Faculty of Arts,
Chulalongkorn University
Reading Responses
Think of the responses as an attempt to
explain, discuss or comment on a question that you pose about the
reading or on an issue that interests you in the text. I don't expect
more than one page double-spaced but these should be well thought out
and carefully proofread. Use MLA format. (See below for links to MLA
citation guides.)
Sample Student Reading Responses
Sample Student
Responses to Susan Glaspell's play Trifles
Study Question:
What
is the significance of the setting and the set?
Response 1:
Teerapong
Wanichtamrong
2202235 Reading and Analysis in the Study of
English Literature
Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri
January 7, 2009
Reading Response 1
A None Place
“Down
in a hollow and you don’t see the road” (42), Mrs.
Wright’s kitchen is in a house that is literally
unseen by passersby. In this setting that is
generally invisible, a crime has been committed
which no one sees or hears save possibly the suspect
who pleads ignorance and is not present in the play.
The case that will be tried in court will have no
female jury because the time of the play is when
women cannot be such a part of the legal system, nor
can they vote or be a part of the political system.
The setting then, is a time and place where Mrs.
Wright’s case effectively cannot be seen or heard.
In
this non place, the set is a kitchen where,
according to the sheriff, “the law,” there is
“nothing here but kitchen things” (38). Wiped of
existence and legal potential, the set and setting
of Trifles is
Glaspell’s genius ironic construction. Out of sight,
out of mind, goes the saying. By bringing this
dismissible space to her audience, Glaspell forces
them to look at and think about a place that
otherwise has no position in consciousness. The
things that unfold in this nonexistent
place—unwitnessed crime, unknown motive, and unfound
evidence leading to an untenable case—ask the
audience to reconsider its dismissibility. Rather
than being negligible, this none place becomes a
privileged peek into the unknown. And once known,
the place, its hidden female inhabitant, and her
secret conspirators, are not easy to forget.
Works
Cited
Glaspell,
Susan. Trifles.
Plays. Ed.
C. W. E. Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
35–45. Print.
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Response 2:
Umaporn
Jaisawang
2202235 Reading and Analysis in the Study of
English Literature
Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri
January 7, 2009
Reading Response 1
SOS
George
Henderson the lawyer declares of Mrs. Wright, “I
shouldn’t say she had the homemaking instinct” (39),
pronouncing her unfit to be a housewife by looking
at the house, and especially the kitchen, as a
reflection of the woman herself, to which Mrs. Hale
takes exception, “Seems mean to talk about her for
not having things slicked up when she had to come
away in such a hurry.” The set—“a
gloomy kitchen” (36)—and its setting—“down
in a hollow and you don’t see the road” (42)—then,
represent not only the absent suspect herself but
also her circumstance and even her state of mind.
That her voice and the kitchen are so closely
aligned as to be virtually one and the same thing is
illustrated in Mrs. Peters’ ease in fulfilling her
mission: “She [Mrs. Wright] said they [aprons] was
in the top drawer in this cupboard. Yes, here. And
then her little shawl that always hung behind the
door. (opens stair
door and looks) Yes, here it is” (40).
Everything is in its place. Therefore, when things
are not as they should be, which merely cause Mr.
Henderson to give unfair criticism, they should
cause the keener and more just observer to take
careful note. The women prove themselves to be
excellent listeners of Mrs. Wright (or great readers
of the text which is the set) and become properly
troubled and later alarmed.
The
prepared bread dough gives Mrs. Peters pause: “lift[s] one end of the towel
that covers a pan) She had bread set. (Stands still.)”
(39). The set speaks. That is, Mrs. Wright speaks.
And what the bread baking and dough being set to
rise say to the sheriff’s wife is that Mrs. Wright
was not planning on doing anything out of the
ordinary or on going anywhere where she cannot tend
to her cooking in progress. The set voices Mrs.
Wright’s innocent and normal intentions and plans.
“A loaf of bread beside the bread-box” tells Mrs.
Hale “She was going to put this in there” and
something disrupted her from completing the action.
From this normal lonely routine interrupted, the
women learn further from quilt sewing that began “so
nice and even” but ended “all over the place!” (41)
that Mrs. Wright thereafter becomes disturbingly “so
nervous.”
The
hinge “pulled apart” of a bird cage door (42) and a
canary with its neck wrung “wrapped up in [a] piece
of silk” (43) answer Mrs. Hale’s earlier demand
“What do you suppose she was so nervous about?”
(41). Questions are asked and the set responds. This
odd but natural conversation that these two women
have with the set in lieu of Mrs. Wright reveals an
isolated woman desperately starved of companionship.
In the language of kitchen things, homey chores, and
domestic use, Mrs. Hale is able to understand her
former friend’s distress signals and domestic abuse:
“She liked the bird. She was going to bury it in
that pretty box” (43), and finally come to her aid.
Like the canary that can still tell-tales even
through its broken neck, the set and setting give
Mrs. Wright’s testimony even though she is absent
and silent. You can hear it if you know how to look.
Works
Cited
Glaspell,
Susan. Trifles.
Plays. Ed.
C. W. E. Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
35–45. Print.
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Sample Student
Response to Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging"
(In-class writing,
15 minutes; responding to a study question)
Study Question:
Billy
Collins,
in his essay "The Ride of Poetry," suggests that "the poem can act as an
imaginative vehicle, a form of transportation to a place unknown." Among
the four poems we have read today (Heaney, "Digging"; Millay, "I, being
born a woman and distressed"; Herrick, "Delight in Disorder"; and
Johnson, "Granny in de Market Place"), which one especially "spirits
[you] away to a new conceptual zone"? Write about the ride that the poem
has given you, keeping in mind Collins's description that "to view a
poem as a trip means taking into account the methods that give a poem
vehicular capability. It means looking into the way a poet manages to
become the poem's first driver and thus the first to know its secret
destination."
Response 1:
Ployjai Pintobtang
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn Puckpan
Tipayamontri
October 28, 2010
Reading
Response 1
My Ride with
Seamus Heaney in "Digging"
"Digging,"
a poem by Seamus Heaney sets me on a journey where
past, present and future meet. Beginning with the
present, the son, Seamus Heaney, is holding a pen in
his hand, "snug as a gun" while his father's boot
"nestled on the lug." They're using their different
weapons, yet, with the same purpose: to dig. The
poem carries me through the past where his father
and his grandfather perform their duty as farmers
then shows me how that influences Seamus Heaney as a
present writer. His experience as a son and a
grandson of farmers "awaken in my (writer's) head."
And though he has "no spade to follow men like them
(farmers)," he uses his different kind of weapon,
his pen, to dig for something good as well as his
father and his grandfather did. So in the end, the
poem takes me to the different future than those of
his old men yet has its root from them.
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Sample Student
Response to Sherman Alexie's short story "A Good Story"
(Responding to a
study question)
Study Question:
The
Aristotelian tradition that Le Guin adds to in her essay “What Makes a
Story” divides the structure of a narrative, like that of a play, into
something like Freytag’s pyramid: a beginning exposition where the
characters, setting and conflict are introduced, a middle which consists
of rising action, climax and falling action, and an end or denouement
which resolves conflict and wraps up the story.
What do you think of Sherman Alexie’s “A Good Story” which
seems to suggest that the beginning of a story is, rather, its very
basic inception: a story begins when someone wants to hear a story? The body of the story is the
tale being told. And the
ending of the story is the result of the telling—how it has affected the
listener and teller.
Response 1:
Chutamas Chandchai
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn Sorn
Nangsue
June 21, 2010
Reading
Response 1
A Symbiotic Story
For
many, stories begin with “Once upon a time,”
establishing setting and mood for the characters and
plot that follow.
In Sherman Alexie’s “A Good Story,” the
story begins with the narrator’s mother telling him,
“You should write a story about something good, a
real good story” (140).
It is the reader, not the writer who starts
the story. But
Alexie provokes us further.
Junior responds to his mother’s request by
putting forward his own: “Okay…If you want to hear a
good story, you have to listen.”
The successful making, or “quilting,” of a
story depends on the reader’s participation.
Alexie
claims that he is not trying to “pull that Indian
shaman crap on” the reader with exotic Indian
Americanness in telling a story (xii).
This is, after all, a modern Diet Pepsi
drinking, potato chip munching, sandwich eating, HUD
house dwelling tribe of Indians, not the Disney
Pocahontas running through the forest singing
“Colors of the Wind” type.
Yet, this very image of basketball playing
half-braided brown youths looks very exotic against
the stereotype.
Junior’s earlier demand comes back to chide
us: “If you want to hear a good story, you have to
listen”—a good story is a good story with the proper
cooperation of parties involved.
The proper names of things are proper
because we make it proper.
“Uncle Moses sat in his sandwich chair
eating a sandwich” (141). It is proper that one should eat a sandwich in a sandwich
chair. His
“it-is-a-good-day song” is what it is because he
hums it and makes it so.
The
web of a story is spun out for us in this
interdependent way.
Arnold’s straight words to Moses in
response to why he hid from going on a field trip,
“Because I wanted to see you,” is an “unplanned
kindness” and, for Moses, “a good thing” (143). When
Arnold asks for a “good story,” his story—his
actions which lead him to Moses sitting in front
of the house, and his kindness—therefore, is what
is told. This
“good story” is a proper name for it, fulfilling
as it does the request of the willing and
attentive listener, Junior’s mother, who responds,
also properly, with an approving “it-is-a-good-day
song,” which in turn finishes the story quilted of
diverse pieces of material fitting together in a
symbiotic relationship.
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Response 1 (with instructor's comments):
Chutamas Chandchai
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn Sorn
Nangsue
June 21, 2010
Reading
Response 1
A Symbiotic Story
For
many, stories begin with “Once upon a time,”
establishing setting and mood for the characters and
plot that follow.
In Sherman Alexie’s “A Good Story,” the
story begins with the narrator’s mother telling him,
“You should write a story about something good, a
real good story” (140).
It is the reader, not the writer who starts
the story. But
Alexie provokes us further.
Junior responds to his mother’s request by
putting forward his own: “Okay…If you want to hear a
good story, you have to listen.”
The successful making, or “quilting,” of a
story depends on the reader’s participation.
Alexie
claims that he is not trying to “pull that Indian
shaman crap on” the reader with exotic Indian
Americanness in telling a story (xii).
This is, after all, a modern Diet Pepsi
drinking, potato chip munching, sandwich eating, HUD
house dwelling tribe of Indians, not the Disney
Pocahontas running through the forest singing
“Colors of the Wind” type.
Yet, this very image of basketball playing
half-braided brown youths looks very exotic against
the stereotype.
Junior’s earlier demand comes back to chide
us: “If you want to hear a good story, you have to
listen”—a good story is a good story with the proper
cooperation of parties involved.
The proper names of things are proper
because we make it proper.
“Uncle Moses sat in his sandwich chair
eating a sandwich” (141). It is proper that one should eat a sandwich in a sandwich
chair. His
“it-is-a-good-day song” is what it is because he
hums it and makes it so.
The
web of a story is spun out for us in this
interdependent way.
Arnold’s straight words to Moses in
response to why he hid from going on a field trip,
“Because I wanted to see you,” is an “unplanned
kindness” and, for Moses, “a good thing” (143). When
Arnold asks for a “good story,” his story—his
actions which lead him to Moses sitting in front
of the house, and his kindness—therefore, is what
is told. This
“good story” is a proper name for it, fulfilling
as it does the request of the willing and
attentive listener, Junior’s mother, who responds,
also properly, with an approving “it-is-a-good-day
song,” which in turn finishes the story quilted of
diverse pieces of material fitting together in a
symbiotic relationship.
Chutamas—
The
title of your response, “A Symbiotic Story,” is
good, but I think you should also have a
one-sentence introduction stating the main idea
of your response before proceeding to the
discussion.
The
first paragraph is clearly and logically
developed. I like the way you picked up on
Alexie’s use of the communal activity of
“quilting” as a metaphor for the cooperative way
in which stories are made.
In
paragraph 2, a topic sentence outlining the main
idea of the paragraph would be helpful to the
reader. Otherwise, the paragraph starts well and
your marshalling of details from the story to
describe the modern Indian tribe is well
executed. However, clarity becomes an issue when
you introduce the word “proper.” It is used
three times in one sentence alone and its
meaning becomes unfixed. You need to establish
early on your understanding and employment of
the term “proper.”
Paragraph
3 begins with a good topic sentence. However,
the slippage in meaning in your use of “proper”
continues to affect clarity. The conclusion is
nice and you return to the term “symbiotic,” but
apart from the title this is your only use of
that word. It should be explicated early on in
the response if it is central to your
discussion.
Overall,
an insightful response but for the full effect
you need to clearly explicate key terms used in
your discussion so that clarity doesn’t become a
problem in conveying your thoughts to the
reader. Furthermore, in fully responding to the
question in the ‘Weekly’ you should refer to the
Aristotelian tradition as background in
discussing Alexie’s innovations in the short
story form. Also, have you directly addressed
the final part of the question, i.e. “how [the
story] has affected the listener and teller”?
A final point is that in paragraph 2,
you tantalizingly raise the issue of conscious
exoticism and how Native American products are
viewed by non-Indians, but leave it hanging.
It’d be great if you could elaborate further on
this point.
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Sample Student
Response to Rudolfo Anaya's novel Bless Me, Ultima
(Responding to a
study question)
Study Question:
What is Ultima to the narrator?
Response 1:
Tida Damrongvej
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn Puckpan
Tipayamontri
June 10, 1998
Reading
Response #1 (Bless Me, Ultima)
What was Ultima to
the narrator? I pieced together an answer to
this question while following the narrator's
division of the world. He basically divides
his world into one that is established by the
community and one that is its alternative.
From
the very first chapter of the novel, he
introduces two possible starting points to his
tale: "Let me begin at the beginning. I do
not mean the beginning that was in my dreams and
the stories they whispered to me about my birth,
and the people of my father and mother, and my
three brothers—but
the beginning that came with Ultima" (1).
Antonio, the narrator, makes a distinction
between a historical origin and a personal
birth. He has a history whose origin is
defined through local conventions of ancestry,
and he has a history whose beginning exists
outside of that definition.
Using
Ultima to mark a beginning outside of tradition,
Antonio declares her as the embodiment of an
alternative world. Ultima's character, in
many ways, is fitting for the role. She
comes to live with Antonio's family and is
respected without having to be a part of the
family. She and the narrator's father are
the only people in the household not observing
the fast before holy communion. Ultima's
powers of cure works where those of God
supposedly fails. Existing side by side
with, but not attached to the dominant religion
and culture, the figure of Ultima offers an
option of seeing and living in the world without
the binds and obligations of a mainstream
mentality and custom, although this is a
mainstream within a minority culture in the
larger culture of America.
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Sample Student
Responses to Carol Ann Duffy's poem "Anne Hathaway"
(Responding to a
study question)
Study Question:
Texts speak to and are often shaped by other texts. Each of these
works presents characters that are informed by extratextual sources.
Examine how the character of something or someone is shaped in one of the
literary selections.
Response 1:
Kanokwan
Surapornchai
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn Puckpan
Tipayamontri
June 10, 2009
Reading
Response #1
A Second Best
Sonnet
Shakespeare’s
role-playing begins in bed according to Carol Ann
Duffy’s “Anne Hathaway.”
The willed item is an ever-changing stage
for loveplay where the stellar poet engages in
earthly delights.
Encasing this “living laughing”
Shakespeare is his widow’s recollective sonnet
“held” together by approximate rhymes.
World and words half
rhyme and seas and kisses is
light rhyme that is also a near rhyme which Duffy
seems to dub “soft.”
The feminine unstressed syllable of kisses
transforms Shakespeare’s words as they reach
their goal (“these lips”) into realized action.
After
this relaxed initial quatrain, the rhymes
dissolve even further as the repeated o’s of body,
now, softer, now,
echo, assonance bring
enjambment, continuous over seven lines, to the
eye-sonance touch-noun
end-rhymes and finally an end-stop, producing
word-making and love-making as one act.
More dissimilar eye-sonances
substituting for end rhymes (romance-taste,
on-love) in the release of built
emotions through the next dreamy five lines make
the sonnet seem to lose its structure
altogether.
The finish, however, is a resonant
couplet containing an identical rhyme that
insists, in hearkening back, on that identical
bed in line 8 with a perfect twist.
This is a turn and final statement in
Hathaway’s lesser voice pronounced with the
lingering identical chime of the exact head-bed—the
best coupling among second best rhymes in a
second best sonnet about the second best bed.
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Sample Student
Responses to Sylvia Plath's The Bed Book
(Responding to a
study question)
Study Question:
Think about what reading is when you read a poem in this unit. In a
paragraph or two, show how that poem has urged you to read in a certain
way.
Response 1:
Anchalee
Kamnoedkaeo
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn
Puckpan Tipayamontri
June
3, 2009
Reading
Response #1
Beds that Fly
In
the movie Basic Instinct (1992), the
character Catherine Tramell, played by Sharon Stone,
notoriously invokes Coleridge’s idea of “suspension
of disbelief” as an alibi.
“You make it up,” she says, “but it has to
be believable.”
Tramell is being interrogated as a murder
suspect and her defense is a literary pact between
writer and reader.
“I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a
book about a killing and then kill him the way I
described in my book.
I’d be announcing myself as the killer. I’m not
stupid.” In
effect, she can’t be the murderer because she wrote
about the murder.
That the story is convincing shows her
skill as a fiction writer, not as perpetrator. Putting
your disbelief on hold is why you can enjoy Harry
Potter.
You are willing to ignore your disbelief for
the moment of reading that paintings can talk, that
sprinkling powder over your head can get you from
one place to another across town in a flash.
Put another way, if you want to enjoy
reading, you should be willing to believe.
This is the demand of Sylvia Plath’s The
Bed Book which offers us such fantastic
notions as Snack Beds with automatic dispensers
“Just a finger to stick in / The slot, and out come
/ Cakes and cold chicken” (39–41).
We are not stupid.
Plath’s
poem asks us to “see if the Big Dipper’s / Full of
stew” (173–74) and dares us to revel in springing
“From a Bounceable Bed” even though “You bounce into
the blue—” (l. 163–64).
I did not feel lost in that open blue. In
letting go of my preconceptions and inhibitions, I
was too busy entertaining new combinations of
things, actions and ideas, and the outcome is better
than cakes. For
me, having traveled with Plath from Timbuktoo to
Aunt Joan’s and enjoyed every minute of it, reading
is believing.
Works Cited
Eszterhas,
Joe. Basic
Instinct.
1992.
Screenplay.
Daily Script 3 June 2009
<http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/basic_instinct.html>. |
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Response 1 (with instructor's comments):
Anchalee
Kamnoedkaeo
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn
Puckpan Tipayamontri
June
3, 2009
Reading
Response #1
Beds that Fly
In
the movie Basic Instinct (1992), the
character Catherine Tramell, played by Sharon Stone,
notoriously invokes Coleridge’s idea of “suspension
of disbelief” as an alibi.
“You make it up,” she says, “but it has to
be believable.”
Tramell is being interrogated as a murder
suspect and her defense is a literary pact between
writer and reader.
“I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a
book about a killing and then kill him the way I
described in my book.
I’d be announcing myself as the killer. I’m not
stupid.” In
effect, she can’t be the murderer because she wrote
about the murder.
That the story is convincing shows her
skill as a fiction writer, not as perpetrator. Putting
your disbelief on hold is why you can enjoy Harry
Potter.
You are willing to ignore your disbelief for
the moment of reading that paintings can talk, that
sprinkling powder over your head can get you from
one place to another across town in a flash.
Put another way, if you want to enjoy
reading, you should be willing to believe.
This is the demand of Sylvia Plath’s The
Bed Book which offers us such fantastic
notions as Snack Beds with automatic dispensers
“Just a finger to stick in / The slot, and out come
/ Cakes and cold chicken” (39–41).
We are not stupid.
Plath’s
poem asks us to “see if the Big Dipper’s / Full of
stew” (173–74) and dares us to revel in springing
“From a Bounceable Bed” even though “You bounce into
the blue—” (l. 163–64).
I did not feel lost in that open blue. In
letting go of my preconceptions and inhibitions, I
was too busy entertaining new combinations of
things, actions and ideas, and the outcome is better
than cakes. For
me, having traveled with Plath from Timbuktoo to
Aunt Joan’s and enjoyed every minute of it, reading
is believing.
Works Cited
Eszterhas,
Joe. Basic
Instinct.
1992.
Screenplay.
Daily Script 3 June 2009
<http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/basic_instinct.html>.
Anchalee—
This is an
excellent first response. I like that you’re
bringing in different kinds of texts (Coleridge’s
prose, film script, films) to your analysis of
Plath’s poem to show how they are relevant to
literary study, but be careful that they do not
hog your attention and detract from your focus on
The Bed Book. Changing your word choice of
“notions” in “such fantastic notions as Snack
Beds” to a more thingy noun would work better with
the logical order of the thinking process that you
innumerate—a movement from concrete to abstract:
things à
actions à
ideas. Overall, lively prose and a keen
examination of your act of reading.
Good job!
PT
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Response 1 (revised)
Anchalee
Kamnoedkaeo
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn
Puckpan Tipayamontri
June
3, 2009
Reading
Response #1 (revised)
Beds that Fly
Suspension
of disbelief is what makes fiction come alive. This pact
between writer and reader coined by Coleridge is
notoriously invoked as an alibi by the character
Catherine Tramell played by Sharon Stone in the
movie Basic Instinct (1992) when being
questioned for murder: “You make it up, but it has
to be believable.”
Fiction can be made to seem real but it is
not reality, Tramell reminds her interrogators, “I’d
have to be pretty stupid to write a book about a
killing and then kill him the way I described in my
book…I’m not stupid.”
The writer agrees to verisimilitude, the
reader agrees to put their disbelief on hold, and
the fictional world is enabled for our enjoyment:
thriller dramas where writers can kill without being
killers, fantasy series like Harry Potter
where sprinkling floo powder can get you across town
via fireplaces, and, in this case, Sylvia Plath’s The
Bed Book where Snack Beds come with automatic
dispensers “Just a finger to stick in / The slot,
and out come / Cakes and cold chicken” (39–41). We are
not stupid, and our enjoyment does not come at the
price of intelligence.
The
opposite is true.
Plath’s poem shows us “An Elephant Bed”
that can give “A trunk-spray shower” (129, 139),
asks us to “see if the Big Dipper’s / Full of
stew” (173–74), and dares us to revel in springing
“From a Bounceable Bed” even though “You bounce
into the blue—” (163–64).
I did not feel lost.
In that wide open blue, I let go of my
white little preconceptions of beds and of my jam
rambling inhibitions and was fantastically busy
eating up new combinations of things, actions and
ideas, and the outcome is better than cakes. For me,
having willingly suspended my disbelief in
traveling with Plath from Timbuktoo to Aunt Joan’s
and enjoyed every minute of it, reading is
believing.
Works Cited
Eszterhas,
Joe. Basic
Instinct.
1992.
Screenplay.
Daily Script 3 June 2009
<http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/basic_instinct.html>. |
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Sample Student
Responses to William Carlos Williams' poem "This Is Just to Say"
(Responding to a
study question)
Study Question:
Think about what reading is when you read a poem in this unit. In a
paragraph or two, show how that poem has urged you to read in a certain
way.
Response 1:
Danai
Hengtrakul
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn
Puckpan Tipayamontri
June
3, 2009
Reading
Response #1
Breakfast
vs. Delicious Plums
Two
people depend on “the plums / that were in / the
icebox” in Williams’ “This Is Just to Say.”
For the unseen “you,” the reader of this
message, they are breakfast.
For the speaker, they are more than that. The understated title, for all its trivial anticipation,
actually announces a complex string of serious
comparisons. Reading the poem as a contrastive display of wants and
values releases the true juiciness of Williams’
provocative act.
It
is not only that he has eaten the plums (past
tense, sin committed), and the “you” was waiting
till later (future intention, object not
consumed), but also conning us into sympathizing
with that defiant and remorseless stance,
forgetting that the other party has been deprived
of a meal, and one so important as that which will
break a night-long fast.
We are asked to weigh the value of two
worthies. On
the one hand there is breakfast, on the other,
plums—the same thing but meaningfully different. One is
tasteless, the other “delicious / so sweet / and
so cold.” One
is probable, the other certain; deferred vs.
immediate gratification. Present vs. future. Planned (“saving / for”) vs.
unplanned. Singular vs. plural. Categorical
vs. specific.
Of the two that hang in the balance,
Williams seems to claim that your preserving of
staid, conventional bodily sustenance is not worth
my now joltingly flavorful sensual nourishment. In this
poem so short and sweet, reading is simply
comparing: your thing vs. my aesthetic.
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Sample Student Reading Responses to
Roald Dahl’s “The
Landlady”
Response 1:
Nilobol Wongsam
2202232 Introduction to the Study of
English Fiction
Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri
November 6, 2008
Reading Response
Guilty Pleasures
Billy Weaver, in
Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady,” gives a clear
criterion for his preferred place to stay when he
asks the porter “is there a fairly cheap hotel not
too far away from here?” (142).
Having also taken the “slow afternoon
train”—presumably cheap as well—which deposits him
at a late hour (“about nine o’clock in the
evening”) in Bath, Billy reveals himself to be an
aspiring businessman who is concerned not with the
business of how much he could make but with how
little he would spend.
Yet, as he follows
the porter’s ready reply to try the pub Bell and
Dragon, he encounters a bed and breakfast.
Here, Billy observes the “brilliantly
illuminated” temptation: “tall and beautiful”
pussy-willows which “looked wonderful” beside
green velvety curtains, “a bright fire burning in
the hearth,” “a pretty little dachshund” curled up
asleep in a room “filled with pleasant furniture,”
containing “a baby-grand piano and a big sofa and
several plump armchairs” (143).
Billy’s vacillation in front of this
lavish visual so averse to his sense of thrift
recalls an earlier contrast between seeing and
feeling: “the moon was coming up out of a clear
starry sky over the houses opposite the station
entrance. But
the air was deadly cold and the wind was like a
flat blade of ice on his cheeks” (142).
The setting for this story establishes a
discomfiting tension between the pleasantness of
what is seen and the unpleasantness of what is
felt.
The word “dithering” (143), used to
describe Billy in front of the house window,
contains both the physical and mental push and
pull between his pleasure at the sight and
displeasure of the idea: “he was a tiny bit
frightened of them [boarding-houses].”
It is also a continuing reminder of the
“deadly cold” in the expositional discrepancy. By the
time Billy sees the landlady’s “warm welcoming
smile” (144), its contradiction to his earlier
feeling toward “rapacious landladies” makes the
conflict between seeing and feeling almost a motif
in the story.
Accepting to stay
at the “fantastically cheap” bed and breakfast
(144), then becomes an act of guilty pleasure for
Billy not because of indulgent spending but
because of indulgent skimping.
His disapproving instincts lose to
apparent low cost: “The old girl is slightly
dotty…but at five and sixpence a night, who gives
a damn about that?” (145).
The landlady’s guilty pleasures bring
these words back to haunt Billy.
Her pleasure in having beautiful boys
smacks of illicitness: “They were tall and young
and handsome, my dear, just exactly like you”
(148) and “we don’t want to go breaking any laws
at this stage of the proceedings” (146). This
vocabulary shift to “proceedings,” evocative of
the court, hints at a shift in the story where the
business at hand is no longer economic but
(il)legal. One
suspects that an overnight stay at a local bed and
breakfast is turning into a longer mysterious
series of events. Our act of continuing to read is Dahl pulling us inexorably
into the mire of a murder that we would rather not
be a part of, much like Billy Weaver being drawn
into the house despite his trying to hold back
(144).
“When
I’m writing for adults, I’m just trying to
entertain them,” says Dahl (West 65).
To continue reading is to continue
seeing Billy’s downfall.
Ignoring his feelings and believing
only his eyes probably costs Billy his life. Even
though the anticipated climactic murder never
takes place explicitly in the text, are we
ignoring our feelings of guilt as we
are “entertained” by the pleasure not of
killing, an illicit act, but of reading about
it?
Works
Cited
Dahl, Roald. Tales
of the Unexpected.
London: Joseph, 1979.
West,
Mark I. “Interview
with Roald Dahl.”
Children’s Literature for Education
21.2 (1990): 61–66.
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Sample Student Reading Responses to
Saki’s short story “The
Open Window”
(Responding to a
study question)
Study
Question: Consider movement in the story.
Response 1:
Tida Navakul
2202232 Introduction to the Study of
English Fiction
Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri
June 16, 2008
Reading Response
From Lady to
Child: The Moving Identity of Vera
Vera
is first introduced in Saki’s “The Open Window”
as “a self-possessed young lady of fifteen”
(4). This identity quickly slides into the
next, less mature-sounding, one even as she acts
in the very adult role of playing host to the
nervous Mr. Framton Nuttel who is visiting for
the first time with a letter of introduction
from his sister. By the second sentence,
the young lady in control of the conversation is
referred to as the niece, identified merely as a
temporary replacement for her aunt through their
kinship. We soon see behind the young lady
niece who receives her uneasy house guest with
such poise. The story turns out not to be
a simple parlor scene when yet another identity
is revealed: “‘Her [aunt’s] great tragedy
happened just three years ago,’ said the child”
(5). This dramatic shift from lady to
child makes one wonder. What has
transpired seems to be an exposition to a
different development. “‘Then you know
practically nothing about my aunt?’ pursued the
self-possessed young lady” becomes not the voice
of a grown up niece making polite drawing room
conversation but that of a child gauging her
audience in setting up a game. While the
men are out snipe-shooting for their
entertainment, the child at home is doing some
hunting of her own. Vera, stalking her
prey, we realize when the aunt arrives and asks
whether she is “amusing you [Mr. Nuttel],” is
ironically amusing herself (6). The
shifting label for Vera from lady to niece to
child suggests that perhaps what she would
rather be is none of these. Perhaps what
she most prefers has nothing to do with age, but
activity. Tracked through Vera’s moving
identity, this short story is a conflict of
desire, of a child trapped in the role of a
young lady. She wants excitement and
adventure, and, thwarted, seeks them where she
can, making do with “romance at short notice” as
her “specialty” (7). In the end, she is
not even Vera. Operating as she does in
fiction rather than in truth, she is perhaps
more suited to “authoress.”
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Sample Student Reading Responses to
Saki’s short story “The
Open Window”
(Responding to a
study question)
Study Question:
What does the open window mean?
Response 2:
Pete Jaidee
2202232 Introduction to the Study of
English Fiction
Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri
June 16, 2008
Reading Response
The Open Window
“That window wide
open on an October afternoon” in Saki’s short
story named after it is such an invitation for
imagination (5). Space for this view seems
even greater when we discover that it is actually
a door: “a large French window that opened on to a
lawn.” The story that follows, wild though
it may be, however, is marked by precision.
It was “three years ago to a day” is very
precise. How freely can imagination run when
it is curbed by such control? The men did
not merely go shooting, but specifically
“snipe-shooting.” The window is not open to
infinite possibilities.
There was only one
opportunity for this precise machination to work. That is
a limit in terms of time.
There was only one event that needs to
happen. That
is a limit in terms of activity.
There was only one place where the event
can happen.
That is a limit in terms of space.
There was no room for choice.
There was no room for chance.
Everything is definite.
“The open window” was open to one assured
happening. The time was “twilight” but there
could be no two ways about it (7).
The event happens exactly the way it is
known and said to happen:
three figures were
walking across the lawn towards the window; they
all carried guns under their arms, and one of them
was additionally burdened with a white coat hung
over his shoulders.
A tired brown spaniel kept close at their
heels. Noiselessly
they neared the house, and then a hoarse young
voice chanted out of the dusk: “I said, Bertie,
why do you bound?” (7)
Each
detail was fixed and in place, down to dusk,
white coat, spaniel, and song. Open
windows can mean a limitless multitude of
things, but despite the temptingly wide open
image of its title, for Saki’s “The Open Window”
to be the masterpiece that it is, the open
window must be closed to all but a singular
experience. There is nothing to imagine
because all is known. You are not allowed
boundless wonder because everything is
told. What does it mean, then, that the
open window is in fact very closed? It
means that, in this perverse condition of strict
limitation that showcases the meticulousness of
plot where every element must fit unerringly
together, this open window, so locked against
possibilities and so restricting to imagination,
is perfect.
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Responses to W.
Somerset Maugham’s short story “The
Colonel’s
Lady”
Response 1:
Tida Navakul
2202232 Introduction to the Study of
English Fiction
Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri
August 2, 2007
Reading Response
The Modern Eve
We have discussed
the significance of names in class looking at the
name Peregrine.
Its association with falconry hearkens
back to an old culture of chivalry and legacy, one
that corresponds nicely to “the walls” where
“George Peregrine’s ancestors, painted by the
fashionable painters of the day, looked down upon
them,” the current couple upholding the Peregrine
heritage (53).
Being a bird of prey, the peregrine
falcon also matches George’s love for the hunt
with several “trophies of the chase” to show off
his skill (54).
I have extended
the examination of names to that of Evie, which
comes from Eva, and shares the same root as Eve,
the biblical first woman, the helpmeet and
companion of man, and mankind’s first mother. The
name Eve is derived from Latin Ēva from
Hebrew Havva which means “a living being”
or “Life.” In
the biblical story, Adam gives names to all the
animals and also to his wife. Each name designates a different animal and defines what the
animal is. In
the same way, Eve means, and is, life, and part of
her identity is “mother of all living.”
In Maugham’s “The
Colonel’s Lady,” Evie as George’s wife, contrary
to the legacy of her namesake, is said to be
“barren” (55).
Unlike Adam’s Eve, she cannot be a
mother. She
cannot continue the Peregrine family line.
George thinks “she hadn’t any vitality,”
is “faded” and “thin as a rail” (55) and goes to
another “blonde and luscious” woman (56), one who
seems more fertile and full of life than Evie.
George,
however, is wrong. Evie’s book, Dashwood says, “throbs” with passion “in every
line” (60).
Contrary to George’s perception, Evie
shows that she is full of vitality (from the
Latin vitalis “of life” from vita
“life”). She
gives birth to a new tradition and generation of
man. Her legacy is a society where women can be creative, not in
the physical terms of making babies, but in the
intellectual and emotional terms of producing a
work of art.
This is the creation and contribution
of the new Eve—“fresh and original, very modern
without being obscure” that from conception has
taken on a life of its own and grown beyond the
imagining and control of its parent, just like a
child (59).
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Sample Student Reading Responses to
Billy Collins’s poem “My
Number”
Response 1:
Renu Panya
2202242 Introduction to the Study of
English Poetry
Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri
July 3, 2008
Reading Response
The
Life of Death: Personification in Billy
Collins’s “My Number”
Billy Collins’s
poem “My Number” presents death in action.
Death’s description is suggestive of
personification, where an inanimate thing, an
animal, or an abstract idea “is made human or is
given human qualities” (Coursebook 28). He
breathes (l. 3).
He reaches for (l. 2), tampers with (l.
6), scatters (l. 7), and loosens (l. 8) things. But how
human are these “human qualities”?
How human-like is it to kill a woman who
has already lost her husband, or to snatch away a
person who wants to find his way home, or to give
disease for which there is no cure? The token gesture to humanize death is doubly undermined by
the hypotheticality of the questions in which the
personification is couched and by the inhumanity
of Death’s supposedly human actions.
What human can
have a reach that is limitless in space (can be
everywhere from Cincinnati to British Columbia to
roller coasters and dark lanes) and time (is never
too busy)? What
person can find every life no matter how hidden? What
person has breath that ends life rather than
begins it?
It
seems the speaker’s questions try to humanize
death so he can deal with him as a person who
can be persuaded, who will “find it hard to
find” his house (l. 10, 1), and who has ears and
can hear him talk.
The speaker is not brave in talking to
death, but afraid.
If personification humanizes death and
gives it life, perhaps taking away
personification can end its life?
The personifying imagery makes death
more clearly person-like (having a car,
“stepping from a…car” l.11), bringing him closer
and closer in space and the tense shift from “Is
something so?” (first three stanzas) to “I will”
(l. 17) to “I start talking” bring death closer
and closer in time.
The hypothetical becomes a definite
future, and finally an ongoing present.
At the end, the actions cease,
personification of death stops.
Death is no longer a person who can
make arrangements (l. 5) or park a car (l. 12). The
pronoun for death is no longer a “he” but a
“this” (l. 17), a definite vagueness that is
here. The
sense of doom throughout the poem forebodes the
failure to make death human, and this last word
speaks of the more important failure: after
personification, death’s life continues.
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