Tuesday, March 30, 2010

13. Poor little HANİFE...


We read the short story of Sevgi Soysal called "Hanife" which is mainly about a girl which was murdered under the name of honour killings. the story is fluent and don't bore the reader.there are some points that I'd like to mention about the story;

1. Gold Coin symbolizes;
  • For Hasan, the easy way to use Hanife
  • For Hanife, hope

2. Why did Hanife believed Hasan so quickly?
  • Because she wasn't fed in means of love by her family and Hasan was the first person who "cares" about her.
3. Poplar Trees symbolizes,
  • In Turkey, the graveyards are full of poplar trees because they believe that the noise of these trees soothes the souls of the dead.
  • The shadow of the poplar covers and hides the dead body of Hanife from the public.
  • In Turkish literature, poplar trees symbolizes death.

4. The flew of the headscarf symbolizes;
  • The soul of Hanife flew.
  • In religious beliefs headscarf is an important piece of clothe that every honourable woman should wear.But because Hanife isn't one one them, the scarf flew.
  • If Hanife would be a "good" person, the headscarf wouldn't flew.

5. Stoning Hanife;
  • Because they think she is evil and in Muslim religion, they tended to kills dishonourable woman by stoning.

6. Soysal translated Turkish slangs into English and that makes the story more real.



I want to thank all my friends who participate in discussion and spit out those really good analysis and who made the presentation.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

12. Loving memories of university...


I LOVE YOU BENİM CANIM İRUMMMM!!!!


Well yes, in university we have to study more, at least I'm aware of that. but its kinda hard when you have so much fun friends such as HER:D

Our job is to find a balance between doing our responsibilities and having fun.Because after university we will be GROWN and i don't want to be an adult:S hatta i didn't want to grow any higher than 17 but life..:D

this life has to be offered good memories because although its very hard, a tiny thing would be enough for us to laugh...

11. READ MEEEE!!!!


sonja started a blog-contest prized by a secret box:D

i will write in my blog whenever i find space from hard workings of Sabanci :D

its kinda fun to express my ideas to a machine esspecially i know that the number of my readers are not much from the fingers of a hand:D

but i will continue to blog:D

MADE THE FORCE BE WİTH US!!!

Thursday, March 18, 2010

10. Who wins the LOTTERY??


Money, money... every body needs some to survive.But what is the border of being money colic? People have an idea of "money buys everything" but thats ofcourse not true... Love or humanity cannot be bought.I dont know how i come to this point but my aim in this post to interrogate the text "The Lottery".

First of all the text is rich of characters.There are many of them with specific names.Because i will presentate this text, it confuses me a little to decide which ones are important to presentate.

The other issue that i want to get your attention is the sentences' structure. There are many wrong written words and also sentences don't start with capital letters.

I love the setting of the text which is June - i can assure you my birthday is in June too=) - and the weather is sunny and grasses are rich green.

The writer uses good vocab and i didn't know the meaning of some words like scold, fussing, and paraphernalia.

but to conclude it was an easy text to read so i recommend it to everyone.

9. Sps and Eng have similar topics to discuss!!!

Today at my Sps discussion class, we discussed the contrasts between racism and nationalism.My classmate told a sentence which was: "Lets kill all the Armenian people is a racist sentence." which is not true.Its a sentence which contains highly nationalist feelings.So its a fascist nationalist sentence.While the class were discussing it, i realized that we don't know the difference between those two concepts.


So at the end lecturer ended the discussion by giving a example like: "Lets kill all blacks, is a racist sentence." which was very true.


Because we both learn these concepts in Eng and Sps lets try not to confuse them in the next time!!!

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

8. Racism as a CRIME


Ellison tries to argue about racism of black people and whites.He uses very hard words that represents racism like the word "nigger".He also uses a language that we can say as slang to make it more real.
ı like the way writer metaphors the killing of the black to a party.there were many metaphors as well such as plane=she, fire=executor..
Black man describes as a tough big man who could resist all those flames.All his wish was to cut his throat to die immediately but the "hungry" whites wanted him to suffer.If its not a racism, then what else would be??
there is written that they have to kill the niggers to keep the others in place.By this sentence we can clearly see that whites act like blacks are not human as they are.

just this one sentence "every time i eat barbecue the black fingers of nigger would come to my mind." definitely summarizes the whole article i think.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

7. Seminar Presentations

We formed our groups yesterday and today we studied about asking questions to the audience in order keep their attention alive while someone is presenting.Sonja gave us 3 methods to summarize a longgg text which are;
1- line by line
2- gap fill
3- eliminate, then show!

I found those very helpful and my group will most probably - definitely- use these in our real presentation; the novel!

She also showed us some example presentation's part about using Venn diagrams which will grab the audience's attention immediately.I know Simge has very useful knowledge about making different types of Venn diagrams=)

I hope the best presentation will be ours.
Good luck to all groups.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

6. In order to right a wrong...

There are 3 ways for oppressed people to deal with their oppression.

1- acquiescence: "is a legal term used to describe an act of a person in knowingly standing by without raising any objection to infringement of his rights, when someone else is unknowingly and honestly putting in his resources under the impression that the said rights actually belong to him." according to Wikipedia.

2-Resort to physical violence and corroding hatred.

3-Nonviolent resistance which means no individual need to submit to any wrong; seeks 2 opposites; acquiescence and violence while avoiding immoralities of both.

Violence never brings permanent peace.ıt solves no social problem, it merely creates new and more complicated ones.


As martin Luther told, he sees violence as "immoral" because it comes from hatred not love.he also added that it annihilate communication and societies.


REFERENCES:
THREE WAYS OF MEETİNG OPPRESSİON- MARTİN LUTHER KİNG, JR.

Friday, March 12, 2010

5. İdentity


They asked maulouf what is your identity? and he answered "both" as he considered himself as Lebanese and french.He says "Arabic is my first language and I discovered Dickens, Dumas and "Gulliver's Travels" in the Arabic translation, and I felt happy for the first time as a child in my village in the mountains, the village of my ancestors where I heard some of the stories that would help me later write my novels. How could I forget all of this? How could I untie myself from it?". This quote tells us that nationality, choosing an identity is nothing but forming borders to a human's brain, soul...

i tried to choose the parts that make me think deeply about this topic and i wanted to share them with you...

"If these people cannot live their multiple belongings, if they constantly have to choose between one side or the other, if they are ordered to get back to their tribe, we have the right to be worried about the basic way the world functions. "

"Thinking about a Turk born almost 30 years ago near Frankfurt, and who has always lived in Germany, and who speaks and writes the German language better than the language of his Fathers. To his adopted society, he is not German, to his society of birth, he is no longer really Turkish. Common sense dictates that he could claim to belong to both cultures. But nothing in the law or in the mentality of either allows him to assume in harmony his combined identity. "

"Half French and half Lebanese, then? Not at all! The identity cannot be compartmentalized; it cannot be split in halves or thirds, nor have any clearly defined set of boundaries. I do not have several identities, I only have one, made of all the elements that have shaped its unique proportions. "


Like Hitler, trying to create a pure blood "nationality", asking maulouf which identity do you belong to is nothing but a genocide, don't you think??

4. Review Quiz


Hi there!!!!
We had a quiz on last Tuesday to make a review of what we had done so far in this 3 weeks.Sonja sent an email saying that she thought it would be useful to make this kind of a quiz to review our knowledge.i agree with her because this quiz make me understand the texts more deeply and make me learn more about those vocab words.so Sonja yes i would like to have another quiz like this in the future to review the texts.But may i suggest something? can you make the questions a little easier so that people can really compete to blog the other group's way:D
other groups underestimate our group but at the very end we made a 3-in-a-row...
so I'm congratulating my group members and wish that our great performance would last for the second quiz:D

Thursday, March 4, 2010

3. Research paper topic

Hi there!!! i finally decide my topic on research paper assignment which is HONOUR KİLLİNGS.i choose this topic because i feel very angry when i read the news about the women who killed for "namus" in the east of Turkey.So i wanted to explore more about the men's pschology who kill their sisters/wifes.
İ wish myself good-luck because i know it would be hard to write the essay=))

Monday, March 1, 2010

2. Where have you been, where are you going?


The tough guise that the male youth is obliged to wear and beside this obligation the fascination of the female majority is being analyzed very intensively in this short story in my point of view.

Oates gives us the image of a 30 year old tough men who is trying to pick up on a 15 year old teenager. Immediately one would have the idea that our bad guy Arnold has bad intentions on Connie, the pure young teenager; but Oates also shows us that there is also bad in the good and good in the bad. For example, Arnold, taking the evil role, stays always kind and caring about Connie. He treats her kind, in some sort of way, whether his intention is bad or good. On the other hand, Connie "the victim" of the fiend, also trying to take advantage of Arnold because he's older, tougher and cooler from the male friends, she and her friends know from the neigberhood. So this story was not a dispute between the evil and the pure.

Another point which troubled me was the role of Arnold in the eyes of Connie. Connie at the beginning, wanted her mother dead, hated her family and wanted out of the suburban neigberhood she lived in; but at the end she refused to go with Arnold till he threatened her about her family. So it was a little confusing for me to understand whether she took off with Arnold to be out of her misery or to save her family. She is totally different from the stubborn, crabby to a affectionate, loving daughter. Also some critics discuss the issue whether Arnold is satan or saviour.

After some research, I also found out that in the year of publication of the story in 1966, there have been a big scandal. There was a serial killer in Arizona which was very popular in 1966 among the youth since they knew he killed his own girlfriend and her sister and didn't inform him to the police. This event influenced the author deeply and made her write this short story to give a lesson to the youth which I think was sufficient.