Alvarez and Atwood

Thursday, to continue the theme of "constructing a self," we first discussed Julia Alvarez's "Dusting" and Margaret Atwood's "This is a Photograph of Me."  Several people commented that the child in "Dusting" did not want to live a life of anonymity but wanted to leave her mark on the world (unlike her mother). We connected this poem to ones we had read earlier, including Heaney's "Digging" and Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" We also discussed the symbolic nature of Atwood's poem, and the significance of the parenthesis in the final stanzas. Interestingly, the speaker's identify becomes less clear -- "It is difficult to say where/precisely, or to say/how large or small I am:/the effect of water/on light is a distortion" (19-23) -- as the poem progresses.  Finally, students were paired according to interest to write a character sketch of Ellen West, J. Alfred Prufrock, or the narrator in "Theme from English B," considering whether she/he was round or flat, static or dynamic.  We will continue this project on Friday.