A Short Essay on Hamlet

I've found a very good essay on Hamlet which uses simple language to explain the plot. It also contains some discussion about why Hamlet acts the way he does and how we can understand his actions. I recommend that you read Chasing Shakespeare, Finding Hamlet.

Enjoy.

MLA Citations

There is a lot of information on the Web about citing works. Here are a few helpful links.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_mla.html
This document covers a lot of the methods we looked at in class today. It is a good complementary resource for your Harbrace Handbook.

http://www.westwords.com/guffey/mla.html
This document goes into a lot of detail about citing electronic sources. It also explains why there are often two dates in a single citation. The first date is the publication date of, say, the Web page. The second date is the access date, or the date you viewed the Web page. Sometimes Web pages don't have publication dates, in which case you would only use the access date.

Shakespeare Links

Here are some links with more information on Shakespeare and his life and times.

Life in Elizabethan England
http://renaissance.dm.net/compendium/home.html

Shakespeare's London
http://sites.micro-link.net/zekscrab/London.html
http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/locations/location154.html

Shakespeare's Bio
http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/timeline/timeline.htm

General Shakespeare
http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/life.htm

Shakespeare's Theatre
http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/shakespeare/

I made a mistake

I thought Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" were in your Imprints book. I was mistaken. We will cover these poems on Monday. Please follow the links above and read these works for next week's class.

Reading List for the Week of January 10

Please make sure you read the following poems as we will be covering them in class this week:

“There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale
“The Song My Paddle Sings” by Pauline Johnson
“Snake” by D.H. Lawrence
“The Real Math” by Oscar Penaranda
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats
“Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Books Required for the Class

Here is a list of books we will be using in class. If you can only buy a few at a time, buy them in the order listed.

Imprints 11 (Published by the Gage Learning Corporation)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Harbrace Handbook for Canadians (Published by Harcourt Brace and Company, Canada)
Oedipus the King by Sophocles
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Sonnets

Your homework for the weekend is to read three sonnets: "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," "In the Crowd" and "Sonnet LV." To learn more about the sonnet, you should visit M. Wendy Hennequin's page called "Building Blocks of Sonnets." There is a lot of terminology on this page that we haven't covered yet. The most important parts for our purposes are the sections called "Types of Sonnets" and "Sonnet Structure."
Hennequin also provides some very good advice:

Read sonnets! After reading enough of them, you'll internalize the uses of the structures and won't even think about them.

Web Assignment 2

Earlier this week, you attempted a rather difficult task. You all tried to define poetry. I would like you to post these definitions on the site so that we can review them later. It will be interesting to see how your ideas will have changed by the end of the poetry unit.
Please post your definition as a comment to this post.

Web Assignment 1: McSweeney's

One of my favourite web sites is McSweeney’s. McSweeney’s is a literary web site that publishes very short stories. There is also a McSweeney’s journal that comes out roughly four times a year. Both mediums feature very good contemporary writing, some of it very funny. I have chosen to link to a story called “Creepy Clown Under the Bed's Telepathic Message to Child in Bed, Age Five and a Half” by Melissa Bell. I think the story is both funny and a bit spooky. It reminds me of the fears I used to have as a young child. Unlike the implied reader in the story, a five year-old child, I wasn’t afraid of clowns; however I was afraid of aliens. I thought there was one under my bed at any given time during the night. I think Bell’s story does an excellent job of capturing a child’s irrational fear.

Web Assignment 1

Class,

Your first web assignment is to post a link to one of your favourite web sites. Write about why you like this web site and about anything else you would want the reader to notice. For example, in my posting (above), I talk about a story that appeared on my favourite web site.

I look forward to reading your postings and learning about new sites on the web.

Welcome Students

Hello everyone and welcome to our class blog. Over the course of the next two months, we will be using this web-space to post our thoughts and hold discussions about the things we will examine in the classroom. I hope you are all as excited as I am about using this medium. Happy blogging.