After Images - Emmett Till Poem

I am so glad that we can write about this poem. When Dr. Hollingsworth read it aloud in class I new that I wanted to write my final paper for this class on this poem. I read it a second time after class and think it is such a powerful poem on many different levels. The poet does such a great job of relaying what is going through their mind, and I think that writing a paper analyzing this poem would work great. What happened to Emmett Till was absolutely horrible and sad on every level, and this poem captures the sadness pretty well. We are being exposed to the poets reactions to these horrible events from the very start: "However the image enters its force remains within my eyes." This is very saddening, but powerful poem, and I am so glad that I got to read it.

My...Decompression

I feel as if I should decompress in a sense, after finishing that Kate Chopin deconstruction. I had never written a deconstruction before this paper, therefore I was so afraid of doing so. I used the notes we took in class and focused on binaries and did exactly what my Approaches to Lit. textbook told me too. I have that class currently, so it is actually kind of neat to be taking them at the same time. I use the text book for that class a lot when it comes to writing papers. I was difficult at first to wrap my head around the idea of just writing about the things that I did (binaries and gaps). I felt sometimes like I wasn't being clear, but other times, I did, and this feeling flip-flopped often. I liked writing the paper though, and I think the things I learned in the story wouldn't have come about if I hadn't taken this approach. I liked this writing style, though it was quit taxing, it was rewarding just the same.

Hegemony

I decided to do a little bit of research on the word "hegemony" after it came up in class last Tuesday. When i searched the word on Wikipedia, I got an eye-full that I didn't realize I was asking for. The whole page was based on history and hop hegemony relates to history. To those of you who already knew what hegemony was, forgive me. I then searched hegemony in literature and liked what I saw. I also understood it a bit more. The definition I got was this, "The predominant influence, as of a state, region, or group, over another or others." So, is it fair to say hegemony can be both a good or a bad thing? It can be good for someone who likes to be a part of the influence and is fine with going along with it, but it is not good for those that they are trying to influence? For instance, let's say that there are a group of men in some town who hang out. They expect "their women" to do everything fo them, and generally the women go along with it. This is just fine for the men, and even the ladies that do these things because it's just simply what they do. But of a women who doesn't feel that this is ok, but also lives in the tiwn, it is not ok, because the men will expect her to be like all the other women. I hope I'm understanding hegemony correctly...