The Purpose of this Blog

Your task on this blog is to write a brief summary of what we learned in class today. Include enough detail so that someone who was ill or missed the lesson can catch up with what they missed. Over the course of the term, these 'class scribe' posts will grow to be a guide book for the course, written by students for students.

With each post ask yourself the following questions:
1) Is this good enough for our guide book?
2) Will your post enable someone who wasn't here to catch up?
3) Would a graphic/video/link help to illustrate what we have learned?


Sunday 16 January 2011

Enduring Love Narrative

In Mr. Chatterley's lesson on Friday we didn't read any of the book but we studied narrative. Much of it was about how things were said when reading text. One of the quotes used at the start was from a Charles Dickens book, Great Expectations. "Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the Church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

After that we split in to groups and analysed quotes. We identified what type of narrative they were, and in what way they were being said, such as:

"Mum, can I have a dog for my birthday."
"No."
"Christmas?"
"No."
Birthday and Christmas?"
"No."

We also studied 3 critical extracts in our groups. Such as "Fictional conversation is a literary skill, rather than a hearing of voices.", John Mullan. After this, we looked in to "How do writers dialogue?" There were 3 examples given:

1- Direct Speech: Using the words of the speakers. For instance: "well", says Judge Gurie "well, well, well". She then turned to me.
2- Reported Speech: Example: Judge Gurie sarcastically indicates her suprise.
3- Free Direct Speech: Uses the words of the characters, but without any speech tags. Example: Well. Vernon, I'm not going to turn you down this time.

Then, more analysation of 'How writers use dialogue.', and we discussed the use of idioms - i.e. "Over the moon." On the sheet, it said there are many ways in which writers convey voices and develop characters in a range of ways; such as "the length of character utterances", "the use of idioms", "standard English or recieved pronunciation". Writers also use dialogue to "establish contrasts between chracters, move the plot along, explore key ideas in narrative and create moments of tension."

We established Enduring Love uses Direct Speech. The last thing we had to do was find a quote and show how it sums up a character. I chose Joe's line of "It was nothing. Wrong number, go back to sleep" as I thought it summed up his attempt to dominate everthing and everyone. He likes to be in control of everything (doesn't believe in things that aren't proved by science, i.e. religion) and is a bit of a control freak.

Homework:
Comment on this.
Read pages 99-161 of Enduring Love. I think it's 161, I wrote it on my hand but it rubbed off!!!!

Daniel.

11 comments:

  1. The book was "great expectations" and the begining few speeches of the book.

    Narrtive speech was the exact narrative we were studying. This can tell us alot about how the speaker is saying things and what his personality is like

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  2. Good bolg Daniel.....

    Akanksha.

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  3. I agree with what Chris said about narrative, different techniques have different effects.

    Good post Daniel

    'Sonny.

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  4. Awesome blog dude

    (btw next time don't write the H.w on your hand :P)


    Esmeralda ;)

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  5. good blog daniel...enough said

    saways

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  6. good blog it tells people who were not in what to do
    Tamsin

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  7. Great blog
    Going over narrative again made it easier for me to understand enduring love and what narrative it uses.

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  8. - Title of that lesson was "How dialogue affects meaning".

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  9. i think joe should have ran away with jed and left the cow clarissa

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  10. that is outragous, you haven't seen the true analytical process of Mcewan, you should appreciate that instead of ranting about the relationship which clearly will not happen! People these days

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  11. what?! they should of all had an orgy

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