Monday

Hi all,

OK - although the baby still hasn't turned up (!) it's unlikely at this stage that I'll be in on Monday. However, Mr Marshall has kindly agreed to take the lesson, and will be taking you through the key narrative features of some of the chapters which we otherwise haven't got covered. The idea is that, whilst this will obviosuly be valuable in its own right, it will also act as a model for your own presentations. Thanks very much to Mr Marshall for coming up with this cunning plan!

One more thing - I've got an essay title that I'd like you to complete for the Keats poems, but it's on my email, and this is not currently working. As soon as I can, I'll post this with a deadline.

Thanks to all for an interesting lesson on Friday. If you weren't there, we used emagazine to watch the clips on use of dialogue and character. We then discussed these in relation to EL, considering the ways that, through Joe, McEwan presents dialogue to us in meticulous detail, explaining how words are delivered, and what the characters are doing whilst the dialogue is taking place. We used chapter 6 (I think) where Jed tells Joe that he loves him as a model for this, and discussed the way that Joe seems obsessed with detail, as if he is constantly trying to justify or prove the validity of his memory. We also looked at the opening of the chapter in the restaurant, where Joe admits that his memory can be fallible, and considered McEwan's blend of scientific and poetic language within Joe's narration, as he often applies poetic techniques such as imagery, alliteration etc, even when the content for his narration is scientific. There's a curious blend of the rational and the artistic present in Joe's narration here, evoking one of the central themes of the novel. An example which we looked at could be Joe's description of his apartment (can't remember the chapter and my book's at school!), in which he used an extended metaphor of his home as a ship, with a number of explicitly 'poetic' rhetorical flourishes being applied.

What else? We discussed the importance of the symbolism of the hot air balloon, in that it is man-made and demonstrably technological, but at the same time is controlled by fate and the elements to a large extent. Again, we thought this was apt as a symbol of the science vs the spiritual / artistic / emotional theme which we explored through Keats' work and which reoccurs here.

Mr Marshall - you had some interesting things to say about religious imagery in Joe's narration - I wonder if you might be able to summarise this and post it onto the blog? As soon as the email is working again, I'll send you the instructions as to how to do this. On this theme, there's a really interesting interview with McEwan and Richard Dawkins on You Tube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7LjriWFAEs - might be worth having a look at. There's also some other interesting interviews with McEwan on there - great wider reading / watching.

Right, that's it, have a good lesson tomorrow and let me know how you got on - any of you are always free to comment or write a post for the blog if you would like!

Mr Boulter