Kincaid rose from humble beginnings to become a successful contemporary writer, well known for her books and magazine articles bout the immigrant experience  these writings often used first-person narration or imagined dialogue she grew up in the island's capital city of St. Johns at school, Kincaid was a quick student, taking a special interest in history and botany at 13, when she was about to take university qualifying examinations, her stepfather fell ill, forcing her to leave school and help raise her siblings she was angry and dispirited so she withdrew into booka at 17, she accepted a job as a nanny in the U.S. and for 4 years lived with families in the New York City borough of Manhattan and in suburban Scarsdale  she earned a general equivalency diploma and briefly attended a college in New Hampshire before deciding she was too old Kincaid's first collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River, appeared in 1983 h...

Leslie Marmon Silko (1029-1036) Silko was born in Albuquerque but grew up in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico she is a novelist, poet, memoirist, and writer of short fiction Silko stayed on at the university and taught courses in creative writing and oral literature although much of her work emphasizes the healing of conflicts - between white and Native Americans, between the human and natural worlds, between warring aspects of the self - some of her novels also reveal a more aggressive and despairing tone (1029) the story "Yellow Woman" is one of Silko's shortest and earliest pieces, but it occupies a still growing place in the canon of short fiction it became the subject of a volume of critical essays published in 1993 Yellow Woman is either the heroine or a minor character in a wide range of tales Yellow Woman is named together with her three sisters, Blue Woman, Red Woman, and White Woman, thus completing the four colors of corn - but in Laguna shore she eventually...