DAY 11: Symbol as a key into a story

Today, you took your first vocabulary quiz of the year. You were asked to pick words that best fit sentences about the stories we have read, to write sentences of your own about the stories which used vocabulary terms and provided adequate context to discern meaning, and finally to determine which sentence out of several used a vocabulary term correctly. You should continue to study vocabulary in a way that prepares you for this kind of thinking. If you are still just using flashcards with words and definitions on them, you should go back and read the blog entry for DAY 2, and definitely read the corrected sentences on  the wikispace.

After the quiz, I asked you determine where the narrator appears on the spectrum seen below when the story first opens, and then to consider where he appears at the story's close:

Inexperienced                                                  Experienced

Ignorant ---------------------------------------Knowledgeable

Un-evolved                                                      Evolved

Youthful & Idealistic                            Older & Wiser

After you made your determination, I asked you and your table mates to consider how the author's use of a symbol helps demonstrate the story's theme of "evolution."  To help, we consulted the Literary Terms guide given out last week, and which you can find on the wikispace.

Remember, a symbol is an object that has literal qualities that are used to reflect an abstract idea.  For example:

FOSSIL: 

• Unchanging artifact;
  
• Studied by scientists; 
  
• from a past, less developed state; 
  
• gives clues about a life, but doesn't necessarily explain it.
  
• It represents a life form, but doesn't have a real existence.

HOW MIGHT THIS APPLY TO "At the Pitt-Rivers" by Penelope Lively?

• Well, rather than actually form a human relationship, the narrator goes to a museum.  Without real world experience, his odds of changing are little.
  
• He studies the couple of the older man and younger woman to study a life that is not his.
• He himself is less evolved in love than the couple he watches.
• In the same way fossils don't speak to us or explain things, the narrator relies totally on observation--they never actually communicate directly.
• As the narrator hides  from life in the museum, and there the couple hides away from the world, too, neither really have a genuine existence either.

In this exercise, you got a feeling of how you might use a part of a story to help explain a whole.  To be frank, I'm not sure this went so well (things were rushed at the end), which is why I will email this entry to you so you can read all the detail I had hoped the lesson would contain.

The trick to thinking about symbols is to list their literal qualities, figure out what is suggested by them, and then see points of connection with the stories.  If you get the logic of the fossil example above, then you're in good shape.

HOMEWORK

Your homework tonight is to take a stab at a 12-sentence paragraph, which you should write about "At the Pitt-Rivers."  Answer an interpretive question that is of interest to you.  You know enough now to create your own.  But, if you get stuck, try this: Why does the narrator rip up his poem after he sees the man jilt the younger woman?

The other reminder: Bring your sentence diagramming workbook tomorrow!