Who is Laurie Anderson?

On June 6th a group of my literature students from the Academic Magnet High School will have the privilege to meet with Laurie Anderson in a round table discussion about the creative process. After sharing this news with my students their first question to me was, "Who is Laurie Anderson?" My response was to have them carefully study one of Anderson's most popular work, "O, Superman". Instead of immediately showing them the video and asking them to analyze what they saw I instead helped them slowly discover her work by walking them through the following steps:



1. Read and Mark-up Students read and used literary tools to analyze and mark up the text of "O Superman" with interpretive notes.


Student sample of mark up.








2. Listen
Students listened to an audio recording of Anderson's performance of "O Superman". They used their lyric handouts to note where and how Anderson used music and sounds to communicate concepts in the performance.


3. Origins
Exploring the origins of "O Superman" Anderson constructed the song as a cover of the aria "O Souverain, o juge, o père" (O Sovereign, O Judge, O Father) from Jules Massenet's 1885 opera Le Cid. She was moved by the opera's powerful refrain "O Sovereign, O Judge, O Father!" and identified with the huge emotions at its center. She says, "O Souverain' is basically a prayer for help. All is over, finished! My beautiful dreams of glory, my dreams of happiness, have flown away forever!" Students watched the aria and discussed its connections to "O Superman".


4. Watch
Watch a video recording of Anderson's performance of "O Superman"


5. Discuss Students shared their interpretations of the central theme of "O Superman" and explained how the textual, auditory, and visual elements in the work helped present the theme they identified.

Click on the banner below to see a full explanation of this lesson.

The 2008 Festival Poster, A Literary Analysis

Painting With Verticals Cadence 3
by Bridget Riley

The 2008 festival poster was unveiled on Friday. To be honest my first thought was, "oh no, not an abstract!" As a Language Arts teacher I immediately look for a narrative and this can be difficult if not impossible to see in abstract works. Then, I remembered that I had similar thoughts last year when I saw Chuck Close's portrait of Philip Glass. But my opinion changed when I discovered that a discussion of Chuck Close's "minimalist" process of using just his fingerprints to create a large portrait was an ideal way to introduce students to the concept of Philip Glass' minimalist music. My second pass at the work, however, resulted in a flashback to some 70's wallpaper that I saw as a child. It took the words of my 9 year old daughter, Zoe, to get me to reconsider this work. She looked at it, squinched her face, and proclaimed, "Cool! That looks like woven water in a pond of fishes". Note to self: When an interpretation turns cynical seek a child's opinion.


A Literary Analysis of Art: "How to read a work of art in eight steps"
Over the years I have integrated many works of art into my classroom as tools to teach concepts from my Language Arts curriculum. In that time I have developed a method called "reading a work of art in eight steps" (click here for the handout).

In order to give readers an idea of how this works I have provided my responses to these eight steps when used to analyze this year's festival poster. Keep in mind that this method uses literary tools to analyze a work of art. After I have my interpretation I will see what the experts have to say.

1. Sketch and label the main elements in the work (this slows students down and helps them see more elements in the work). Here's my quick mark up of this work:


2. Analyze the diction of the title:
Students create word webs that examine the connotative and denotative meanings of the words in the title. Just take a look at the image below of a word map for "cadence" created by using the visual thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/):

Many of these associated meanings gave movement to the painting and helped me build my interpretation of the work (or at least build on the original interpretation of my daughter's "woven water" interpretation).

Meanings associated with the number 3. I would tell my students that I don't care that the artist probably used the number three in the title because this was the third in a series. Instead I prefer to explore how I can deepen my own analysis of the work.
Three is very important to human beings: three strikes, three pigs, three gods, three bears, three branches of government. Why is this? My answer comes from my hero, the famous mythologist Joseph Cambell who argued that 3 is the solution to the creation of life:
male + female = offspring.
This primal factor hearkens back to the early days when we first crawled out of the "woven water" and crawled around on land.

3. Subject: What is the subject being depicted in this work?
My quick answer: Grass and light woven by water.
(note to self: the water is my protagonist)

4. Characterization: Use the elements of indirect characterization (Speech, Thoughts, Effect on others, Actions, and Looks) to analyze characters and elements in the work.
I have to heavily rely on personification here.
Actions: The water is the protagonist whose flow is being disrupted by the growing grass and intruding light.
The grass and light keep cadence (of three beats perhaps?).
Looks: blue water is hidden behind the other elements.

5. What is the symbolic meaning of elements in the work?
WATER: necessary for life and growth. Commonly appears as a birth or rebirth symbol. Water is used in baptismal services, which solemnizes spiritual births. Similarly, the appearance of rain in a work can suggest a character's spiritual rebirth.
GRASS: food, shelter for fish?

6. Imagery: How do specific elements in the painting appeal to each of the five senses?
blue=water, green=grass, white=light, gray=gray matter of the brain

7. Tone: Identify an adjective that describes the artist's attitude towards the subject of the work.
apathetic / straightforward

8. Plot and theme
Water's flow is disrupted by the elements of earth and sky causing it to weave itself into the fabric of a new diffusion. (I will be working on this as the festival progresses)