Additional Assignment Sequences

ADDITIONAL SEQUENCE SIX

Working with Metaphor

Joshua Foer

Gloria Anzaldúa

Brian Doyle

Anne Carson

Kwame Anthony Appiah

ALTERNATIVE:

Susan Griffin

A metaphor is a comparison, where two seemingly disparate thoughts, images, or objects are linked together. The (often) surprising combination presents a new level of thought or understanding, one fixed in an image: “He is drowning in money.” Metaphors are indispensable to thought and language. Everyone who writes and talks uses them. Each of the writers in this sequence uses metaphor in interesting and distinctive ways. The assignments ask you to think about metaphors and how they work for writers and readers.

ASSIGNMENT 1

The Memory Palace

JOSHUA FOER

Foer tells us that “[e]ver since Simonides, the art of memory had been about creating architectural spaces in the imagination.” (p. 167 of the print book) He names “the memory palace” as the metaphor through which memory could be understood. Foer even describes how this memory palace was made “into a real wooden building.” Write an essay in which you explore the possibilities and limits the metaphor offers.

What does the metaphor help us understand about memory? What questions come up for you as you think through the metaphor? Why might Simonides and others think to use this particular metaphor to think about memory? Why this metaphor and not another?

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ASSIGNMENT 2

Metaphorical Moments

GLORIA ANZALDÚA, BRIAN DOYLE, SUSAN GRIFFIN

Writers often layer their essays with metaphors or, in Anzaldúa’s case, with narratives that serve as kinds of metaphor. One way to identify moments of metaphor that layer a piece of writing is to notice when particular sentences or images seem to carry more than one meaning. For example, when Anzaldúa tells us what the dentist says (“We’re going to have to do something about your tongue”), we might notice that the dentist’s statement has more than one meaning, that what he literally says is meant to signal something else, something larger and more complex than this specific moment. Many of the writers in this collection make use of metaphor in their work, inviting readers to see multiple meanings in a single moment.

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ASSIGNMENT 3

On Your Own

BRIAN DOYLE, ANNE CARSON

One way to better understand metaphor, what it is and how it works, is to practice writing your own. Choose one of the following two essay options:

a. One of the distinctive features in Brian Doyle’s short essay, “Joyas Voladoras,” is the way it moves from hummingbirds, blue whales, and hearts to something else—or at least seems to be pointing to something else, pointing away from hummingbirds, blue whales, and hearts and pointing toward—well, what? The movement is metaphorical; one thing stands for another.

Prepare an essay that is Doyle-like. It should be, at minimum, as long as his. It should be similar in style and intent. It should be organized into six sections, each separated by additional white space. Each should have some Doyle-like sentences. It should make similar metaphorical demands on its readers.

His work is your model and inspiration, and yet this project is also yours. A reader should be able to see where and how your work is in conversation with his; a reader should also be able to see what you bring to the table. And, when you are done, write a brief “Introduction” or “Afterword,” something to orient your reader to what follows or something to provide your reader with a context at the end.

b. One way to read Anne Carson’s “Short Talks” is to think of each section as offering a metaphor. One might say, for example, that “On Trout” is not really about trout but about something else.

Prepare an essay that is Carson-like. It should be, at minimum, as long as hers. It should be similar in style and intent. It should have an equal series of paragraphs (or sections), each headed by subtitles; it should make similar metaphorical demands on its readers.

Question

ASSIGNMENT 4

Kwame Anthony Appiah

SCRIPTING IDENTITY

Consider this passage from “Racial Identities”:

Collective identities, in short, provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories. In our society (though not, perhaps, in the England of Addison and Steele) being witty does not in this way suggest the life script of “the wit.” And that is why what I called the personal dimensions of identity work differently from the collective ones.

This is not just a point about modern Westerners: cross-culturally it matters to people that their lives have a certain narrative unity; they want to be able to tell a story of their lives that makes sense. The story — my story — should cohere in the way appropriate by the standards made available in my culture to a person of my identity. In telling that story, how I fit into the wider story of various collectivities is, for most of us, important. (p. 58 of the print book)

Your project in this assignment is to consider the terms, the stages, the conclusions, and the consequences of Appiah’s argument in his essay, “Racial Identities.” If, as a mental exercise (or because you are convinced), you accept Appiah’s notion that “Collective identities, in short, provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories,” (p. 58 of the print book) how might you tell a story that places yourself in relation to the available scripts, to the life stories available to a person like you — a person of your culture (or collectivity), a person of your age, now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century?

You are not required to write in the genre of the memoir (as though you were writing a chapter of your autobiography), but many find that an inviting way to begin. What a reader wants is a view of you and your world, not in the pen-pal sense of what you look like or what you prefer in music, but with the goal of understanding something more general, something about people like you, something about what it is that shapes and defines a person or an identity in this place and at this point in time. In Appiah’s terms, your writing will negotiate the competing demands of a life and a “script,” of the personal and the collective, of individual freedom and the politics of identity.

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ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENT

Parts and Wholes

SUSAN GRIFFIN AND ONE OTHER

It is useful to think of Griffin’s essay as experimental. She tries to do something that she cannot do in a more “traditional” essay form. She wants to make a different kind of argument or engage her reader in a different manner. She assembles fragments and puts seemingly unrelated material into surprising and suggestive relationships. One way to think about Griffin’s essay is to think about each of her brief italicized sections as developing metaphors for her entire project — the cell, the missile, the etchings, and so on. Choose one passage from Griffin’s series of italicized passages, a passage that will help you unearth an aspect of Griffin’s essay.

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