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Ashley Cox

The Almost Moon - 0 views

www.bookpage.com/books-14685-The+Almost+Moon

Almost Moon Alice Sebold Coping illness Amy Scribner

shared by Ashley Cox on 24 Jan 11 - No Cached
    • Ashley Cox
      Ashley Cox on 24 Jan 11
       
      The main character has to not only deal with that but try to hide the evidence of what she has done
    • Ashley Cox
      Ashley Cox on 24 Jan 11
       
      Her having to cope with her mothers illness let her to the action that took place
  • Helen Knightly has spent her life coping with her mother's mental illness. Often cruel and distant, her mother suffers agoraphobia so severe she can't leave the house without being wrapped head to toe in blankets. When Helen gets her first period, her mother—who can't bear not to be a part of this rite of passage—accompanies her to the drugstore fully cloaked in blankets.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  •   After her father's death, Helen spends years taking care of her aging mother, driven by a toxic mix of duty, guilt and resentment.  
  • "For years I had done my penance for blaming someone who was essentially helpless," says Helen. "I had warmed baby food and fed it to her with long pink spoons pilfered from Baskin-Robbins. I had carted her to doctors' appointments, first with blankets and then with towels to hide the world from her."
  • Finally, Helen snaps. During the next 24 hours, she grapples with what she's done, and what she should do next. Her still-devoted ex-husband flies in from across country to help her cover her tracks, but ultimately, Helen has to decide whether to face up to her mother's death.
  • The Almost Moon is incredibly fast-paced; it's the jittery, forceful story of a woman who sifts through her past to discover what brought her to such desperation.
  • Ashley Cox on 24 Jan 11
     
    This article tells you a little more about the author and also some about the story of The Almost Moon. It show how the main character has to deal with her mothers sickness after her fathers death and that leads her to the action that she does which is killing her mother. Unlike in Lovely bones how someones actions leads to people having to cope with the situation at hand but in The Almost Moon the main character having to cope with her mothers illness leads her to take action
Tara Toliver

Article Analysis #2 - 0 views

go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...tab.do

shared by Tara Toliver on 25 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Tara Toliver on 25 Jan 11
     
    The "Killers" In Margaret Atwood's novel, The Blind Assassin, there are many struggles that the main narrator addresses to represent the "killers" in the novel. The "killers" are all of the characters in the novel because they are blinded by love, family, duty, jealousy, vengeance, and other inescapable, socially defined tyrannies that comprise the fabric of life. These represent human nature and how much simple emotions can affect that fabric of life. J. Brooks Bouson criticized that Iris, the main narrator in the novel, had "linear but interrupted installments of her family and married history with her comments on her present daily life as an octogenarian" (Bouson). Iris's comments about family throughout the novel about her life are crucial to the fact that she is blinded by her duties to her family. When she was young, she was forced to marry a wealthy man in hopes that the union would save her father's factory. In fact, it did not, but Iris let herself be blinded to the fact that she would be miserable and that it would make her life more stressful. Also, within society, human norm is to "carry ourselves perfected--ourselves at the best age, and in the best light as well" (Atwood 311). Iris's comment shows that in society, even she keeps a shield on reality and that this bliss is an inescapable tyranny that keeps others from accepting who they are. Another societal tyranny shown in this novel was jealousy. "Iris's guilt stems partly from jealousy and partly from conventionality" (Watkins). She found it hard to find reason on why it had to be her that had to watch over her younger sister, Laura. In the confines of her relationship with Richard, Iris finds herself not actively participating. She was blinded to the fact that Richard was the one who progressed Laura's illness because she was jealous of Laura during their sibling rivalry throughout the beginning of the novel. "The nove
Mariah Love

The Iliad Criticism - 0 views

www.enotes.com/...iliad-homer

Criticism

shared by Mariah Love on 20 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Mariah Love on 20 Jan 11
     
    Analytical Criticism- Heroic Duty Noted as a timeless classic, The Iliad by Homer portrays a vast array of emotions through detailed imagery and character concentration. However, it has become evident that much of the emotions portrayed by each character are of similar origin to that of other Greek Mythology, this emotion being of helpless humans at the mercy of powerful, vengeful gods. Set in a time of war and destruction between both the Trojans and the Achaeans, writers from CMLC argue that it is not only the men that fight one another but also the gods that persuade the humans to do so. "Although Homer presents an extremely harsh world in which human beings appear destined to suffer as the mere playthings of the gods and fate…" (CMLC). CMLC claim that Homer is quite stereotypical in his use of Greek Gods and their relations with humans. They also claim that the contrast between the harshness of Gods and the susceptibility of humans demonstrates mans gentle nature even in a time of war. Overall writers of CMLC critique Homer's use of Greek Mythology and the common portrayal of man. The structure of this critique is weak at best and demonstrates a choppy analysis of The Iliad. This is so due to the tendency of this article to jump from one topic to another with a lack of transition. The ill-prepared structure of the article inadvertently has a negative impact on the focus as well leaving it poorly adjusted and inconsistent. However, the topic of the article is well thought out and continues to make intelligent and unobvious observations about both Homer and The Iliad throughout the piece. It is of my conclusion that the writers of this critique have the belief that Homer although renowned for his unique stories is more unique in his writing technique than he was of his stereotypical stories. There is unfortunately some bias that these writers face, being of the twentieth century much of Greek Mythology is easily accessible unlike in the age of Homer
Ashley Cox

My Name Was Salmon, Like the Fish': Understanding Death, Grief, and Redemption in Alice... - 0 views

go.galegroup.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...retrieve.do

Alice Sebold lovely bones Kenneth Womack

shared by Ashley Cox on 28 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • As with so many other works of contemporary fiction and film, Alice Sebold's bestselling novel The Lovely Bones (2002) fulfills our fundamental and indelibly human desires for establishing vital interconnections with the lost friends and loved ones who adorn our personal pasts.
  • Time and time again, the most cherished works of our literary and popular culture reflect this abiding need to seek out our lost siblings, parents, and grandparents.
  • we long for the opportunity to wade back into the recesses of time in order to enjoy impossible reunions with the people who left their imprints upon our very souls
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • By narrating the events surrounding the Salmon family's tragic dislocation and heart-wrenching reunion, The Lovely Bones deftly taps into our yearnings to eclipse the laws of space and time. Even more powerfully, the novel depicts the many ways in which interpersonal tragedy possesses the capacity for tearing survivors' lives apart at the very moment in which they need familial companionship the most. The parlance of family systems therapy--with its accent upon the interpersonal dynamics that shape literary works as well as our own senses of self--provides us with a useful lens for understanding the Salmon family's trials and tribulations in The Lovely Bones.
  • as an inherently open system, the family must at once provide support for its individual members' integration into a solid family unit, as well as their differentiation, or emotional and psychological separation, into relatively autonomous selves. This mutual developmental process possesses the capacity for producing functional and dysfunctional families. In functional families, individual members evolve into fully realized selves that allow them to act, think, and feel for themselves. In dysfunctional families, however, family members develop pseudo-selves--often fostered by fear and anxiety within the system--and thus, such individuals frequently remain unable to maintain any real equilibrium between their inner feelings and their outward behavior
  • In the novel, Susie can only watch in horror as her family devolves from a functional system into a dysfunctional shadow of its former self. Family therapists describe the fashion in which the Salmons maintain their systemic dysfunctionality as a psychological state of homeostasis, which Barnard and Corrales define as a family's tendency
  • "In order to perceive change in one's life--to experience one's life as progressing--and in order to perceive oneself changing one's life, a person requires mechanisms that assist her to plot the events of her life within the context of coherent sequences across time--through the past, present, and future" (35). These mechanisms--works of narrative therapy--offer cogent methodologies that assist clients (or readers) in simultaneously identifying with and separating from the dilemmas that plague their lived experiences.
  • At the beginning of the novel, the Salmons' interpersonal relationship exists as a functional family system. Jack and Abigail Salmon enjoy a busy, albeit satisfying family life in eastern Pennsylvania, where they raise their three children--fourteen-year-old Susie, her younger sister Lindsey, and their four-year-old brother Buckley. After Susie's rape, murder, and dismemberment in December 1973, the family lapses into a dysfunctional spiral as they attempt to cope with a stultifying sense of grief. The effect of Susie's untimely death is rendered even more painful by the disappearance of her body save for a stray elbow, as well as by Jack's suspicions that a reclusive neighbor, George Harvey, is responsible for her demise.
  • "The reflective awareness of one's personal narrative provides the realization that past events are not meaningful in themselves but are given significance by the configuration of one's narrative," Polkinghorne observes. "This realization can release people from the control of past interpretations they have attached to events and open up the possibility of renewal and freedom for change" (182-83).
  • Told entirely from Susie's perspective, the novel details the post-traumatic experiences of her family as they attempt to make their various ways among the living. Existing in a form of atemporal limbo that she describes as a kind of heaven, Susie observes her family and friends as they try to understand her loss in terms of their own survivorship. In addition to her significant role as witness, Susie must also contend with her own anxieties about her untimely separation from her family unit, as well as her severance from the young life that she was only just beginning to comprehend.
  • "There is no question," they write, "that families devote considerable energy to maintain a certain amount of order and stability. Security," they add, "seems to be tied with a certain amount of stability and predictability"
  • In The Lovely Bones, Susie composes her narrative in an explicit attempt to make sense of her family's dysfunctionality and to explode the homeostasis of her former family system, thus allowing them to effect their own "new levels of functioning." Although feelings of morphogenesis for Susie will always be tempered by the finality of her death, she intuitively realizes that the sublimation of her family's homeostasis will allow both herself and her family to continue their progress toward selfhood--although obviously in decidedly different locales and through highly disparate states of being.
  • The particular manner in which Susie sorts through the tragic events of her family's post-traumatic experiences can be usefully understood by interpreting her act of narrative therapy in terms of the five "attitudes" toward death that Kübler-Ross postulates in On Death and Dying. These attitudes--which themselves mirror the five stages of dying that terminally ill patients undergo--include denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. "The one thing that usually persists through all these stages is hope," Kübler-Ross writes. "It is the feeling that all this must have some meaning, will pay off eventually if they can only endure it for a little while longer" (139).
  • Abigail isolates herself by delving into the workaday world of the suburban housewife. Her obsession with the preparation of the family's meals and her daily chores allows the time to pass more quickly, thus limiting her ability to reflect upon her daughter's ordeal.
  • In The Lovely Bones, the first portion of Susie's narrative highlights the narrator and her family's struggle with denial and isolation as they simultaneously come to grips with and attempt to disavow the unsettling reality of her murder.4 Their feelings of denial and isolation function as "coping mechanisms," according to Kübler-Ross, as well as the result of the "inability of [clients] to look at their situations realistically" (37, 41). Unable to make sense of Susie's sudden disappearance from their lives, the Salmons initially cleave to each other, hoping against hope that somehow she will return to their midst. After the police report to the family that Susie must be dead, given that so much blood had been found at the scene of the crime, they begin the difficult work of having to confront her fate, as well as their own. Like her family, Susie finds herself unable to accept her passing: "I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother," she reports. "That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it" (27).
  • While her father purposefully refuses to allow himself to cry for her loss--to do so, he reasons, would make Susie's death seem all the more real--Jack copes by attempting to establish normalcy in the Salmon household within only a few scant days of her disappearance.
  • Meanwhile, Lindsey and Buckley act as their father's accomplices in his efforts to trap Susie's killer. In one particularly harrowing instance, Lindsey slips into Mr. Harvey's house in order to search for evidence. She narrowly escapes from his clutches, ultimately becoming the object of Mr. Harvey's sociopathic fantasies herself. In each instance, the family members' behaviors serve to exacerbate their ability to come to terms with their grief, rather than to sate their enduring despair.
  • In this fashion, Jack, Abigail, and Lindsey each develop pseudo-selves in order to quell their devastating senses of anxiety and pain. As the youngest member of the family, little Buckley can hardly begin to comprehend his sister's fate. He only begins to understand the extent of her absence from his life during a game of Monopoly, when he realizes that there is no one to play with the shoe, Susie's favorite game piece. Unable to cope with the significance of the moment, Buckley hides the shoe in his bedroom. As with the rest of his family, Buckley can only consider the depth of her absence in isolation from the rest of the unit. To do anymore, it seems, would force them to contend with the awful reality of a world in which Susie simply no longer exists.
  • In the second stage of their confrontation with Susie's death and the slow, almost imperceptible collapse of their family system, the Salmons experience the anger about which Kübler-Ross remarks in On Death and Dying. "When the first stage of denial cannot be maintained any longer," she writes, "it is replaced by feelings of anger, rage, envy, and resentment." According to Kübler-Ross, people in such situations often find it difficult to control their anger or to differentiate logically between the various objects of their animus. "The reason for this," Kübler-Ross observes, "is the fact that this anger is displaced in all directions and projected onto the environment at times almost random" (50).5 In The Lovely Bones, the family's anger takes many
  • forms. Susie's own anger reaches a fever-pitch when she learns the maddening extent of her killer's depravity. As she recognizes that her own death was just the latest in a series of unsolved homicides, Susie seethes as she realizes that Mr. Harvey's house exists as a "town of floating graves, cold and whipped by the wind, where the victims of murder went in the minds of the living. I could see his other victims as they occupied his house--those trace memories left behind before they fled this Earth" (182).
  • While Susie's anger rages in heaven, her father's inability to come to terms with her death pushes the Salmon household to the brink of psychological disaster. His suspicions about his daughter's killer begin to emerge after he visits Mr. Harvey's home and assists his reclusive neighbor in the construction of a backyard bridal tent. Mr. Harvey's bizarre behavior--including his odd remark that "the neighbors saw us. We're friends now"--culminates in Jack's nearly round-the-clock surveillance of the murderer's behavior. Egged on by another neighbor's advice that he should find a covert way of avenging his daughter's homicide, Jack begins casing the cornfield where his daughter died. After he mistakenly accosts a young couple in the field, an altercation ensues that nearly results in Jack's own death. "
  • I wanted my father's vigil," Susie reports, "but also I wanted him to go away and leave me be" (140).
  • Having sublimated her grief for so long and with her husband's increasingly risky behavior testing the boundaries of her patience, Abigail indulges in an extramarital affair--with the local homicide detective, no less--in order to stave off her guarded emotions.
  • Lindsey and Buckley respond to their mother's departure by rallying around their father, whose physical deterioration in the wake of his daughter's murder has rendered him into a shadow of his former, pre-trauma self. Yet by opting to become their father's protector and ally, Lindsey and Buckley also succeed in erecting complicated emotional walls between themselves and their estranged mother.
  • In the third stage of their post-traumatic experiences, the Salmons engage in the act of "bargaining," the grieving phenomenon that Kübler-Ross describes as the product of a given client's irrational fears about the future and his or her "attempt to postpone," if only temporarily, the inevitable processes of life and death
  • In the Salmons' case, the third stage involves very explicit efforts to delay their acceptance of the finality of Susie's death. In so doing, they postpone their capacity for achieving morphogenesis and become typecast in their familial roles.6 Such self-imposed constraints inevitably lead to identity diffusion.
  • Abigail, the overwhelming anxiety over her daughter's loss and the psychological disintegration of her surviving family prompt her to seek refuge by fleeing the Salmon household. When the first anniversary of Susie's death arrives, Abigail can simply no longer fathom the mind-numbing flow of the grieving process:
  • After spending the winter in her late father's cabin in New Hampshire, Abigail drives across the country to California, where she finds a job as a day laborer in a winery. As Denis Jonnes notes,
  • Abigail seeks to empower--or, perhaps more accurately, re-empower--herself by effecting her escape from the larger Salmon family system.7 Yet mere distance can hardly provide her with the emotional sustenance that she so desperately desires:
  • Lindsey attempts to lose herself in the business of living. Opting to go to school the first Monday after Susie's death, Lindsey begins steeling herself against the world. In class, Susie observes, "my sister did not look at Mrs. Dewitt when she speaking. She was perfecting the art of talking to someone while looking through them. That was my first clue that something would have to give" (30).
  • Buckley's youth is understandably complexified by his psychological over-identification with his father, and their intensely close relationship results in Abigail's triangulation after her return from the west coast.
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  • Ashley Cox on 28 Jan 11
     
    This article takes the coping mechanisms in the lovely bones and is connecting it to real life and gives more insight to why the acted the way they did and also how their different ways of coping lead to a divided family. 
Kaitlyn Sandifer

Literary Analysis 4 - 0 views

web.ebscohost.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/...pdf

Immigration psyche Jhumpa Lahiri

shared by Kaitlyn Sandifer on 28 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Kaitlyn Sandifer on 28 Jan 11
     
    Argument: Authors A Rama Krishna Rao and R V Jayanth Kasyap argue Lahiri's chacters' search for their identities, and the overall immigrant psyche. The author's descibe the various chacters from Lahiri's different novels and how each of them struggle to adjust and find thier own individuality. Evidence: "A union with the outside world would bring happiness and isolation sometimes leads to depression". "Another important factor that affects the psyche is displacement. People who get displaced-geographically, culturally and spiritually-are always ill at ease and display the symptoms of psychological ailment". "Lahiri's novel The Namesake illustrates the optimism required in an immigrant. It shows that it is the willingness of the mind of an immigrant that helps him to assimilate and adapt himself to the alien ethos. Like Bharati Mukherjee, Lahiri focuses on the aspect of the characters shuttling between dual identities" Thoughts: I really like the authors' way of focusing on the psyche of the immigrants and not just thier actions. They include everything from thoughts and interactions with others, especially with family, as well as other personal choices the specific characters make in the stories. Also I find it very interesting how Rao and Kasyup focus on immigrants as a whole, such as when they descibe how immigrants crave affection, and that an immigrant of any generation cannot live in isolation. This helps to put immigration of all types in perspective, not just that of Lahiri's characters.
Allymyr Atrero

Literary Reference Center - powered by EBSCOhost: Jane Austen - 1 views

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literary jane austen biography analysis

shared by Allymyr Atrero on 24 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Allymyr Atrero on 24 Jan 11
     
    Argument: Jane Austen relied on familiar experiences rather than render characters and situations out of unrealistic circumstances. Claim: Austen's sickly condition towards the end of her life influenced her creation of the imperfect, yet tangible heroines. The frail Fanny and the plain Elizabeth both share uncanny abilities to make profound observations of the society. Evidence: "She was struck down, however, with a deilitating and crippling illness ." ". . . she did not attempt a scope which might have been above her powers . . . She also had observed that the real dramas of life were played out in the everyday world of ordinary people." http://search.ebscohost.com.lib.chandleraz.gov/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=MOL0260000110&site=lrc-live.
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