Press Release for Ivanhoe and Ivanhoe Project

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Finding Literary Connections in Ivanhoe, MN

 

It has always been clear that Ivanhoe, Minn. was named after Sir Walter Scott's novel, Ivanhoe; however, it is not so clear where the suggestion first originated or the specific connections that lie between the town and the novel.

A new wikia page, now accessible online, called Literary Connections: Ivanhoe and Ivanhoe helps to enlighten the public.

"I was intrigued by the connections I saw while reading Scott’s novel," says Brittany Vlaminck, creator of Literary Connections: Ivanhoe and Ivanhoe and native of Ivanhoe, Minn. "It gives my hometown a deeper meaning that I wanted to share with the public." Vlaminck shares that this sparked the idea for the project.

After reading Scott’s novel, Vlaminck researched the town’s history at the public library in Ivanhoe, Minn. After this, she traveled the town to find literary connections that can be noted between the town’s streets and benches and Scott’s novel. This information can be found on Wikia.com.

“Ivanhoe is actually named after an estate owned by a knight named Wilfred, this creates the mental image that the favored knight comes from the town in Southwest Minnesota,” says Vlaminck. Information like this can be found with in the 21 pages about how the town's name and nickname came to be and their connections to the novel. It also shares information about the characters and places the town's streets and benches of Harthill Walk are named after.

The site is strictly educational and free to the public. Visit at Literary Connections: Ivanhoe and Ivanhoe.

If you would like more information, contact Brittany Vlaminck at 507-828-4094 or email her at brittany.vlaminck@trojans.dsu.edu.

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Gaming and Advertising

I recently read a section of a book called "Play Between Worlds" by T. L. Taylor. The section, or rather chapter, was entitled "Where The Women Are" and the chapter discussed how women have become very common players in the gaming world. While the chapter focuses on women who play Everquest, it can be said, for almost any game, that women have become common and valuable to gaming culture. So if this is becoming so common, why are we still focusing our advertising strategies towards men?

The following link will take you to a paper I wrote for my Contemporary Rhetoric class that discusses the advertising strategies of this game and how new media allows easier access to these advertisements.

Advertisement Analysis - Game of War: Fire Age

The Nightingale and The Rose

For my short stories genre class, I created a presentation about Oscar Wilde's short story, "The Nightingale and The Rose". The presentation was to show different adaptations that have been created of the work. The presentation has information about Wilde and his life, a summary of the story and some of the themes within the story. It discusses some of the styles used by Wilde and then it goes into the adaptations. These include a ballet and opera and also different videos that I have linked within the presentation.

The Nightingale and The Rose from brittanyvlaminck

The first page covers information about his life and family and what he wrote. Both of his parents were writer, which ultimately sparked Oscar's interest. He married a woman named Constance Lloyd and had two sons. He later began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas and was arrested for the affair shortly after. He died due to a severe ear infection that turned into meningitis.

He created many works including a book of poems called Poems. Two short story compilations, of which The Nightingale and the Rose can be found within Happy Prince and Other Tales.  He wrote one novel that had been first published as a short story but was edited and republished when his critics asked for a longer story.  He also created many well known plays.

SPOILER ALERT! The story is about a young student who is in love with the daughter of his professor. She says she will dance with him at the ball the following night if he can bring her a red rose. The student does not have a red rose in his garden and the nightingale hears his cry. She searched the garden and talks to the different rose bushes until she comes to a red rose bush that says he can produce a red rose only if she is willing to sing to him all through the night while pressing her heart into a thorn in the bush. SPOILER ALERT!! The nightingale agrees to do this in the name of true love. In the morning, the student walks over the nightingale's dead body and pick the red rose. When he presents it to the young girl, she refuses because the chamberlain's nephew has given her jewels. The student throws the rose into a gutter and it is run over by a cart while the student goes back to his home to study. SPOILER... well, too late if you already read through this.

Wilde's style has a lot of recurring devices and themes. Some of these are pointed out in this show with excerpts of where they can be found in the piece.

ADAPTATIONS!!! 
Some adaptations that were created include the ballet and the opera. The ballet slide has a link to a video from the backstage of the production. The ballerinas and the creator talk about the adaptation because there it was difficult to create the production. Since ballets use only music and dance to convey a story, and Wilde's story use lots of dialogue, it was important for the audience to read the leaflets before the ballet began to understand the story fully. The opera was a compilation of Wilde's story and four poems from Christina Rossetti.

Other adaptations have been created that can be found on YouTube. The slideshow links to a couple of these videos.

Generation Y - Traits

For another class, me and a group of my peers are looking to create a project for our Contemporary Rhetoric class. We were discussing our audience, and since the prompt suggested targeting our generation, I started looking into Generation Y.

This generation normally consists of individuals that were born between the 1980s and the 2000s. It is also called the Millennium Generation, the Echo Boomers, and IGen, or Internet Generation.

An article found on About Careers.com called Generation Y by Sarah Kane says that the most common traits of the individuals from generation Y is that they are tech-savvy, family-centric, team oriented, achievement oriented, and attention-craving.

Agree: I was intrigued. It is well known that our generation has grown up using a wide variety of different mediums, making the tech-savvy observation likely to be correct. And thinking about how this group project has already been going, I can see that every one in my group (all of which are members of the Y Generation) is also very team and achievement-oriented because they are working together to create a proposal and to create a full proof plan on how to attack this project. We have also already planned future meetings to keep updated with each others work so that this is a group effort rather than individual work. This idea of attention-craving suggested more that we like praise and feedback on our work. We want to offer the best work we possibly can because that is what our generation has always been told to do. "Do your best." And because we have this desire, we look for someone to tell us whether they think we did well or if we could have done better.

To Disagree: The only trait in this list that I feel any disagreement with is this idea that our generation is family-centric. I'm not saying that we aren't just that I believe there is a better way to describe this trait. Personally, I am very family oriented, but the reason I like a flexible schedule (as the article suggests) is because there are many things I want to do with my life outside of work. I believe it's important to have a job to provide for our families and our lifestyles, but I have things I want to learn and to be a part of outside of my job. As I'm looking into a career of editing, I'm thinking to myself about my desire to travel to all fifty states, and to become a sommelier, and to own a stylish wardrobe made of dresses and giant sweaters and far too many pairs of leggings. I want to read the Classics of different time periods and locations, and to compare them to the novels that are now being created today. These are all activities that I need free time to be able to do.

I feel that our generation focuses so much on Internet and other mediums because they offer us the ability to communicate, write, read, work - all while on the go. We can share information easily through these new medias and we have the ability to learn new things with just a few clicks of the buttons on keyboards and touch screens. This ability is what we crave because it offers us the option of having free time to see the things we want to see and do the things we want to do while keeping a job and earning that living that is so important in our survival. 

Back to the Top: So back to the different traits that describe this generation - I feel that the phrase "family-centric" is the wrong word choice. I feel that the trait they are trying to describe here is "Self Indulging". We believe in an understanding of balance of life between work and fun. We allow ourselves to enjoy life whether that means focusing more time on our families or focusing on goals outside of our work and home lives, we let ourselves indulge on the pleasures that life has to offer. 

This discussion shows the connection between English and New Media because it is an article that a writer created that was offered to the public in this medium to reach a large mass of people. Anyone who wanted to know about Generation Y had the ability to find this knowledge by just a few clicks of the keyboard or screen. New media has allowed us to find information faster than before. It also allows us to share our thoughts of the things we read and experience the way this blog is allowing me to share my thoughts after reading Ms. Kane's article. 

Blog Stats

Chitter Chatter Stats as of February 27, 2015

In class today, we were asked to look at our stats page on our blogs. I looked at it from when I first started it to it's current status. I find it really interesting, but there's nothing too exciting to note.

I feel like my page views are really high, but I've noticed that even my own visits are counted in that number, so a lot of those views are my own. I check the blog to make sure the links work right and that everything aligns right and such.

February 2015 page views.

This picture shows my page views specifically for the month of February of this year. This is very different from the all time page view status because it shows that there was a bit of activity in February, but the picture looks like there wasn't much activity. As you can see here the most used day was sometime around the 19th and at that time I had 15 views. Whether these are all my views or from others, I'm not quite sure. But it's really neat to see.

Back to the first screenshot of all of my stats, it's cool to notice how many people have viewed the individual posts, while I know that at least one of those is from me, it's neat to know that four others have looked at my post on 2nd Street Diner. I hope that my post about Wine-ing in SD gets more attention because it has a link to my pinterest page that offers information and links of the different wineries around South Dakota! I think this is such a neat subject because while wine is a world-wide product, SD wines are made to show the best of South Dakota! They use fruits and grapes that grow naturally in the state. I feel like this is a subject of interest and that people may like that post if they were to see it.

The audience was interesting because it's just in the US. But a blog allows access for other countries around the world. My current audience, I assume, is mostly just my classmates but searching the internet allows opportunity to find my blog and posts.