We did not explicitly answer Mo and Air's concerns and the excellent questions those concerns prompted yesterday when we were discussing.
- The unresolved question is: When we say that "a lion symbolizes strength," what does the word lion mean, an animal or something else, such as a characteristic or set of characteristics?
The discussion yesterday was excellent, with people making points and asking further questions (What does
characteristic mean?) which will be very useful next week, and which, as we saw, led smoothly into a discussion of the essay questions that are academic writing 2. However, I also think it would be good to resolve properly the particular question that led to such a fruitful discussion. Doing so might also clarify our ideas about symbols, symbolism, symbolizing and symbolic structures.
Please share your ideas in a comment.
And in case you would like to use
italics, insert a link or anything similar in your comment, the
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"Comments - italics, bold, links and ¶" tells you how. (The link is also on the list on the right.)
Let me give some examples.
ReplyDelete1. A lion has four legs.
2. A lion symbolizes strength.
In my opinion, in sentence no.1,lion directly refers to an animal but for sentence no.2, it is different.
It does not mean lion itself,but it is an abstract idea in our mind reflecting how we perceive a lion;an animal.
Because the important part of the meaning of the word lion in sentence no.2 is a 'passive' meaning,which hinge on what we feel and think about it. It is not a neutral meaning, but contaminated with our opinion about it.
Air,
DeleteIt's an excellent start to the discussion, a clear and concise presentation of your ideas.
I'm looking forward to the responses.
Surely, I totally agree with Air's idea. Those sentences have same subject but different meaning. So the word "lion" doesn't mean a lion all the times.
DeleteAnd you've probably already noticed that in Lord of the Flies, almost everything is a symbol: the food has symbolic importance, Golding uses space arrangements to symbolize relationships, and there is that glaringly obvious symbol of politics and authority.
ReplyDeleteWhat does the conch symbolize? What does this symbolism tell us? (And is the conch a shell, or something else?) What are the characteristics of the conch, and how do they work symbolically?
I think I've managed to use all four parts of speech now, so that's my last bit of blogging for this morning. My coffee's also finished now, and I have to prepare for my level 1 class at 8:00 AM.
As Hartmann and Blass point out on page 10, the use of examples is very helpful in clarifying an idea (2007). When that idea is something as complex as the concept represented by the word symbol, it is probably essential to use examples to ensure that you have a clear and correct understanding of the term. And Golding's novel is full of examples of symbols to analyse.
Deletereferences
Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
In my Reading and Speaking class this afternoon, which a few RW5 students are also in, we took some time to answer a seeming simple question:
ReplyDeleteIs a blog post an article?
The difficulty, as so often, is the meaning of the word article, and we needed about 40 minutes of work to settle that question well enough to confidently and convincingly answer the question about blog posts here.
I think that the word symbol is very similar - it's a word we have all been using for years, and we think we know what it means, but do we? The only way to be sure is to write down our idea (or otherwise state it) for others to agree or disagree with.
I am sure we've all been talking about articles for years, too, but when it became necessary to state clearly and precisely what we mean by that word, it wasn't so easy; the resulting discussion also helped to clarify several other words and ideas, as well as being excellent practise in a range of useful academic skills.
And of course, in the major essay question for this term, all of the key terms are familiar words of phrases that we've all been using frequently for many years - not one of them is new, strange, exotic or highly technical, nor is the word symbol.
So, what does symbol mean? What is a symbol?
Do you agree with the definition that Air has given us above, which tells us that a lion is not an animal, or do you want to present and support a different definition of this important academic word? And it is important in academic work in every field, as shown by the fact that it is not new to any of us, and that we all think we know what it means. Trouble is, we don't yet agree.
And from our discussion this morning, there is another unresolved question, which I think has a place here.
ReplyDelete- Is Piggy from a lower social class?
I'm not sure that how can I defy who is from higher or lower class. I think that we focus on position in society in the past, like merchant is lower occupation than soldier. But now we don't think that; that is, we focus on money more. No matter who you are, if you're rich, you will have more power to negotiate everything.
DeleteSo do we defy higher class by position or money?
Or do we define social class by something else?
DeleteI like Mo's new question on the way to deciding whether Piggy is of high or low class, and whether a lion is always an animal, or sometimes not.
For those looking for more on this, there is an instructive essay recently published in The New York Times that you might like to read, especially the fourth paragraph of "A Matter of Taste?" (2012).
And then there is Katie's latest addition to this discussion with her suggestion that the novel, and the characters in it, symbolize society generally. Which leads us to ask: Is Piggy a boy all of the time, or is he sometimes something else? (I expect Mo and Air to say that Piggy is sometimes not a boy but something else. And that the conch ... .)
Reference
Deresiewicz, W. (2012, October 26). A matter of taste? The New York Times. Retrieved November 22, 2012 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/how-food-replaced-art-as-high-culture.html
If you've looked ahead to the coming academic writing exercise in Part 5 of chapter 1 of Quest, you will already have noticed that Hartmann and Blass ask you to write a paragraph of definition for either the word symbol or metaphor (2007, p. 39, Step A.). The discussion here is not a problem; it is, on the contrary, an excellent opportunity to practise using the seven "types of definition" that Hartmann and Blass list on page 40, to which I drew your attention this morning, and which we have been practising in our discussions the past week or so in preparation for this coming writing assignment, which is itself a warm up exercise for the more challenging major essay that you are writing this term, on which we will start working seriously next week. (I think that's enough relative clauses for one sentence.)
ReplyDeleteAnd as we have already seen, Hartmann and Blass's list of seven useful techniques for defining a term should really be a list of eight: etymology is often a very powerful tool in supporting an idea about what something means.
Reference
Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
It's just taken me 34 minutes to write the introduction and conclusion to my essay on Ralph, which is about what I thought - I'm expecting that it should take you about an hour, or perhaps a bit less, maybe a very little more, to write your introductions and conclusions.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, my paragraph of definition was a nasty surprise. I've previously written a paragraph on a couple of different topic, but this time I chose to define the word symbol, and by the time I'd got some ideas, did a bit of research for details and more ideas, and then written the first draft, I had been sitting working for 80 minutes. That's a bit longer than the hour or so I had thought it would take me. And then another 24 minutes revising. The worst is, I decided that I had to leave out one of my favourite ideas!
I hope the support for my main idea is enough to persuade those who disagree with me to change their minds.