How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

http://www.glogster.com/marian89/how-do-i-love-thee/g-6l753fbglc7jua94urqcpa0

After reading 'How Do I Love Thee?', I felt that the author's wholehearted feelings are palpable. The use of rhetoric elements convey the message so clearly that we can almost 'see' and 'hear' the poet's feelings for her beloved.  Even if it is not easy to put such an intense and abstract topic into words, the author succeeded to make it 'concrete'. Although the poem is written in Old English, the message is crystal clear, since most of the expressions employed that are still used in English.

The colour this poem suggests to me is light pink, as the love she describes seems spiritual and profound,  rather than only passional. 

The images this evokes are: Two people holding hands, hugging or keeping a dialogue and a person in front of a fireplace, thinking melancholically. In the glog, I included the picture of a mountain and the sky above, since it represents that love can be infinite as the sky. Such an image also evokes the idea of heaven -life after death. A hand with a lot of words written on it and a notebook suggest the idea of love expressed via the written word.

I feel the videos of the beautiful songs 'And I Will Always Love You' by Whitney Houston and 'Love you Till the End', soundtrack of the film 'PS I Love You' suit this poem perfectly.

As regards the prose fiction works we dealt with, H.D.I.L.T. reminds me of 'The Lagoon', since the Browning's poem represents Arsat's love both for his brother –in some lines- and for his wife –in some others. Arsat keeps on lamenting the fact that he had abandoned his brother, but he does not seem sorry to protect Diamelen on the same night. When both these dear people pass away, he feels in the sunset of his life. 

Poetry - Love your Enemy by Yusef Iman

http://www.glogster.com/aruzacnun08/poetry-love-your-enemy/g-6l781uallc0jljgakcosha0

Love your Enemy

Yusef Iman

brought here in slave ships and pitched overboard.
Love your enemy
language taken away, culture taken away
Love your enemy
work from sun up to sun down
Love your enemy
Last hired first fired
Love your enemy
Rape your mother
Love your enemy
Lynch your father
Love your enemy
Bomb your churches
Love your enemy
Kill your children
Love your enemy
Forced to fight his Wars
Love your enemy
Pay the highest rent
Love your enemy
Sell you rotten food
Love your enemy
Forced to live in slums
Love your enemy
Dilapidated schools
Love your enemy
Puts you in jail
Love your enemy
Bitten by dogs
Love your enemy
Water hose you down
Love your enemy
Love,
Love,
Love,
Love,
Love, for everybody else,
but when will we love ourselves???????
From: Something Black, Copyright 1966 by Yusef Iman

After reading all the poems from the selection provided, I decided to concentrate on this one, which is a 38-line poem written in the third person and with a statement/ answer format. As it uses accessible language, this poem is easily as well as quickly read. 

The lines stating activities that are far from human followed by a strong imperative statement - love your enemy - made me experience a weird feeling at first because I was not able to understand the message behind. Then, I felt pity for the oppressed since it seems to me that he is trying to bear his real life without forgetting what the Bible says.

A slave and the Bible were the two images this poem evoked. While I imagined the former coping with the unavoidable situation of being under his master's will, I could clearly see the Bible open with the statement "love your enemy" written in it. Both images together reflect  the contradiction between what the Bible teaches and what happened to slaves before slavery was abolished. 

The tune this poem suggests is similar to the Responsorial Psalm done after the First Reading in mass.

The final message of this poem is that we are taught to love others either friends or enemies so much that we forget about how self- love feels.

I think this poem is thematically related to "The Lagoon" and to "Wide Sargasso Sea" since both Arsat and Antoinette are the oppressed.         

At the top of this post I included the link so that you can have access to the Glog I have prepared and below there is a brief comment justifying my choinces.

While the pictures that surround the central image represent some of the dehumanising activities mentioned by the poem, the moving arrows departing from these pictures point to the centre where I placed the imperative statement taken from the Bible - "Love your Enemy", which emphasises the several times the oppressed repeats such a powerful claim. Regarding the wall chosen, it is not of a definite colour, which symbolises the weird feeling this poem made me experience when I first read it. The audio is a love hymn and I decided to include it because it cam up while I was searching for further information about this poem. 

At the bottom of the Glog is the final message with the same rhetorical question used by Yusef Iman, which invites the reader to think about self-love.

I hope you can enjoy the interpretation of this poem as I did.

POSTMODERNISM

I've chosen The Final Cut and Educational Use of Second Life

The film is a postmodernist one. It is an excelent example in which we can see the advent of computers. The key feature here is knowledge. On one hand, real knowledge is the one that can be stored in a "digitalized" way, in this case in a chip that is implanted in a baby as soon as it is born. When this person dies, the images can be used to make a "memorial" video, which is shown in their wake. On the other, we can also analyse knowledge as functional because we make use of it to produce this video.

The video that explains the educational use of second life was stricking for me. I knew that lectures were given using this platform but I didn't know the fact that you could go to different museums to see the paintings which are there and this is the key element of postmodernism. The reality created by simulation, the virtual reality. This world is not original it's a copy of the real one, we could say is a reproduction of life.

In my opinion, I found these videos appropiate to analyse two key features of postmodernism: knowledge and simulacra.

Postmodernism

I really agree with all the opinions written in the blog. They are all very interesting.
I decided to select the Final Cut and War Games trailer. I´ve found that these two videos are intimately connected with  Klages’ article on Postmodernism. The Final Cut shows how technology is good knowledge. "The advent of electronic computer technologies has revolutionized the modes of kowledge production, distribution and consumption in our society. Computer technology is the domintant force in al aspects of social life." So dominant that anything that is not digitalizable is not knowledge. And even more dominant in that it can even manipulate people´s lives.
In both videos, there is no clear difference between reality and technology, as most of your comments say. In the Final Cut, everything is recorded and cut. Our lives are manipulated by technology.
 In war games Trailer what seems to be a game for some, is realitity for others. And this game for some is "simulacrum": a reality created by simulation, for which there are only copies. In postmodern societies, there are no originals.
 All in all, this confusing mixture between reality and fiction makes us think of the vital role technology is playing in our lives.

Postmodernism

I have chosen  “Educational Uses of Second Life” and “Ohio University Second Life Campus”.

 

Both of these videos show another way of education, a virtual reality in which students are immersed in their own education. Both videos show that universities are now turning into a different learning environment, like a paralell world in which students are the protagonists of video-game-like realities.

 

I could identify in both videos some postmodernist features. One of them could be the fact that postmodernism is associated with electronics and computers as the “means of production” which determines social practices. Knowledge is transformed by our reliance on computer technology. All knowledge must be digitalizable to be preserved: anything that is not digitalized will not be considered “knowledge” and will be excluded from our systems of data collection, organization and preservation.

This is reflected in the way universities are now turning their attention to digital education, as an attempt to include education in this cybernetic era.

 

I could also identify the “simulacra” feature in both videos. A silulacrum creates a passive subject who takes the simulation as the only necessary reality. I think that by creating another reality, the Universities that have chosen to relly on this kind of simulacrum of their campus may be leading their students to take a passive attitude towards reality, the fact that students can actually “walk” and visit different places virtually dont create a need for them to actually interact in their real life situations. 

Postmodernism

I have chosen two videos: “Educational Uses of Second Life” and “War Games” 

In the first video, I can identify some postmodern features. Firstly, Lyotard says: “All knowledge must be digitable to be preserved, anything that is not digitizable will cease to be knowledge” We can support his idea throughout the video since the world of education is being turned into an interactive virtual one.Definitely, the PC is playing a key role in this virtual environment. The computer has changed the way knowledge is arranged, distributed and stored.Secondly, knowledge becomes functional - we learn things, not to know them, but to use that knowledge. This is clearly reflected in the video when it says that students learn by doing. This means that they have an active role in the learning process. For instance, learners  can work together to collaborate in a project and co-create virtual 3D objects.This virtual world also gives learners and educators the chance to form part of communities.They can achieve this by resorting to tools like blogging, for example.

In the second video, “War Games", I can identify one major postmodern feature: the lack of distinction between game and reality. The young man, who seems to be a master at playing computer games, finds it difficult to distinguish game from reality.

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Features of postmodernism in “Introduction to Pop Art” and “ Warhol and the 20th century.”:

*A break down between high and low cultural forms: the line between fine art and commercial art is blurred. As pop art uses images of mass-product objects and celebrities that everyone could recognize in a second, it seems that everybody could understand art.

*Pop art makes use of repetition of these images. This is consistent with Baudrillard’s idea that in the postmodern world of mass media the original disappears and only copies exist.

*There is a questioning of what Lyotard calls “grand narratives”: pop art takes cheap, everyday objects and transform them into “art”, questioning the traditional conception that art should represent the most valuable ideas in a culture. Pop art introduced new questions about what art is, how it can be made, and who could make art. In Andy Warhol’s words: “The Pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all…”