English A1 HL paper 1

[Candlegiglia]

Hi!

so how was your Paper 1?

I'm in Time zone 2, so we got this prose that i didnt really understand. I liked the Poem much better, 'Minority' by Imtiaz Dharker.

[Alix]

Hey! I felt the same, the prose was a bit too vague so I didn't even consider it but I did the poem, Minority.. I didn't think it was too bad, I understood it and there was a lot to write about. Some people told me that in the last stanza:

until, one day, you meet

the stranger sidling down your street,

realise you know the face

simplified to bone,

look into its outcast eyes

and recognise it as your own

.

Some people thought that she was talking about an actual stranger, another immigrant but I said it was the speaker herself as she has finally developed a sense of identity because it says "recognize it as your own". What did other people interpret it as?

[sweetnsimple786]

I'm in TZ1 and I did the poem. It was so adorable but kind of hard to make meaning out of.

Did anyone else do the poem?

[Candlegiglia]

hmm thats interesting. i didnt look at it that way. I said that what she's trying to say that when you remove all superfial appearances and "simplify" everyone to the "bone" you'll realise that we're all the same. "own" refered to a sense of sister/brotherhood. What sets us apart is merely our outward appereances, on the inside we are all very similar. the the poet was just expressing her wish that people should recognise that and not point fingers at people who only SEEM to be different.

lol thats what i thought, anyway.

its quite open to interpretation. Someone in my class said that she was talking about 'discrimination' (well she was) and the caste system in India (i dont know how she construed that from the poem?)

the poem was quite easy so i expect that the grade boundaries will be quite high??

i made SUCH A stupid mistake though!!! I kept refering the speaker as the 'narrator'. I don't know why. I don't know what came over me. I just hope that they don't penalise too much because of it.

[sweetnsimple786]

Candlegiglia, my teacher said it's okay to say speaker or narrator & reader or audience.

[Candlegiglia]

really!?!! Oh thank goodness!! that's such a relief!!! I was just reading one of the paper 2 questions on poetry (we're doing drama though)and they refered to the central character as speaker/persona and it made me realise what a stupid mistake I'd made. But I'm so glad that it's ok to do that.

I guess I'm just so accustomed to analysing prose instead of poem, I got a bit confused. Poems aren't really my strong points. I was rather surprised when the poem we did (Minority) turned out to be so easy to talk about.

Thanks Sweetandsimple786! =)

[sweetnsimple786]

Haha same here. We do novels mainly, but poetry is easier to talk about because they pick poems that often have a "so what?" or a bigger picture that tries to get the reader asking questions.

No problem

[greaterthaninfinity]

I'm in TZ1 and I did the poem. It was so adorable but kind of hard to make meaning out of.

Did anyone else do the poem?

Hey sweetnsimple, I'm also TZ1. The goldfish poem, right? I thought that was a godsend. I talked about it as an allegory for human romantic love.

[sweetnsimple786]

Okay. yes, love song with two goldfish.

I didn't know if that would be a stretch or not.

What'd you make of the parentheses? I said it seemed almost as if the narrator was whispering secrets.

There was a lot to talk about, but I just didn't know how structure it

[greaterthaninfinity]

I thought the parentheses were ultimately important in showing that the love between the goldfish, like the "love" between many people, was ultimately doomed for failure because they never really were emotionally involved with each other; the poem focuses on showing the ephemeral nature of infatuation. The female goldfish saw that their attraction was superficial, and understood that there was a world outside of their obsession with each other. Does that make any sense at all? Basically - the parentheses were like the bowl, which was essentially the veil of obsession that clouds people's judgment and "he could not give her a life beyond the bowl" (or whatever that line was).

Edited May 5, 2010 by greaterthaninfinity

[jwcgator]

I thought the parentheses were ultimately important in showing that the love between the goldfish, like the "love" between many people, was ultimately doomed for failure because they never really were emotionally involved with each other; the poem focuses on showing the ephemeral nature of infatuation. The female goldfish saw that their attraction was superficial, and understood that there was a world outside of their obsession with each other. Does that make any sense at all? Basically - the parentheses were like the bowl, which was essentially the veil of obsession that clouds people's judgment and "he could not give her a life beyond the bowl" (or whatever that line was).

I thought the bowl was supposed to have something to do with the guy's life, and how it's so confined. He could not escape his own bowl, so he had to live in it, but the female didn't want to which is why she left him.

[hannah.mb]

I'm in Time Zone 2 and I did the prose, not the poetry. I actually thought the poetry ('Minority') was really hard, especially with what her referring to "scratches"- I really didn't get it. I think that I was intimidated of it, I don't know how. I think the writer's voice was too "strong" and kind of put me off trying to get to the heart of what she (he?) was saying. But a lot of the people in my class did the poetry, they found the prose confusing.

So I did the prose, an extract from 'Turned'- can't remember who the author was. I said that the reason Mrs. Marroner and Greta were crying was because Mr Marroner had died and also that there were beginnings of a "household scandal" because Mrs. Marroner found out that Greta fell in love with Mr Marroner. But maybe I went off on a tangent....because other people in my class who did the prose didn't think that Mr Marroner had died at all, and a lot of them said that Greta hadn't fallen in love with Mr Marroner either So I don't know if I was way off topic...

[soadquake981]

I wrote about the goldfish poem too. I explained how the motif of "containment, restraint, and lack of freedom" is present throughout the poem, most notably in the fishbowl metaphor. As for the parentheses, I noticed that everything is enclosed in parentheses except the phrase "a life beyond the". So, I asserted that Chua did this intentionally to highlight that phrase, and give a glimmer of hope amidst the tragedy of a love broken up.

[Candlegiglia]

I'm in Time Zone 2 and I did the prose, not the poetry. I actually thought the poetry ('Minority') was really hard, especially with what her referring to "scratches"- I really didn't get it. I think that I was intimidated of it, I don't know how. I think the writer's voice was too "strong" and kind of put me off trying to get to the heart of what she (he?) was saying. But a lot of the people in my class did the poetry, they found the prose confusing.

So I did the prose, an extract from 'Turned'- can't remember who the author was. I said that the reason Mrs. Marroner and Greta were crying was because Mr Marroner had died and also that there were beginnings of a "household scandal" because Mrs. Marroner found out that Greta fell in love with Mr Marroner. But maybe I went off on a tangent....because other people in my class who did the prose didn't think that Mr Marroner had died at all, and a lot of them said that Greta hadn't fallen in love with Mr Marroner either So I don't know if I was way off topic...

umm...I thought 'scratches' just showed her frustration at the way the world was as opposed to the way it ought to be. *shrugs* i dont know. To be honest, I didn't have time to analyse everything!! and i hope that they dont mark me down for that.

The prose wasn't confusing as such...i just didn't know what the central themes were? I thought it was loss but i wasn't sure. hehe lol when i read it though, i got the same impression as you!! Either that Mr Marroner had died....or Greta was pregnant with his child? I dont know why i thought of pregnancy but yh...like i said, I wasn't too sure about it.

As long as you backed your thesis, I'm sure it would be ok.

[Fezz]

I did the prose "turned" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Mrs Marroner left her husband because Gerta was pregnant with his baby.I personally interpreted it on a slightly different level but come on...it was so vague that I am sure there will be various different interpretations. I hope its alright though, as long as whatever we said is backed up with evidence ^^

But all in all I found it quite nice, there was alot to say and alot to argue.

If you wanna read the full story then you can do so here

aye nerd attack

sry ppl lol

Edited May 5, 2010 by Fezz

[CommeDesEnfants]

I'm in TZ1; did the goldfish poem. I feel the exact same way: there was a lot to talk about, but the way I structured it didn't work out that well. :/ Apparently, the author of that poem wrote it when she was 12, and she's only 19 right now...

Did anybody else think that the male goldfish was kind of a representation of alcoholism? I didn't have enough time to jot it down, but it sure seemed like it.

[soadquake981]

I said that the goldfish served as symbols for actual people, and yes, I noted that there are references to drinking alcohol to "drown his sorrow".

[Einstein's Grandson]

I'm in TZ2 and did the poetry.

In a nutshell, I addressed mainly the author's use of the motifs of rootlessness and misfitting and the melancholy tone to convey the theme of identity, thus conveying the author's didactic resent of the feelings of rootlessness created by immigration.

The "scratching" I said conveyed the persona's struggle to fit in to the society; I referred to the title "Minority" to clarify that point, since the persona states in the first line of the poem "I was born a foreigner" and then says something about always having been a foreigner wherever he/she went. Using that, I talked about how it portrays the theme of identity, since the persona doesn't feel like he/she fits in anywhere - not at the "home country" or the country to which he/she migrated.

Basically, I just said the whole thing's about feelings of rootlessness and dis-belonging.

[IBbda]

I did the goldfish poem too. I said the fish were a metaphor symbolising a couple's relationship (that it was about humans). And my main body points were the symbolism of the fish; relationship between fish/couple; notion of being trapped; and desire of freedom. I talked about the parenthesis too, like said it gave an allusion of a bowl which mirrored how they feel trapped in the relationship, and then noted how 'a life beyond' didn't have parenthesis to emphasise how the parenthesis represented that entrapment. I also talked about Freedom and one of my points was about the "ocean" which is an ultimate symbol for freedom, and forget. I talked about the change in tone, in the beginning it was romantic and got lugubrious later. I talked about the sibilant alliteration, plosive sounds, metonyms, and colloquial style. I also liked the simile "drinks like a stone" (something like that) because of the connotations of a stone: cold, devoid of feelings.

Thats all I remember. I hope I did well. I want a 6/7 but i spelt things wrong and used wrong terms. Like i said it was both tercet stanzas and 5 line stanzas, thinking tercet was 6 but it was 3 lines! So ill probably get marked down for that , and i spelt anthropomorphism wrong.

[CommeDesEnfants]

Hm, it pretty much looks like we all said similar things for the TZ1 paper. I had a bit of a mindblank when it came to using literary terms, though... We'll see.