Friday, December 9, 2011

Technology!


This class was different from other classes because of the use of web technologies. Before taking this class I had never uploaded a video or a PowerPoint presentation. I also never created a blog before.
             Online learning is different than in person learning for several reasons. The main reason is I didn’t need to be at a specific place at a certain time to listen to a lecture or to complete work. Without these constraints I could review and start working on assignments whenever I want within a deadline period. Of course with this freedom it can be difficult to find the motivation to get online to start the work because there is no definite schedule of when class starts for the week. Like with physical classes I know I have to go because if I miss one lecture I know I could get behind or not hear important information. With online classes I know all the information is there so there seems no urgency to acquire it.
            The benefit to taking an online English class is that this is a class that doesn’t need to be in person. Most of this class is about reading texts and writing which is something that students can do themselves with little guidance.  There are some classes that need to be taken in person like for instance classes with lab requirements but an English class is not among them.
            When I found out this class was centered partially to posting on a blog weekly I was unsure how it would turn out. With the end of the semester at this point I can see how writing on a blog was a good idea for an online English class. Not only to get feedback from other students but to have all my work together in one place. The comments I received in response to my writing are more critical. I think it’s because it’s an online environment which is helpful in knowing where improvement in my work needs to be made. This is feedback in addition to my instructor. I could realistically see how a blog would be a good way to share my experiences with others so I would feasibly use this median in the future for sharing. This course along with some online technologies I used for the first time was a great help to improving my skills and as a result I’m happy I took this class with Laura Cline as the instructor.


Link to article on why online classes are better.


Image from here.
 

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Reflection on the Course


            It’s surprising how fast the semester went by. Even though this online English class went by quickly I feel like I have learned a lot. With the end of the semester here I feel my writing skills have improved greatly compared to the start of the semester. In this class I learned how to look deeper when reading literature, analyzing to look for the meaning and how that affects the rest of the text. I have learned how to better organize my thoughts to write focused statements. After reading and writing about the novel Frankenstein I have a better understanding in looking for multiple meanings and perspectives. I feel like I have made a great improvement in my skills but that’s because my writing wasn’t very good to begin with so any change is going to be a great improvement. With the skills I learned in this class I know I can apply them to not only future college courses I will be taking but also to my future career.
The readings in the class have affected me in a way that it made writing about them easier just because they were interesting. The major readings of the class with the theme of monsters made the writing part of the class easier.  It’s not fun to write about a required reading you find tiresome.
I have met the learning outcomes for the class just by doing all the assignments required. When doing assignments I put effort in writing as best as I can with the continuous revision of my work to make sure that any readers can comprehend my thoughts and ideas. The peer review of other students work has helped not just in understanding the material better but the comments on my work on what I need to improve upon.  As a result of this I feel all of the learning outcomes have been met even if there is always room for me to improve upon.  
My writing process has changed with the realization that just starting my essay will get my train of thought moving. I can also go back to revise and improve my work. The hardest part of writing for me is just getting started. My process has changed with knowing my sentences and ideas have to flow and connect to my main idea/thesis. I try to envision how the reader will interpret the meaning of my words. This changes how I write.
The biggest challenges were just getting thoughts on paper. It’s hard to come up with views because I wanted to get the correct interpretation of the poem “The Second Coming” or the novel “Frankenstein”. I overcame this when realizing there is no true answer and any answer is correct as long as I can provide evidence. After that with any writing assignment I focused on writing what I really thought based on my own opinions instead of looking for the right answer or analysis. I feel this has affected me not just in writing but when dealing with people. I am more likely to say what I feel instead of what I think people want to hear. As a result I feel more authentic. This class was a great help to improving my skills and as a result I’m happy I took this class with Laura Cline as the instructor.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Critiquing a Critique



In the article, Kyle Bishop starts off by saying that all great literary productions reveal what our cultural anxieties are. He gives examples of this such as movies at the end of World War 2 that show our fear of the use of atomic weapons or the movies made as a result of our fear of the communist threat. Bishop says Zombie cinema is the most revealing of our culture of the recent decade. Zombie cinema has its ups and downs over the years. Recently however there has been a sort of zombie “Renaissance”. There are a bunch of examples of the various movies released in the past few years. The zombie films of the recent decade addresses the social and cultural fears from the terrorist attacks on September 11. Bishop says “Night of the Living Dead” reinvented the zombie from the historical version of a monster of voodoo magic. The frequency of these movies has increased during periods of loss of freedom and autonomy. Starting in the 1980’s zombies became more of a joke and portrayed in comedies. With the peace and stability in the 1990’s the zombie genre declined with movies failing at the box office. The result was few new ideas or stories were produced in the 90’s. Zombies found their way into video games starting in the 90’s. Zombies started showing up in video games, graphic novels, books, and movies. No one recognized this zombie “renaissance” until 2006. The amount of zombies in film, TV and other media makes the genre more complex than mere entertainment. There are reasons why audiences fear these corpses. Zombies cannot be reasoned with, or dissuaded because they have no emotion. They never tire and will kill mercilessly. Zombies are in a state of decay with a human appearance that was once belonged to the living. As a result they personify our own death. The breakdown in the social order in zombies allows the fulfillment of survivalist fantasies. Zombies are animals. The end of the world portray in the zombies film is the greatest fear. Bishop makes comparisons between zombies and terrorists of 9/11. Everyone could be a threat and as a result there is no safety. The zombie is unique because it didn’t start in literature like other monsters but in folklore, drama, and cinema. By forcing viewers to face their fears the zombie narrative is insightful into modern society. 

Link to article on how to survive a zombie attack.

Image from Here.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Draft of Final Project


Jordan Anderson
Laura Cline
English 102
5 November 2011

Zombies

“It wasn’t wearing a shirt and its mottled gray flesh was all torn and pockmarked. It smelled like the beach, like rotten kelp and saltwater…Tim looked frantically around the room for a weapon just as it grabbed him by the shirt” (Brooks 31). In this fearsome situation where do you turn? Everyone knows what zombies are. Zombies are the decaying undead humans who hunger for human flesh. How anyone can become a zombie is through some form of contact like a bite-mark from an infected human. What threat does a zombie represent to society? In World War Z zombies represents a lot of various fears for people. There is one overlying symbolic idea of zombies though. Zombies represent the loss of free will along with the loss of conscious thought that make people human. This reduces your friends and family into less than humans into mindless animals who stop at nothing to feast on human flesh. Zombies represent the danger of the loss of control and safety. In short zombies threaten what makes each of us human.
Even though they might look like us they are far from what makes us human. It is indeed frightening as I am supported here by Bishop, “The threat is not only manifested as a hostile undead human but likely a hostile undead human the victim recognizes as a former intimate” (Bishop 203). This makes the living fearful. Zombies represent this familiar horror, “Horror is based on recognizing in the unfamiliar something familiar, something attractive even as it is repulsive” (Bishop 203). For the people around us can be infected and the people we have come to love and trust can be reversed very quickly. When our image of our love ones trying to kill us is in front of us the decision to run or kill them is hard.  This image is explained by Bishop, “Although statures, portraits, and photographs are treasured as valued reminders of those now dead, no one really wants to see the face of a loved one slowly rot or be reminded of the brutal realities of morality; such a confrontation would be frightening, to say the least” (Bishop 198). Not only is an undead person frightening but an undead person we used to know is even more frightening. The fear is identifying the human resemblance in the monster.
What if the enemy can’t feel fear? Now that’s fear. In World War Z a soldier discusses why people are fearful of zombies, “It’s fear, dude, just fear and you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day” (Brooks 46).
They can’t be stopped because they are already dead hence the only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it through the head. A soldier in World War Z explained that fear, “They’re not afraid! No matter what we do, no matter how many we kill, they will never ever be afraid!” (Brooks 42). They don’t feel pain. They can’t think. Zombies have lost the ability to make choices. There is no right and wrong decisions to be made. The only objective that concerns the infected zombies is to eat living people.
The drop to the level of animalistic instinct is unnerving and emotional.   This is a primitive impulse something we humans think we have overcome. We are above these animal instincts. As a result it makes us question our humanity. With these monsters that never stop there is the realization that there is no safety. There is no place that you can relax. These monsters who hunger for flesh are everywhere that people are.
One infected person can contaminate an entire population. With the population contaminated bishop explains, “In all of these scenarios, the virus, plague, or infestation has been so rapid and completer that cities are quickly overrun, buildings abandoned, posts deserted, and airwaves silenced” (Bishop Dead 21).This is essentially how it starts too. One person becomes a zombie then another and before you know it everyone is your enemy. What can you do with yourself and those you care about? Isolate yourself? Or just kill everyone else before they become infected instead of delaying the inevitable? We depend on others for our survival so this isn’t possible.               
 A zombie isn’t dependent on basic survival like us. They don’t need food. They hunger for food or sustenance but they don’t need it. They don’t need sleep. They have an ability to keep moving without tiring down time or feel the need for rest. Security for itself and avoiding pain isn’t an issue with the undead. The zombie doesn’t have to think or worry about these things.
It’s not just about getting sick and dying. It’s about after dying you can come back as a member of the undead to contaminate others is the fear. When one person gets infected it doesn’t stop. The infection can spread especially if someone knows they are infected. Sometimes the infected can be hard to spot in its early stages. One minute a person is fine and the next he can be gnawing at your arm. This can make people distrustful of each other with knowing that an ally can turn against you without thought. These zombies attack us on a personal level.
There is also the fear of getting eating alive. These zombies don’t give you a quick death. These zombies just want the flesh of humans. That is a horrible way to die with lots of pain. Some are those who see a plan to opt out of this system. They shoot themselves in the head so that they can’t be reanimated and harm others. Also so they don’t have to endure the pain. As a result some just give up. For example in World War Z someone explain why people were dying without actually being sick, “The problem was psychological, a case of just giving up, not wanting to see tomorrow because you knew it could only bring more suffering” (Brooks 68). People become helpless which makes them lose the will to continue.  In the last episode of The Walking Dead one of the characters has this problem. She can’t decide whether she wants to live. Not only does she not want to deal with the suffering of living but she wants the choice of where she dies. With suicide she can decide when it ends.
With zombies there always come the zombie mob and surviving the large group. The movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead demonstrate this. The Walking Dead show focuses on a small group that somehow survives and tries to fight and hide for their survival against a mob of undead. They want to survival this mob of mindless consumption. With these fears zombies evoke we can understand why they are so entertaining to watch. 


Works Cited

Bishop, Kyle. "Dead Man Still Walking." Journal of Popular Film and Television 37.1 (2009): 16-25. ProQuest Research Library. Web. 30 Oct. 2011. http://search.proquest.com.proxy.yc.edu/pqrl/docview/199456220/132BB92FA9B58B12016/2?accountid=31701
Bishop, Kyle. "Raising the Dead." Journal of Popular Film and Television 33.4 (2006): 196-205. Web. ProQuest Research Library. Web. 30 Oct. 2011. http://search.proquest.com.proxy.yc.edu/pqrl/docview/199488557/132BB92FA9B58B12016/5?accountid=31701
Brooks, Max. World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Crown, 2006. Print.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Annotated Bibliography


Bishop, Kyle. "Dead Man Still Walking." Journal of Popular Film and Television 37.1 (2009): 16-25. 

ProQuest Research Library. Web. 30 Oct. 2011. 


This is one of my secondary sources. I choose this article because the author goes through the primary characteristics of the zombie genre. The author talks about how the fear of the genre relate to the world events of when certain movies came out. The author talks about how zombies are presented in other mediums other than literature and movies. The author talks how the visual representation is better able to convey fear than if read in a book which I found interesting.

Bishop, Kyle. "Raising the Dead." Journal of Popular Film and Television 33.4 (2006): 196-205. Web. 

ProQuest Research Library. Web. 30 Oct. 2011. 


This is one of my secondary sources. I choose this article because the author explains why zombies are so frightening. The author does a good job of backing up my main points. The author goes through the formula of zombie movies. The author talks about the gore and violence of the zombie movies along with how they can break taboos like cannibalism. Bishop compares the zombie with other monsters.

Brooks, Max. World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Crown, 2006. Print.

This is my primary source for my essay. In this source the author describes an after account of a zombie apocalypse through interviews. With the interview type setup in the book the author was able to include multiple fictional views around the world on the topic of zombies through personal accounts. With the multiple views the reader can gauge what the threat from these monster represent more clearly. The main reason I chose this as my primary source was because I read it years ago and it was entertaining to read so I was encourage to read it again.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Final Project Proposal


For my final project I plan to complete option # 2. Essay #4 will be the monster project with the monster being zombies. I chose this option because if I write about something interesting like zombies I will be more motivated to put more effort and time into it. I have experience with reading and watching my primary sources for this project already so I’m already familiar with them. Possible primary sources include the book World War Z, the movie 28 Weeks Later, and the TV show The Walking Dead. With this project I hope to accomplish a deeper understanding of why this type of monster is so entertaining to read about and watch. I also hope to accomplish a well-constructed paper with more fluid paragraphs and sentences with good supporting ideas. For research I plan to specifically use the ProQuest Research Library database, the Yavapai library network and the internet. I want my final project to be amazing and I hope it goes well.


Link to rules for zombie survival.


Image from: http://windows7themes.net/wp-content/gallery/zombie-theme/1-zombie-wallpaper.jpg