Welcome! HU 300 – Unit 5 Seminar - Literature

Tonight’s Agenda  Questions, concerns, comments  The vitality of poetry  Metaphor in ordinary conversation  Metaphor in poetry  Communicating with sound and tone  How poetry communicates  How “art” communicates  Literacy and contemporary culture

Metaphor: Using one thing to represent another thing in speech.

Speaking “metaphorically” is the opposite of speaking “literally”.

Is ordinary speech “literal”? What do you say when someone asks how you’re doing? “I’m beat” “I can’t complain” “I’m fed up” “I’m rolling!” “Same old same old” “I’m wiped out” “I’m wired” “I’m psyched”

Much of our ordinary speech is poetic! If we took each other literally all the time we’d have a very hard time communicating!

What does this metaphor mean? “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Or this? “My candle burns at both ends” Or this? “I’d rather be a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

If we could say literally exactly what’s said in a poem, there would be no need for poetry.

Communicating with Sound and Tone How is this: “He counted each penny, ever so carefully” different from this: “The guy was obsessed with his bank balance”

This difference is what poetry is all about.

If we could say literally exactly what any artwork “means” or “says”, there would be no need to create the art!

All “art” is communication about things we cannot relay directly or literally.

Otherwise put, the genre or medium an artist chooses is central to what the work communicates.

Poetry  Why don’t people read poetry?  Are there are some places that poetry does exist and thrive in our culture?

Reading in America  In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts put out a study called “Reading at Risk,” about the decline of reading in America. In 2007, another study showed that 1 in 4 adults read no books in (Fram, 2007)  What do you think of these findings? Do they seem accurate to what you observe?  What might a decline in reading say about a culture?

Update on Reading  For the first time since the NEA began surveying American reading habits in and less than five years after it issued its famously gloomy "Reading at Risk" report -- the percentage of American adults who report reading "novels, short stories, poems or plays" has risen instead of declining: from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in 2008 (Thompson, 2009).  (Note: Nonfiction is excluded from the study)  What might explain the increase of reading in the last 6 years?

Do you think reading has an impact on quality of life?