I have chosen “How Do I Love Thee?” for two main reasons: I feel really identify with this love poem and it reminds me of one of the best teachers I have ever met during my teacher training course, Mrs. Liliana Magrassi. She passed away few years ago but I can still remember the first time I read this beautiful sonnet with her in a workshop called “Language Through Literature”.

In this sonnet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning shows the love and affection of one person to another in a beautiful and delicate way. She depicts a love which is to extend beyond this lifetime. She is able to take the meaning and value of love to a much higher, even spiritual, level. Throughout her words, she effectively warms up our hearts by showing her passion to her beloved husband and how openly and freely she trusts on him.

This poem can be related with “To The Lighthouse” since the kind of love depicted in this poem is similar to one that Mrs. Ramsay expresses to her husband and family.

Once you have read this poem, it is hard to forget it. It makes you feel completely alive. We are left with the enviable feeling of love, stuck deeply in our hearts. For me, it is a quite magical sonnet that explores the abstract power of love and helps us believe that true love can last forever. 

Old Maids by Sandra Cisneros

I have chosen this poem not only because I like the theme (marriage) but also because the author is clear with what she want to express. After doing some research, I found out that this poem is autobiographical. Cisneros and her cousins were born and raised in Mexico. They were 30 years old and they were consider to be spinsters for their community and family. The poem explains that their aunts asked them why they haven't got married yet.

After reading the poem several times, some strong feeling were evoked such as sadness, gloomy and sorry for them. But after some research, this feelings changed because Cisneros chose to remain single. She explains in an interview: "I've never seen a marriage that is as happy as my living alone," Cisneros replied. "My writing is my child and I don't want anything to come between us." (taken from Wikipedia)

I believe that I can relate this poem with "To the lighthouse" because it is strictly connected with Cisneros. Marriage and age are important themes in the novel, mainly when we are talking about Lili Bricoe. She was single and  everybody at the Ramsey's house were trying to find her a husband even though she wanted to remain single and to continue working with her paintings.

In the gloster, I included a picture of Sandra Cisneros, rings (which represents marriage), a Mexican family (because of what the poem says) and an interesting video.

TRAILER: NICE WORK 2012

We have chosen to create a trailer for an imaginary film version of “Nice Work” as we feel identified with the story itself,with Robyn and Vic’s relationship and with the way in which the author presents the two different worlds - the Industrial and the Academic. With this trailer, we are trying to portray the most important features and themes of the novel.

In order to create this trailer, we followed some production stages. First of all, we watched different kind of trailers so as to know what a trailer consists of and what we should bare in mind while doing it. Then, we made a list of important quotations and key words that should be included. And finally, we made an exhaustive web search looking for photographs (characters and objects) and songs mention throughout the novel.

The programme we use to create this trailer is "Ulead Video Studio 11". We found it very useful and appropriate to produce this work since as an editing tool it allows us to include photographs, videos and music. At first, we had some difficulties with learning how to use Ulead but after trying several times we cope with them. Moreover, we found really hard to learn about the different format video files that are used to make this kind of works. And finally, at the moment of publishing it in “youtube”, we encountered serious problems concerning copyright issues so we were not able to publish it as it was asked in the assignment. We just managed to  upload it in the Litin3blog.

For the analysis of Postmodernism, I have chosen the trailers of two of my favourite movies: “Adaptation” provided by Mariel and “Magnolia” from one of my favourite films directors, Paul Thomas Anderson.

This is the link for “Magnolia”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwXDHSrNFbQ

Features of Postmodernism present in “Magnolia”:

· Questioning the grand narratives: this film questions the concept of religion as it is an aesthetic movie.
· Lack of distinction between game and reality: The whole story goes around a game show.
· Subjectivity: Stream of consciousness. The director lets us get inside the characters’ minds and hearts with dazzling style.
· Mini narratives and Simultaneity: The film deals with different stories at the same time. It is a Rhizone story as it shows connections between events and people without any causative explanation.

Features of Postmodernism present in “Adaptation”:

· Simultaneity and simulacra: The film mixes the present with not only the past and future, but also with the imaginary. Adaptation is about a script writer's process of adapting a book to film and an author's process of writing a book about a real man and events in his life.
· Multiplicity and incompatibility: Time, place and people are constantly jumbled throughout the story. Lots of things existing at the same time but not forming any kind of pattern or unity (“Pastiche”)
· Subjectivity: Use of stream of consciousness to let the audience get inside the characters’ minds and feelings.
· Self-reflexivity: Characters do learn lessons, grown and change: “the only truth we can offer is the truth that's our own experience of the world" (Adaptation).

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

                THE LAMENTATION OF THE OLD PENSIONER

                     by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

ALTHOUGH I shelter from the rain

Under a broken tree

My chair was nearest to the fire

In every company

That talked of love or politics,

Ere Time transfigured me.

Though lads are making pikes again

For some conspiracy,

And crazy rascals rage their fill

At human tyranny,

My contemplations are of Time

That has transfigured me.

There's not a woman turns her face

Upon a broken tree,

And yet the beauties that I loved

Are in my memory;

I spit into the face of Time

That has transfigured me.

 I’ve chosen this poem because the title caught my attention. After reading the poem and after doing some research, I found that this is the story of an old man who remembers all the good moments he had when he was young, his friends, the talks about love and politics, the woman he loved. And now, he feels sad because time passes and he is left alone with his memories. Time has changed him and now he misses his youth.

 The first time I read the poem, it made me feel sad and think about my grandparents and about old people. Sometimes we think that they are fine but we don’t really know how they are.

The poem has evoked old, black and white images and pale colours such as yellow or white.

Trailer- Nice Work by David Lodge

For the execution of this Trailer of Nice Work, we´ve captured textual parts of the novel for us to reflect a faithful version of it. Taking into consideration that this novel has many aspects to be focused on, we´ve chosen to focus on Vic and Robyn´s love affair so as to make this story more appealing to the public.

The programmes we used for this trailer were xtranormal.com for the recreation of the scenes and VideoPad to put together all the scenes created by the previous software mentioned and to add some captions.

Due to the limitations of the programmes, we couldn't be as precise as we would have liked to be, but all the same we used this software because it is user friendly and it allows us to cause the effect we wanted.

The first scene that appears in the trailer was recreated by us, since we as readers only know about this event when Robyn tells her friend about the shadow scheme. However we thought it could be interesting to recreate the moment in which Swallow proposed this to Robyn. This scene was extracted from page 85 from the novel.

The following scene was extracted from page 144 when Vic and Robyn were complaining about the rights of Danny Ramm. We´ve thought that it would be interesting to show this part of the novel because it was the moment in which these two characters clashed the most.

The last scene was extracted from page 301. We´ve thought that this scene was fundamental in this trailer to show the turn of their story and to show Vic´s irrationality towards his feelings.

The scene of the plane flying was extracted from this link and the background song was extracted from this link.

I must say that, leaving all the difficulties that we´ve been through in this task behind, we think that this was a very interesting experience for us, not only because we got to know new softwares that we as teachers can use in the future with our students, but also because it helped us to be more immersed in this extraordinary novel.

By Marina Robledo, Sofia Piotto and Maria Isabel Trabaina

Postmodernism

I've chosen "The Final Cut" and "Jokaydia"

Both of them have postmodern characteristics. As regards the first one, the most important aspect is knowledge and the beginnings of technology- "The advent of electronic computer technologies has revolutionized the modes of knowledge production distribution and consumption in our society." In the movie, when a person is born, he /she can have a chip implanted that can record all the moments of his/her life. When this person die, that chip is taken off and cut to make a "memorial video" (something interesting to see) for their families. 

As regards Jokaydia, we can found what Baudrillard calls "simulacra". In this case, it is related to virtual reality- "The page was created to document the educational uses of virtual worlds and games"- and not to copies of originals  This wiki has useful information about virtual worlds, platforms, tools, social networking services and games. 

I believe that in the trailer and in the wiki, knowledge becomes functional because they learn things, not only to know them, but to use that knowledge. 

Words between inverted commas have been taken from Klages and Jokaydia Wiki