Thứ Hai, 18 tháng 2, 2013

Entry 1_Bùi Hoàng Long

Item 1

Celebrity


Vibrant lights
Roused clamor
Flickers of light
Extreme glamour.

Papers after paper
Tired, sore arms
Just keep on smiling
Continue to charm.

Bags under eyes
Another long day
To sit and pretend
Waste your life away.

Cameras are everywhere
You cannot hide
All the rumors that subside
Hurts deep inside.

Unseen by the public
Of internal pains
Unnoticeable feint act
The façade remains.

Glamour so evident
Media preordained
Deem forlorn
Everything unexplained.

Accomplishments surpassed
Yet feeling incomplete
Life is such
Full of Deceit.
Oblivious out in the open
Hide your pain
Just keep on smiling
Cover up the Feign.

Nobody knows
What it’s like to be them
Many unknown facts
All condemned.

Media fakes
Public makes buzz
Having fame makes life
Nothing like it was.

The industry may seem glamorous
But it is far from glam
Every action you make
May be looked upon as a scam.

Nobody knows the truth
Behind the screen
From the public view’s eye
Much is unseen.

All we see is
The orthodox of show biz.

Vibrant lights
Roused clamor
Flickers of light
Extreme glamour.

Author: Margery Wang

Analysis:
There are, from my viewpoint, four rhetorical devices in this poem as follows:
- Repetition of the beginning canto: Contributes to emphasizing the "flashy atmosphere" that celebrities "breathe".
- Rhyme: Most rhymes are terminal ones, including perfect rhymes like arm-charm and glam-scam and imperfect rhymes like pain-Feign or incomplete-Deceit.
- Metonymy: In the sentence "Tired, sore arms", the arms stand for the famous people who suffer from tiredness and pain after having to sign continuously for so long.
- Irony: Contrasts between the mask that celebrated people wear day after day in public and their actual lives with inside painful parts of their soul that they cannot reveal.

Moral lesson: The actual life of renowned people is not like what it is publicly seen.


Item 2

The elephant who lost an eye

An elephant came to the edge of a stream of clear rushing water. Being thirsty, the elephant leaned over, dropped its trunk into the cool water and… plunk!
“What? What happened?” the elephant cried. “I can’t see! My eye… it fell in the water! Oh nooooooh,” the elephant wailed in a panic, “I lost my eye!”
And, in fact, the elephant’s right eye had popped out of its socket and fallen into the stream. The elephant searched frantically for the eye, groping with its trunk along the bottom of the stream. The more he groped, the cloudier the water became. That made him panic even more, and he started churning up great piles of sand, until he couldn’t see anything.
Then the elephant heard the sound of laughing. Furious, he looked around to see who it was, and saw a little green frog sitting on a log, laughing and laughing.
“You think this is funny?” the elephant shouted. “I lose an eye and that makes you laugh?”
“What’s funny is to see how upset you are. Calm down and everything will be fine,” the frog replied.
The elephant felt a little ashamed and took the frog’s advice. He stopped moving his trunk around, and soon the water became clearer as the sand sank to the bottom. And there in the stream lay his eye. He reached for it with his trunk and popped it back into its socket. And then he thanked the frog.

Author: Christian Godefroy
Source: http://www.positive-club.com/ (Subscription via email)

Analysis:
In my opinion, there are three rhetorical devices employed in this story as follows:
- Overstatement or hypebole: In the way of saying that the elephant was able to pop his right eye back into its socket when it had popped out and fallen into the water.
- Metaphor: That the elephant churned up the stream with his trunk, making it cloudier for him to search for the eye is somewhat similar to many people's reaction when they are in panic stations: losing control and making a mess without calmly investigating the situation to see what the real problem is.
- Parallelism: That can be seen in such sentences as "The more he groped, the cloudier the water became" to add rhyme.

Moral lesson: Keeping calm is the key to seeing the world objectively and rationally.


Item 3




Analysis: 
From my point of view, irony is employed in the above picture. The lady looks disappointed when she is exposed to the fact that the corporate ladder of men is much longer than that of women. This means that she will never get the chance to reach a high position in the company for which she is working for.

Message: Women have much fewer opportunities than men do to promote their career in business world.


5 nhận xét:

  1. Here are my some comments. I hope they will be useful for you:

    - Item 1: I find that you stated the rhetorical devices as well as message fully and correctly.

    - Item 2: The second item lacks one more rhetorical device. It is the rhetorical question (I lose an eye and that makes you laugh?)

    - Item 3: You should add irony as a rhetorical device used in this item. The reason is that no ladder in reality is as small as woman's one which appears in the picture.

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  2. Nhận xét này đã bị tác giả xóa.

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  3. Here is my commennt :D Hope it helps you ;)
    I agree with Tài about item 1. I think when we analyse for readers about rhetorical devices, we should show it in simple way, not like a ful message

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  4. You have done an excellent job in identifying the rhetorical devices and the messages, showing a deep understanding of all three item. Your language is also very good in terms of vocabulary and grammar. Here are some of my comments on each item that you may want to put into consideration to improve your works even more.
    Item 1:I do not really think that the "arms" in "tired, sore arms" is a metonymy, because it is not clearly related to, or intimately associated with the celebrities. As far as I know, metonymy is the use of a part to show the whole thing, but that part must be particular so that the audience can understand what is mentioned.
    Item 2: I must say that I agree with Tai's idea. "I lose an eye and that makes you laugh?" is really a rhetorical question, because when asking it, the elephant does not really expect an answer. The implication is: "Stop laughing at me".
    Item 3: Totally agree with you.

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