To start class today, please get into groups of three. First, read your letter aloud to your peers. Then discuss what you think is significant in each one. What did your peers respond to or find significant that you did not? What did you learn from their reflections?
Next, as a group, identify the most important scene in Dorothy Allison's text, the scene that you think most vividly represents the point of her writing. Generate a paragraph that briefly describes the scene and then explains your choice to the rest of class. What are your reasons for why this scene best illustrates the main argument of this text?
Questionable Quality
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Found on the premises of Johnson-McFarlane and Centennial Halls are what
are supposed to be “convenience” stores. These convenience stores make
their busin...
16 years ago
page 43
ReplyDeleteThis passage describes Allison's struggle with overcoming, specifically her rape, but other hardships in her life. Transforming them from a "curse" to a "blessing". In other words, learning from her experiences and bettering her life through these lessons. She expresses independent growth. She explains the feeling of evil being a man who does not understand the significance of his damage upon her, he simply brushes it under the rug. We feel that this passage concludes "Two or Three Thing I Know For Sure" by Allison's ability to heal and fin d closure through her story telling. Writing becomes her expression.
Victor, Mariah, Meredith
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Reflection Paragraph
Writ 1122-53
As a group we came to the conclusion that the most important part was when Dorothy’s sister did not understand as to why she was gay. Also, Dorothy and her sister revisited both their childhoods in order to help her younger sister let go of her past mistakes such as sending Dorothy when the dad called. Dorothy also spoke about beauty and how her sister and mother were both beautiful but she was just plain and simple. Dorothy thought that beauty ruined her sister’s life and caused her to get pregnant. The final part was when Dorothy looked at her niece and saw the same lifestyle that the rest of the females in Dorothy’s family had endured. She wanted to tell her niece her mother’s story so that she would not be lost like Dorothy was as a child. This was the most important part because this closure for her and this was when Dorothy was attempting to change and help her niece understand what she was not able to learn as a child.
“Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.” (Allison, 86)
As a group, we found the reminiscent conversation between Dorothy and Anne to be the most important scene of the book. It details the feelings that were harbored against each other, and the development of a deeper understanding of their mother while admitting their jelousy for one another. This scene was important in how Dorothy came to terms with the shadows of the past, which helped her to turn a new leaf. By telling her neice stories of her mother, she realizes the power of internal beauty and importance of reaching out to each other; "If we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form."
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The most important scene in "Two or Three Things I Know for Sure" is when she goes and takes karate. It enables her to have an outlet in which to channel her rage and anger due to the disadvantages she was born into. She continuously returns to karate despite the fact that she is physically drained, non-athletic, and constantly mocked. She marches on, "All I gained was a sense of what I might do, could do if I worked at it, a sense of my body as my own. And that was miracle enough," (Allison 66). It reveals how she is the change in her life, her willingness and desire to change views that society holds of women, which culminates in her seeing the teacher's wife in class one day and the absolute perfection she represents.
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Towards the end of the book, Allison meets a fan that tells her how he thinks her work should be in hypertext, where every word a person clicks on leads them to another story. Allison initially disregards the offer but later has a vivid dream that is metaphorically in hypertext. In the dream Allison sees the story of her life on a brick wall, each time she touches a brick with a specific memory it then falls away and a new memory appears. Eventually, the last brick falls away leaving her “in the rubble of [her] life” (Allison, 94). In the end all she has to hold on to is a word: “Mama.” This is significant because not only did her mother signify love but words and stories are also the only thing she has to hold onto in her life, the only thing that will not crumble away, something no one can take away from her.
ReplyDelete"Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form," - Dorothy Allison, 'Two or Three Things I Know for Sure” pp. 86
ReplyDeleteI believe the discussion between Allison and Anne, her sister, best embodies her purpose in writing ‘Two or Three Things I Know for Sure’. They both discuss the hardships they endured as children, and as adults on the journey to find themselves. Both sisters realize that they still have much in common, even though they have very different experiences. Sharing their stories, bearing theirs souls, they discover a new appreciation for the other and for the other’s strengths – they nominate each other’s personal and unique beauty. As Allison explains before telling a story to her little niece: “For one moment, this moment leading to the next, the act of storytelling connect[s]… life” (84). Just as Allison and her sister sit on the porch and split a six-pack of beer, she recreates that personal connection through her writing. Although literature is usually like a one-way conversation, she asks her audience to reminisce and reflect on their own experiences, to share their beauty as she has shared hers. Together, they, author and audience as one, begin to know beauty by seeing the beauty – the scars, the gifts, the hardships, the strengths, the experiences – in each other.
The passage that represents the point of her writing is her dream on page 93 toward the end of the book. In her dream, she was in a museum and her right eye completely blinded and she was very old. After walking in the museum for a while she hit a wall that had her story was on this wall, and with every brick she touches on the wall a window open and a memory appear in front of her and then the memory vanishes. In the end every bricks fell down and she was standing in the rubble of her life hearing her son calling her “Mama” and she held on to this word with all her power. This passage is very important because it explains the true power of a story. A story is stronger than the very foundation of the earth, even after we get old and dies and turn to dust our stories and memories will go on in life ageless like an endless echo through the mountains. A story is the only thing in our life that nobody can take away from us, atoms aren’t the building blocks of our bodies but memories are. A human being without stories is an empty useless vase; stories are the red, breath taking looking flowers that fills the vase emptiness.
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