Metaphor by Metaphor

How do we move from an exterior to the inner life of a character when writing in a third-person limited point of view? This is one method. Write:

• at least three sentences that are exterior descriptions of the character and setting
• one sentence that explicitly labels itself as part of the character’s thoughts about the setting. Use “he thought” or “she thought” or something similar.
• at least three sentences which are not labeled that present the
  • character’s inner life
• one sentence that explicitly labels itself as part of the character’s thoughts
• at least three sentences that are exterior descriptions of the setting

Can you cut the labels?

Which of the objections (generated by either you or a peer) to your thesis or supporting points are most likely to be presented by your audience? Of these, which do you want to refute or concede?

How can you directly refute?

If you are conceding, what is the greater “support” to your thesis you can explicitly mention?

Brainstorm a brief plan for replying to each objection you are likely to encounter.

What worked well as you wrote poems for class this semester? What could have been better? If you had another week to finish this assignment, how would you use that time? Describe the process of assembling the portfolio: what did you do first? Why? When did you know you were finished with the portfolio? Why did you include the poems you did?

Let’s follow the directions Graff and Birkenstien give on page 90, but replace the paragraph they provide with the following, from Ruland and Bradbury’s From Puritanism to Postmodernism:

Because of such exclusions, much later American writing, and some would say the American imagination itself, revolted against Puritanism. In fact to many later artists the very idea of a “Puritan imagination” would come to seem a contradiction in terms. Hawthorne, one of whose ancestors was a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials, returned with a sense of curious ambiguity to the world of his steeple-hatted Puritan ancestors in The Scarlet Letter (1850). He tests the idea of “iron-bound” Puritan society against the world of nature, but discloses as well that the power of the Puritan spirit has not died. (31)

Or this one, about Anne Bradstreet:

But, though [Bradstreet’s poem’s] strongest subjects are drawn from the stuff of daily life . . . they have a metaphysical wit and texture that anticipate the works of a New Englander of two hundred years later, Emily Dickinson. This comes in part from the struggle between dissent and acceptance in the life of a strong-willed woman living in a commonwealth which required double submission, to domestic and divine duty, but also in part from the sense of felt experience she inherited from British poetry, mixing an alert vivacity with an apparent simplicity. Her love is marital, her landscape plain but brightly seen, her meditations troubled but ultimately pious, her awareness of nature acute but also respectful of the Maker of it. (22-23)