Laurarosenielsen

Welcome

Greetings...

Hello, Laurarosenielsen, and welcome to Wikipedia!

To get started, click on the green welcome.

I hope you like it here and decide to stay!

Happy editing! jbmurray (talk • contribs) 08:54, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Magical Realism Reconsidered

I'm looking forward to working with your class during the semester - if you have any questions about the project or Wikipedia in general, please feel free to leave me a note at User talk:Awadewit. Wikipedians are here to help you! Awadewit (talk) 19:37, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Bibliography assignment

Hi, here are the details of the MRR annotated bibliography assignment...

Good Wikipedia articles are built on a foundation of good sources. In this respect, Wikipedia articles are not much different from academic essays. In fact, if anything a good Wikipedia article is more reliant on good sources than are other academic or scholarly texts. The whole notion of verifiability, which is the first of the encyclopedia's five pillars, depends upon reliable sources.

The aim of this bibliography assignment, then, is to identify, read, and comment on the most important and reliable sources that relate to the topic of your chosen article.

In coordination with your group, you need to do the following:

• Identify the most important sources for your topic. These will be both books and articles. They will vary depending upon the kind of topic you have chosen, but to give a couple of examples this book is a key one for the general topic of magic realism, while this biography would be essential for the article on Gabriel García Márquez.
• Use databases and the Koerner library catalogue to identify these sources. Look for as many as possible in the first instance; you will later choose between them. On the whole, they will not be online sources (though of course many articles are now available online thanks to JSTOR and other services).
• Aim to come up with a long list of, say, 5-20 books and perhaps 15-40 articles. Obviously, for some topics there will be more material than for others. So for some topics you will need to do more searching; for other topics, you will need to be more careful and discerning as you choose between sources. Look far and wide and be inventive in thinking about good sources.
• In some cases, the article may already have a number of references, either in the article itself, or perhaps somewhere in its talkpage archives. You should take account of these, but you should still undertake your own search, not least to find new material that has not been considered before.
• To figure out what you need, you will also have to look at your article and consider what it is missing, what needs to be improved, where it could do with better sources, etc. In other words, you will have to start planning how you are going to work on and rewrite the article.
• Come up with a final short list of c. 2-4 books and perhaps 6-24 articles.
• Put the long list (of all the sources you have found) as well as the short list (of the sources you have decided are the most important) on your article's talk page by Wednesday, January 20.
• Distribute the sources among the members of your group. Each person should be reading the equivalent of one full book or six articles. Exceptionally long books may be divided up between group members.
• Read the sources, bearing in mind the information that is going to be useful as you work on the article. Think about what it covers and take a note of particular page numbers.
• Produce an annotated bibliography of the sources you have read. This will consist of a summary or précis of the most important aspects of the texts, which should be at least 150 words long for each article read; 600 words for each book. You should put this on your user page by Monday, February 8.

To coordinate with the other members of your group (whose names you can find here), use their talk pages. Each time that you log in to Wikipedia, you will notice that if you have a message waiting for you, there will be a yellow banner at the top of the page.

Good luck! --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:06, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Hi -- I saw your note at the top of the talk page for One Hundred Years of Solitude; it's usual to post at the bottom of the page. That way the notes on the page can be read in chronological order as you go down the page. I moved it for you -- if you go to the talk page you'll see it's at the end now. I also gave it a section heading, which makes it show up in the table of contents for the page. To create a new section you can click the "+" sign at the top of the page; if you just want to edit a section and add comments to it, just click the edit link next to that section's header.

Any questions, feel free to ask -- just post here or on my talk page. Good luck with the article! Mike Christie (talk) 22:31, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks to Mike for helping out. And Laurarosenielsen, good job on getting the ball rolling. A few lessons... 1) Yes, it takes a bit of time to figure out how things work, but soon enough you'll see it's pretty easy; 2) But as I said in class, don't worry about making errors, as they can always be fixed and you will never manage to break Wikipedia (or if you find a way to do it, that would be quite something); 3) there are a ton of helpful people out there, such as Mike Christie, who are willing to provide advice and show how things are done.

Finally, I do suggest you also drop a note on your fellow team members' talk pages. That way they get that little yellow band which alerts them to a message, and know to have a look. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 22:41, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

heads up

Heya, just to point out that if you look here you'll see that User:Awadewit has volunteered to give special help to your article, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of course, you guys are to take the lead, and above all do the research required to improve the article. But you should definitely feel free to contact Awadewit on her talk page. You'll find she's very friendly and knowledgeable about writing for Wikipedia, and will give you as much help as she can.

Incidentally, you should also (as I mentioned before) be putting our project page on your watchlist, so you can see changes like this one. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:24, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

No problem

It's always a pleasure working with Jon's students. I look forward to seeing what you all come up with! Mike Christie (talk) 00:46, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

"The Solitude of Latin America", Nobel lecture by Gabriel García Márquez, 8 December, 1982 In this acceptance speech by Marquez, truth of the novel is addressed. Marquez appeals to the fantasy in his novel and refers to a historical time line to state the reality that the novel is born from. As an artist he presents a political message, and defines the countries of Latin America and addresses how the rest of the world, too easily misinterprets them. The major elements of this speech are important to the Wikipedia page because I think to have a blurb on what Marquez wanted to accomplish with his novel and the purpose of his novel from his mouth is a fantastic reference. Swedish Academy of Letters: The Permanent Secretary. Press Release: The Nobel Prize for Literature 1982 The Press release in 1982 is useful to the Wikipedia page because it gives feedback on how the novel was viewed most current to its publication. Furthermore, it discusses the great success of the novel, especially at an international level. Finally, it purposes the inspiration it left for the Latin American world, in both the eyes of Latin America and through the eyes of the outside world.

"Ghosts, Metaphor and History in Tony Morrisson's Beloved and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude", by Daniel Erickson.

Erickson’s book embodies the symbolic meaning of the novel through different metaphors, images and the characters’ specific natures. It emphasizes on the power of the past, the cyclic time spectral and how repetition that dominates throughout the novel proves to be a dominating practice in the Latin American world. The formula of repetition furthermore is the wrecking ball to the self destruction of Latin America evident in its economic and political dependence, and underdevelopment. Images such as the glass city and ice factory represent how Latin America already has its history outlined and is therefore fated for destruction. Also, there is a look the parallels between colonization in the fiction village of Macondo and the actual colonization of Latin America. The book would be an asset to the Wikipedia page because it contains information on the themes addressed in the novel and how these themes relate to the importance of the novel. I would like to enhance the information about the themes on the wiki page, it looks a little bare.

(The following are simply quotes I found very useful from the book) Chapter Seven

On seeing Prudencio (the ghost), José Arcadio Buendía abandons his obsession with progress and instead becomes obsessed with the past, collapsing into a belief in unchanging timelessness and lamenting that the “time machine has broken.” (p.140) This leads to the second aspect of spectral complexity in One Hundred Years of Solitude; the ghost and the displaced repetition that it evokes are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history.” (p.143) / but metaphorically transposes specific aspects of Latin America’s continuing history of dependence and underdevelopment, a history that, however regressive seeming, is directly tied to the “progressive, linear history” of modernity. Attending to its placement within historical time and space will show that the spectral, although a fantastic figure, is not an antirealist figure, but is part of García Márquez’s engagement with the changing history of Latin America.”(p.142)

Chapter Eight

García Márquez addresses the ideologies of everyday life in Latin America, the ways in which socialized individuals conceive of the larger historical forces that determine their world in ways that obscure the reality of these forces. (p.182) Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. (p.191) The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create. From within such an ideologically predetermined” situation, events can indeed seem fated, in that they conform to one’s ideological parameters. In his study of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Martin quotes Hector Murena’s description of the connection between misinterpretation and Latin America’s seemingly inevitable history. (p.192) Ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions. (p.193)

Chapter Nine

The conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude thus exploits the deconstructive capacity of both the spectral and metaphorical figures, their tendency to erase themselves, in order to highlight Latin America’s capacity for ideological and social transformation. The spectral metaphor is used to install and then deconstruct a particularly alluring but ultimately debilitating ideological representation of Latin America, clearing the way for a revolutionary estimation of Latin America’s true conditions, devoid of the spectral figurations that have so far haunted Latin American history. (p.210)

“Cien años de soledad: the novel as myth and archive” by Gonzalez Echevarria. p. 358-80 Year 1984

Echevarria presents a most interesting and scholarly view on the novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The article focuses on the Latin American novel, the myth and the history overlapping, and more specifically how the myth acts as a vehicle to transmit the history to the reader. There is an evolution of Latin texts, and during the nineteenth century there was a switch in discourse towards the consciousness of travelers which is referred to in Marquez’s novel as the anthropology, where truth is found in language and myth. As well, the article draws attention to three main mythical elements of the novel: classical stories alluded to (foundations and origins), the characters resembling mythical heroes, and the supernatural elements. How the archive in the story is interpreted by Echevarria is intriguing. He views it as a symbol of what is linear and at the same time of symbol of the Latin America that was only discovered by the voyager but had its historical entity developed by the printing press. The Archive is a symbol of the literature that is the foundation to the history and a decoding instrument. Melquiades represents both the whimsical and the literary, literature ironic critical and contradicting to delusion. The ambiguity is that Echevarria concludes with the notion that the desire for meaning is only satisfied by myth. A well constructed coincidence between history and myth fabricated the base to One Hundred Years of Solitude, the evidence presented in this article is strong and well structured and would help the Wikipedia page in all areas, especially facilitating an exhort on symbolism and an exhort on the book’s worthy presence in the genre of “magical realism”.

“Some Implications of Yellow and Gold in García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude": Color Symbolism, Onomastics, and Anti-Idyll” by John Carson Pettey Citation Revista Hispánica Moderna, Año 53, No. 1 pp. 162-178 Year 2000 In my research of articles for the Wikipedia page I discovered the above article, which enlightens on the symbolism that colour has in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yellow and gold seem to be the highest frequency colour mentioned. It is mentioned that gold is a reference to the history of early European imperialism, and the Spanish siglo de oro. Yellow is present in certain character aspects. Looking closely at the language used in the novel, attention is drawn to words such as aurum (imperial Rome), paralleled with the character Aureliano. Not only do the characters reflect the colour symbolism, but so does the setting, Macondo, the village name, comes from the yellow fruit, banana. Furthermore, the colours signify a search for both economic wealth (gold) and intellectual wealth (the yellow manuscripts). Finally, because the colours gold and yellow are motifs, it is yet another reflection on repetition and the cyclic theme that dominates the story. I thought that a look at colour is particularly a more abstract approach to symbolism and would therefore be a point of view for the Wikipedia page that could add to the diversity of its resources.

“Nietzsche, Borges, Garcia Marquez on the Art of Memory and Forgetting” by Michael Bell Romanic Review v. 98 no. 2/3 (March/May 2007) p. 123-34 Year 2007

The above article draws connections between three writers; the encounter with other writers would help the Wikipedia page to further its role in its web of information. This article follows an outline that connects the memory machine in One Hundred Years of Solitude to an image of the novel itself. It is an article that pulls from not only the literary characteristics of more modern writers, but also from the writing of the most prominent Miguel Cervantes. Bell states the contrast between Cervantes who saw the need to distinguish history from fiction and Garcia who seeks to recognize and exploit the fiction in history. However, the irony of Garcia’’ search is that he uses mythic motifs that are both demotic and farcical. Towards the end of this article Bell talks about Garcia’s recovery of the marvellous lo real maravilloso”. This concept is found to be fundamental in the writings of “magical realism”, and I think the outreach this article has makes it a necessary candidate for the Wikipedia page. --Laurarosenielsen (talk) 22:06, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Re: blogging

(copied over from my talk page:) To access student blogs, go to http://blogs.ubc.ca/span365/. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 18:33, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Some editing tips

I noticed on your most recent post to Talk:One Hundred Years of Solitude that you wanted to create lists and sections in your post. Wikipedia "code" does not really recognize a "return" or "space" - you need to tell the program to create a new line or paragraph. There are two good ways to do this: 1) * - the asterisk creates a bullet point; 2) : - the colon indents. I hope this helps! Awadewit (talk) 04:58, 13 March 2010 (UTC)