This digital poster explores a common theme in two works of literature.Create a digital poster related to the theme of your Short Essay 2. This poster must reference the literature that you wrote about in that essay. This is a multi-modal composition, which means that it will combine both text and visual design. Focus on the following four criteria: Design, Clarity, Content, and Grammar.
- Design: Overall visual appeal. I'm not expecting professional graphic design work, but it should be reasonably attractive.
- Clarity: Is it easy to read the text? For example, don't put white text on a yellow background.
- Content: 75+ words. Convey a clear argument or idea.
- Grammar: This is a brief writing assignment, so you should be able to catch and correct any grammatical errors. Stylistic choices, like using sentence fragments with bullet points, will not be considered errors.
Larriva4 Jean Larriva March 9th 2021 Title: Essay on The Two Literary Works Contents Introduction3 Similarities, differences and theme3 Conclusion4 Work Cited5 Introduction The evident similarity between Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz and Inanna Sumerian is the theme of death and rebirth. The way both literary works display the theme of underworld and otherworld is commendable. Two philosophical ideas are discussed by both the writers. Rebirth is aligned with karma whereas the idea of underworld is aligned with purgation. Both these ideas of life after death have become a major part of the theme of both literary works. There are dissimilarities as well along with major similarities. The similarities, dissimilarities and the theme for both the literary works will be discussed here. Similarities, Differences and Theme In “Inanna’s Descent: A Sumerian Tale of Injustice”, the theory of death and rebirth surfaces to be the main theme and tells us how she must confront her shadow before it makes its way through life death and rebirth and then turn out into the other way of the tunnel as a completer and more whole person. Some Native folklores mentions how the journey to the underworld is not going down but up (Pérez-Lloréns et al.). Her epic is a remarkable example of the otherworld adventure in which her otherworld itself is the underworld and ‘descent’ is supposed to be just the passageway to land up in the otherworld. The noteworthy Inanna’s tale gives a brief description of her advent into the underworld to attend her brother-in-law’s funeral where she is instead put on trial by her sister, Ereshkigal, after her garment of power is stripped off. Her carcass hangs from the wall. Similarly, Sor Juana’s take on classical mythology resembles with Inanna’s theory of the same. another similarity that can be drawn between the two literary works are the capability of both the writers to prioritize themselves because Sor Juana portrays herself as the epic heroine in her poetic masterpiece “First Dream” which arguable is also an epic, similarly, Inanna in her hymns comes off as a human-like goddess just like in an epic poem. Both of the literary works portray an ambitious role in the mythological structure (Adamik). The dissimilarity lies in the approach where Sor Juana is more of a courtly love poet who admires and dedicates most of her literary works on female. She has created epic poems where the epic heroine is herself indeed. On one hand when Sor Juana dedicates her literary works to mostly female admirers, Inanna on the other hand makes her literary works based on death and gloom. Sor Juana's respect for her own "mind" and "understanding" in the above sonnet hints at the importance of intellect for her self-identity. Conclusion To conclude, a vivid description of underworld and otherworld is portrayed in the literary works and also shows family betrayal when Inanna’s sister kills her at the funeral. The appreciation of similar sex affection is also visible from Sor Juana’s poems and hymns. Even the similarities and differences both conjointly make them masterpieces. Both their minds are too complex and at the most we can do is be appreciative about their works. Whatever they are, it has made them come so far and produce excellent literary works like these. Work Cited Adamik, Verena. "Making worlds from literature: WEB Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess." Thesis Eleven (2021): 0725513621993308. Pérez-Lloréns, José Lucas, et al. "Seaweeds in mythology, folklore, poetry, and life." Journal of Applied Phycology 32 (2020): 3157-3182. Poetry, Postcolonialism, and Humanity Poetry, Postcolonialism, and Humanity ENG2043 Unit 5 Part 1: Looking to the Past This week, we jump forward to the middle of the twentieth century with narrative poems by Pablo Neruda and Robert Hayden. Sor Juana lived and wrote in the heart of the colonial period, whereas Neruda and Hayden lived in that period's aftermath. Both of the latter poets, though, looked to the past to try to make sense of their present. In the poems for this week, Neruda forms a spiritual connection with pre-Columbian Inca peasants, whereas Hayden addresses the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. It's best not to read these poems in a rush. "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" and "Middle Passage" are both quite complex, but so are the subjects they tackle. Part 2: Neruda and Macchu Picchu Although the spelling 'Machu Picchu' is also common, for the sake consistency, this lecture will follow the spelling used in John Felstiner's translation of the poem. "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" is a very dense and allusive poem. As the critic Christopher Reid put it in The London Review of Books, "A great deal of Neruda's poetry, in Alturas de Macchu Picchu and elsewhere, is irredeemably obscure. Certain poetic properties - earth, air, the moon, blood, love, solitude, germination and the like - recur in combinations that begin to look merely kaleidoscopic." Indeed, the first two cantos feel a bit like a blurry montage. Imagine a man wandering through the city and into the countryside. As he wanders, his troubled thoughts seem to mix with the scenes and landscapes around him. If you were to sit inside that man's mind, you might witness a stream of impressions very similar to what Neruda offers us. Then, in the third through fifth cantos, the poet's thoughts darken as he contemplates the nature of death. The turning point comes in the sixth canto. Neruda describes a pilgrimage to the ruins of Macchu Picchu, a pre- Columbian Inca estate located high up on a Peruvian mountain ridge. Whereas Neruda seemed disoriented earlier in the poem, he now has a focus - Macchu Picchu itself. Descriptions of the place are woven throughout the remainder of the poem. Consider, for example, the vivid opening of canto nine. As Neruda examines the ruins of Macchu Picchu, though, his thoughts stretch back to the laborers who originally built it. What were their lives like? What did the magnificent construction cost them? These questions become explicit in canto ten: Macchu Picchu, did you set stone upon stone on a base of rags? Coal over coal and at bottom, tears? Fire on the gold and within it, trembling, the red splash of blood? Give me back the slave you buried! Shake from the earth the hard bread yof the poor, show me the servant's clothes and his window. Tell me how he slept while he lived. Certainly, passages like this reflect Neruda's Marxist sympathies. Neruda was at one point elected to the Chilean senate as a member of the Communist party. Later, he was exiled from his home country for several years due to his politics (NobelPrize.org). (The movie Il Postino depicts his years in exile in Italy.) The deep humanism of Neruda's poem, though, resonates even with those who do not share his political ideology. If the poet can reach through time to connect and sympathize with those long dead, surely we might do the same for others in our own age. That, at least, is the implicit challenge of Neruda's poem. Part 3: Hayden and Middle Passage In Middle Passage, Robert Hayden tries to make sense of his African American heritage and the haunting legacy of slavery. The title, of course, refers to a leg of the transatlantic slave trade, or triangle trade, in which kidnapped Africans were carried as slaves to the New World. (The entry for "Middle Passage" from the Encyclopedia Britannica website provides a quick refresher on this ugly chapter in world history.) Hayden's poem has a collage-like effect, as he uses several different voices and styles of writing to create an image of the slave trade. The poem, in various places, borrows the style of journal entries, legal depositions, church hymns, prayers, and even oral narrative. Intriguingly, the slaves themselves never speak in "Middle Passage." Instead, Hayden tells the story through the voices of white slave traffickers. These are unreliable narrators, though. Hayden shapes his poem in such a way that the reader pushes back against and rejects the pro-slavery perspective. This is a rhetorically powerful move. If slave trafficking sounds indefensible even when described by its practitioners, then it must be deplorable indeed. Hayden, though, allows his own voice to break through at various points. This is especially true of a phrase from the beginning of the poem that is repeated at the end: Voyage through death to life upon these shores. A voyage into the realm of death, then a return to the realm of life - this echoes the pattern we saw in the Innana epic at the beginning of the semester. Hayden, though, maps that mythic pattern onto real-world history and geography. For those Africans kidnapped into slavery, the Atlantic Ocean becomes the underworld. By making use of a pattern so common in Western literature, Hayden implicitly claims a shared ownership of that Western literary heritage. This claim becomes more explicit in the poem's Shakespeare allusions. Consider the following lines: Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes. These lines are based on a passage from Shakespeare's The Tempest, a reference Hayden expects his reader to recognize: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (Act I, Scene II) The second time Hayden turns to this passage, though, he transitions from Shakespeare's voice into his own. By doing so, he asserts his full authority as a poet of the English language. "Middle Passage" and "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" end with similar ideas. Neruda calls to the dead Inca laborer, "Rise to be born with me, brother." Hayden describes Cinquez, leader of the Amistad rebellion, as a "life that transfigures many lives." Both poets, therefore, suggest that the oppressed victims of history are, in some symbolic way, resurrected in their literal and spiritual descendants. Poetry becomes a vehicle for redeeming the traumatic past, thereby building foundations for living in the present. (CSLO 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.3, 1.3.1, 1.4, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, 2.1.4, 2.2.2, 2.2.3, 2.2.4, 2.2.5, 2.2.6, 3.1, 3.1