Lit and Performance

Throwback to my junior year, when I first switched my English class from Language&literature to literature&performance, I still remember the first class I had; Ms.Guarino gave me the book ‘Fences’ (their summer reading book), and told me to memorise a scene and perform the next day. Though it was not the first year that I took drama related course, I felt nervous and excited. I asked around my classmates about why they chose this course, and the answers were different: some said they want to improve their acting skill, some said they want to gain more confidence…’ The moment that I walked into the black box and saw people talking happily and smiling, I knew that this class will be fun for the next two years.  Throughout the two years, one of the things that I learned would be time management. I remember when I first started this course I always waited until the last minute and finish the homework, which was both tiring and low quality. Then, I realised that there will be...

While some poems focus exclusively on a personal or private experience, others reflect on the place of the individual in the larger human community. In the work of at least two poets, explore the ways in which poems have conveyed the poet’s sense of the world beyond the private sphere.  As an Arabic who is born in the United States and have a diverse family with a heavy sense of culture environment, Naomi Shihab Nye has lots of experiences that can reflect the idea that though people have different identities, they are still all humans no matter what. More specifically, in her poems ‘My father and the Fig Tree’ and ‘The words under the words’, she expresses the idea that all humans try to adapt to different environment, even though it can be difficult.  In the poem ‘The words under the words’ Naomi has a detailed description of her grandmother’s life in the U.S. After reading this poem, it appears to me that Naomi tries to emphasise the idea that humans can adapt in a...

no specific rhythm scheme Mention Allah Her grandma’s perspective of the modern world Culture: My grandmather’s Days made of bread, around pat-pat and the slow baking. She’s familiar of her country: she knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there is a letter. She alone, no connection. She misses her husband. She talks about god.

Blood  “A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,”  my father would say. And he’d prove it,  cupping the buzzer instantly  while the host with the swatter stared.  In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.  True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.  I changed these to fit the occasion.  Years before, a girl knocked,  wanted to see the Arab.  I said we didn’t have one.  After that, my father told me who he was,  “Shihab”—“shooting star”—  a good name, borrowed from the sky.  Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”  He said that’s what a true Arab would say.  Today the headlines clot in my blood.  A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.  Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root  is too big for us. What flag can we wave?  I wave the flag of stone and seed,  table mat stitched in blue....

The language of a poem is often that one thing compared to another. In the work of at least two poets you have studied, explore how poets have made their subjects come alive through different means of comparing them. In order to express her will of being unnoticed and Nobody, Emily Dickinson uses multiple strategies in her poem 'I'm nobody, who are you?' to do so. First of all, by setting different types of the tone of the stanzas, Dickinson expresses her own opinion of being Nobody and Somebody. After interacting and knowing that the reader is also Nobody, Dickinson expresses a happy emotion by using an exclamation mark, saying 'Then there's a pair of us!'. By showing the excitement of finding that the reader is also anti-social like herself, she shows happiness in this stanza. And right after she brings up the excitement, she infers the public as 'them', which shows how she does not like the idea of being exposed. In the second stanza, Dickinson main...