Journal writing is a way to record your thoughts. They can record personal responses to everyday experiences, like diaries, or they can record intellectual responses to academic work, like the double-entry journals you’ll be keeping during our study of various texts. Disciplining yourself into writing down your questions, observations, emotional reactions, and reflections helps you read more deeply and sort out what’s going on, at the surface level of the story and beneath it. Ideally, write in your journal as you read. Even just writing down a word you don’t know is useful because then you can look up its meaning and wonder about why the author would choose that particular word. Journal entries are the seeds of ideas, whether for essays, books, scientific experiments, or artistic creations. There are different ways to keep a journal, but I’d like you to try this method. Double-entry Journal for Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Cue (question, observation, initial reaction)+page
Hatchery (2)—interesting diction/word choice
fretsawyers (3)—embarrassing but I don’t know what this means. Look up later. . . .
Henry Foster (8) Yuck! Reflection
This usually refers to the place where chickens are bred, where their eggs are kept warm until it’s time to be born. Why apply it to humans? ***After reading the rest of this chapter, it seems Huxley is suggesting a world in which mass production, efficiency and technology are highly valued. People are treated like livestock.
Fretsaw’s a thin saw used for more intricate work, for curved edges. Metaphor for how people here are molded? This place wants worker bees, not thinkers.
So obsequious. Can’t stand his smug attitude and how eager he is to rattle off statistics to impress the Director. Will he be typical of Huxley’s characters and if so, what does he suggest?
***It’s useful to review the previous day’s entries and add on to them with insights gained from class, continued reading, the passage of time. SUMMARIES: At the end of class, or each day, it’s good to draw a conclusion of some sort. For above: Henry Foster exemplifies the obedient, efficient type of citizen this society values. It’s all about order and control, mass producing an unquestioning labor force to maintain the status quo.
