Category Archives: ResponsePaper

I have come to the conclusion that the poem I will use to create my digital essay and paper is “Fear” by Raymond Carver. The overall message that I want to get across is that in the current world we live in, fear is playing an increasingly significant role in the reason why people can no longer live stress-free lives. We ourselves are the ultimate reasons why we truly cannot be happy and live without fear, because we create fears out of our everyday troubles and uncertainties.  Due to the media publicizing unworthy events and the new discoveries revealed to us, people are finding flaws in almost everything. Whether it is reality or exaggeration, our focus on the worries in the world is only dragging the true essence of life down.

For my digital essay I will be doing a skit. Although my ideas may change I want to create a dramatic, yet lightly humorous, story line based on someone who is being negatively affected by the news and media on ridiculous matters. I believe that I will be able to depict the proper mood in my video by choosing the appropriate song to play in the background.

I was thinking very hard about what exactly I should be writing my digital essay on but I think that out of all topics available, I want to focus on our ever-expanding freedom of choice. Every day, people feel less and less obligated to fulfill what society pressures them into and this is especially prevalent in today’s music. “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga advocates for the LGBT community and songs by artists such as Eminem stress the importance of being true to yourself. I have not decided what I want to do just yet but I think I will try to find a poem from a couple decades ago that has similar ideas to this and then try to incorporate both into my essay.

Gaga\’s \”Born This Way\”

For my digital essay and paper #4 I believe I will be focusing on John Donne’s “The Flea,” It falls under the subtopic of metaphysical poetry, which is poems that uses elaborate conceits, and expressing the complexities of love and life. Metaphysical poetry has always really fascinated me because it was a way of how the highly intellectual people of the seventeenth century communicated issues without being public about it. This poem is about how a man was rejected sex by his lover. Specifically, I will attempt to tackle the idea of how sex is linked to happiness. Why is the character in this poem so attached to idea of sex? Is it because he thinks he needs this to be happy?
As for my digital essay, I will be illustrating a series of situations where a man is not happy after being rejected sex. Specifics are not known at this point but I will keep you posted definitely. It will be very captivating. = )

At this point, I’m still relatively lost about what I want to do for the final paper. I’ve been looking through a lot of poems, but none of them seem to strike me as anything I’d want to devote an entire paper to interpreting. It’s likely that I’ll end up doing something with a theme of childhood, or growing up and becoming an adult, because I found a lot of the poems categorized under that theme to be particularly interesting.

The one thing that I’m completely set on though, is the idea of doing a stop-motion animation video for the digital essay portion. It might be a bit ambitious given the amount of time we have to do this project, but since I’ve already done a film project before for another class, I wanted to try something different this time around.

As I begin thinking of which poet and ultimately which poem to write my final paper for this class, I feel sort of torn between Audre Lourde and Gertrude Stein. Both have such unique writing styles and the subjects of their poems are completely different. Lourde, as we learned, is the queen of writing excellent sentences with just few simple words. However, Stein is the queen of repetition which brings such power to what she is writing about. I now understand what Professor Kaufman meant about her comment of being very Gertrude Stein when we had to write a speech in Ehrenreich’s voice and use a literary element from “The Birthmark” which my group had repetition. I think I might be leaning towards working on a piece from Stein because I have been learning and experiencing much repetition in my own writing due to analyzing “Hills like White Elephants” and understanding the power of the message that stays in your head.

In thinking about the digital essay part of the paper, I admit I am still a little frightened by the notion that I have to create something so visual that snapshots what my thesis will be. I have only recorded short snippets on my six year old camera no longer than thirty seconds. I have seen YouTube videos with collages of pictures, music and short movies and I have never really thought that I could accomplish something like that. After seeing the sample ones in class, I feel somewhat more assured that it is possible to create a masterpiece and that we can interpret how we want to show our thesis in different ways. As of now I guess I might be working alone but that might be subject to change of course after we find out what people want to work on and if there are similar topics. As for ideas of the video itself, I like visuals a lot such as artwork and words that really stand out. I also really appreciate music because that helps videos to flow and also I have always listened to music more for the lyrics then the actual rhythm and beats. I would like to incorporate some of these aspects into my final masterpiece.