We have covered a lot of material in class in the last few weeks. We have finished up the play Death of a Salesman and have had many conversations about analyzing it and figuring out what everything means. These conversations have helped me a lot because some people bring up ideas that I have never thought of before, and then it helps my understanding of the text as a whole. Another thing that we did that helped me was reading the commentaries on the play. Although they were lengthy, I found them kind of interesting. They proposed a lot of ideas about the play that I never thought of before. I remember one thing that I found very interesting was in one of the commentaries, The Commodity Comes Home to Roost, when they talked about Willy's affair. They said that Willy had the affair, not because he was unhappy or lonely, but because someone in the business world was finally choosing him over his opponents. I had never thought of this, but now that I think about it, it makes perfect sense. So reading those commentaries and writing about them definitely helped out, especially with the annotating part, too.
Something that we finished up right after Thanksgiving break was watching the movie Death of a Salesman, while following along in the book. It was interesting to see what the director kept from the original and what he cut out. Some of the things that he chose to leave out, like long conversations between Linda and Biff about Willy, seemed important to me so I wasn't really sure why he would cut that out. I do think the director did a good job with the movie overall though, such as Willy's flashbacks being always being around the daytime when it was light out, and having the tense scenes with the all of the fighting going on be during the night when it was dark out. That showed the better times in Willy's life, or when he was happier and how things weren't so good in the present for him. This was also a topic we discussed in class.
The most recent thing that we started doing in class was reading William Shakespeare's Hamlet. We haven't gotten too far into yet, but it's pretty good. I have to admit, I'm having a hard time trying to keep track of which character is related to who, and stuff like that. It is helping me straighten things out though when we stop to discuss every few scenes. This way I feel like if I'm not understanding things, then we can go over it before we move on.
Mehar, I think that you did a good job writing about Death of A Salesman in a way that will reprocess the information that you learned rather than just listing off what we have done and your initial reactions to the things. Something you might want to include is a few more details about other things we did in class, like tone exercises or AP practice or whatever, so that so much of the post isn't focused on one topic, although I feel like I probably did something similar in my last post.
ReplyDeleteI hope you liked reading Hamlet! I thought it was a pretty good play (but hard to understand at first).
Hey Mehar,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the first few pages of Hamlet are pretty interesting. We did cover a lot about Death of a Salesman and learned a lot about it. I also think that reading the commentaries helped understand a broader perspective of the play and learn more about the views of the author and the views of characters in the story. Good job!
I totally agree with all that you have said. The discussions and commentaries we have done have really opened my mind to so many more ideas about the play. Its really interesting, to me at least, to see how someone else might see the same scene as me just completely different. I also liked watching the movie and I enjoyed how close it was to the book. There were a few missing lines here or there, but overall it was all there. Lastly, I agree Hamlet is rather confusing. There are a lot of characters and the language is hard to decipher sometimes. Great job!
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