Chapter 19 Geography Matters...Chapter20 ...and so does season.notebook

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September 03, 2014

Aug 31­2:42 PM

Geography Matters...

Let's going on vacation! Where?     Mountains? Beach?

­Writers have to ask that question, too, so we readers should consider its implications. 

Every story or poem is a vacation, and every writer has to ask, every time.    Where is this one place taking place?  

Readers have to ask...what does it mean to the novel that its landscape is high, low, steep or shallow? Why did the character die on the mountain?

   What, in other words, does geography mean to a work of literature?

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Chapter 19 Geography Matters...Chapter20 ...and so does season.notebook

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September 03, 2014

Aug 31­2:59 PM

Think about a story and where it took place... Would it be the same without geography? WAIT!!!! What is geography?

Geography in literature can also be more. It can be revelatory of virtually any element in the work.

Theme? SURE! Symbol? No problem. Plot? Without a doubt! Geography can also define or develop character.

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Chapter 19 Geography Matters...Chapter20 ...and so does season.notebook

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September 03, 2014

Aug 31­4:07 PM

Geography can be a character.

Think about the island in Life of Pi...

What the island gives them in the day, it takes at night.  Do you think there is a reason why the island looks like a man lying on his back?

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Chapter 19 Geography Matters...Chapter20 ...and so does season.notebook

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September 03, 2014

Aug 31­4:24 PM

Whether it's Italy or Greece or Africa or Malaysia or Vietnam, when writers send characters south, it's so they can run amok.

Hills and valleys have a logic of their own. Why did Jack and Jill go up the hill? Wasn't the real reason so Jack could break his crown and Jill come tumbling after?

Who's up and who's down?

What do up and down mean?

Low: swamps, fog, darkness, fields, heat, unpleasantness, people, life, death.

High: snow, ice, purity, thin air, clear views, isolation, life, death.

So, high or low, near or far, north or south, east or west, the places of poems and fiction really matter. It isn't just setting, it's place and space and shape that bring up to ideas and psychology and history and dynamism.

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Chapter 19 Geography Matters...Chapter20 ...and so does season.notebook

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September 03, 2014

Sep 1­5:17 PM

Season Matters too!!!!

That time of year thou mayst in me behold                     When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang                       Upon those boughs (trees) which shake against the cold:        Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

That's Shakespeare's sonnet 73. The thing that really works is that the speaker is feeling his     age here and making us feel it too,  with those boughs shaking in cold winds, those last faded   leaves still hanging, empty limbs.

His leaves=his hair, have mostly departed.  November=old age.

The end of autumn and the coming of winter­but the thing he is REALLY talking about is OLD AGE.      

Summer=passion & love winter=anger and hatred

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Chapter 19 Geography Matters...Chapter20 ...and so does season.notebook

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September 03, 2014

Sep 2­7:26 AM

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