Medium-stakes assignment #3

Course Description:
Texting the World brings together literary and nonliterary texts and considers how the same theme plays through them via analysis,

evaluation, and creation of said texts. This particular section of ENG 200 is devoted to the theme of The Sea. Artists and writers have

long found inspiration from the sea. In this course, we’ll examine representations of the sea throughout history, with an emphasis on

contemporary and classical literature, as well as art, poetry, scholarship, and film. Through reading, writing, and discussion, we’ll

consider the ways the sea, and what it encompasses and represents, can allow artists and writers to explore the human condition and

show us something about our own values, attitudes, and beliefs.

Assignments are designed to help you use writing as a learning tool and to improve your written communication abilities. You will be

asked to complete a variety of low-, medium-, and high-stakes assignments, including informal writing tasks, collaborative in-class

work, and longer written assignments, in order to help you become adept at analyzing texts and conveying ideas through writing.
This course is situated in the following three core domains:

• Aesthetic and Artistic Thinking
• Oral, Written, and Visual Communication
• Social, Ethical, and Historical Thinking
After you read the course description and three core domains, you will know what are we concentrating in this English class.
Instruction for this assignment:
1) Please read Down to a Sunless Sea by Neil Gaiman. I uploaded the attachment file.
2) In no less than one typed page, respond to Down to a Sunless Sea by Neil Gaiman. If you are having trouble thinking of what to

write, you may want to consider these questions:
. What traits of this short story can you identify with Postmodernism? Explain why you feel this way.
. How does the title give meaning to the rest of the story?
. Discuss the symbolic meaning of the rain, the necklace, the ships, or any other things you wish to identify.
When you write this assignment, please DO Not SUMMARIZE THE TEXT. You need to think of “What makes you think of after reading this Down

to a Sunless Sea by Neil Gaiman” and write about it. You will need to closely read, analyze, and interpret the text. Apply your basic

critical and rhetorical terms, devices, and/or strategies in close reading.You need to recognize multiple perspectives.

Down to a Sunless Sea by Neil Gaiman
A rainy encounter in London on the banks of the Thames unlocks a tale of loss and grief in this exclusive story from Neil Gaiman, Down

to a Sunless Sea

‘The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake, or a sea serpent’ … Tower Bridge at the turn of the 20th century

Photograph: Royal Photographic Society/ SSPL via Getty Images Royal Photographic Society/SSPL via Getty Images
Neil Gaiman
The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake, or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the

Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down

into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion.
It is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into the gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The

rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies it only needs

to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.
Nobody drinks it, neither the rain water nor the river water. They make jokes about Thames water killing you instantly, and it is not

true. There are mudlarks who will dive deep for thrown pennies then come up again, spout the river water, shiver and hold up their

coins. They do not die, of course, or not of that, although there are no mudlarks over fifteen years of age.
The woman does not appear to care about the rain.
She walks the Rotherhithe docks, as she has done for years, for decades: nobody knows how many years, because nobody cares. She walks

the docks, or she stares out to sea. She examines the ships, as they bob at anchor. She must do something, to keep body and soul from

dissolving their partnership, but none of the folk of the dock have the foggiest idea what this could be.
You take refuge from the deluge beneath a canvas awning put up by a sailmaker. You believe yourself to be alone under there, at first,

for she is statue-still and staring out across the water, even though there is nothing to be seen through the curtain of rain. The far

side of the Thames has vanished.
And then she sees you. She sees you and she begins to talk, not to you, oh no, but to the grey water that falls from the grey sky into

the grey river. She says, “My son wanted to be a sailor,” and you do not know what to reply, or how to reply. You would have to shout

to make yourself heard over the roar of the rain, but she talks, and you listen. You discover yourself craning and straining to catch

her words.

“My son wanted to be a sailor.
“I told him not to go to sea. I’m your mother, I said. The sea won’t love you like I love you, she’s cruel. But he said, Oh Mother, I

need to see the world. I need to see the sun rise in the tropics, and watch the Northern Lights dance in the Arctic sky, and most of

all I need to make my fortune and then, when it’s made I will come back to you, and build you a house, and you will have servants, and

we will dance, mother, oh how we will dance…
“And what would I do in a fancy house? I told him. You’re a fool with your fine talk. I told him of his father, who never came back

from the sea – some said he was dead and lost overboard, while some swore blind they’d seen him running a whore-house in Amsterdam.
“It’s all the same. The sea took him.
“When he was twelve years old, my boy ran away, down to the docks, and he shipped on the first ship he found, to Flores in the Azores,

they told me.
“There’s ships of ill-omen. Bad ships. They give them a lick of paint after each disaster, and a new name, to fool the unwary.
“Sailors are superstitious. The word gets around. This ship was run aground by its captain, on orders of the owners, to defraud the

insurers; and then, all mended and as good as new, it gets taken by pirates; and then it takes shipment of blankets and becomes a

plague ship crewed by the dead, and only three men bring it into port in Harwich…
“My son had shipped on a stormcrow ship. It was on the homeward leg of the journey, with him bringing me his wages – for he was too

young to have spent them on women and on grog, like his father – that the storm hit.
“He was the smallest one in the lifeboat.
“They said they drew lots fairly, but I do not believe it. He was smaller than them. After eight days adrift in the boat, they were so

hungry. And if they did draw lots, they cheated.
“They gnawed his bones clean, one by one, and they gave them to his new mother, the sea. She shed no tears and took them without a

word. She’s cruel.
“Some nights I wish he had not told me the truth. He could have lied.
“They gave my boy’s bones to the sea, but the ship’s mate – who had known my husband, and known me too, better than my husband thought

he did, if truth were told – he kept a bone, as a keepsake.
“When they got back to land, all of them swearing my boy was lost in the storm that sank the ship, he came in the night, and he told me

the truth of it, and he gave me the bone, for the love there had once been between us.
“I said, you’ve done a bad thing, Jack. That was your son that you’ve eaten.
“The sea took him too, that night. He walked into her, with his pockets filled with stones, and he kept walking. He’d never learned to

swim.
“And I put the bone on a chain to remember them both by, late at night, when the wind crashes the ocean waves and tumbles them on to

the sand, when the wind howls around the houses like a baby crying.”
The rain is easing, and you think she is done, but now, for the first time, she looks at you, and appears to be about to say something.

She has pulled something from around her neck, and now she is reaching it out to you.
“Here,” she says. Her eyes, when they meet yours, are as brown as the Thames. “Would you like to touch it?”
You want to pull it from her neck, to toss it into the river for the mudlarks to find or to lose. But instead you stumble out from

under the canvas awning, and the water of the rain runs down your face like someone else’s tears.
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