This quarter, we have looked at the dystopian societies found in George Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. However, “massive dehumanization, totalitarian government, rampant disease, post-apocalyptic terrains, cyber-genetic technologies, societal chaos and widespread urban violence” are not the realm of literature alone (Snarkerati, 2007): These are also some of the common themes in dystopian films.
Below you will find a truncated list of films I lifted from Snarkerati’s Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time. Your assignment is to choose one of the films below, view it (preferably with a group of your peers and tubs of popcorn), and then post a "meaty" comment which analyzes how each of the governments/ruling classes keeps the people under control in Brave New World, 1984, and whatever film you chose to view. Your comments must address all three and must be thorough. Do not choose a film you have already seen.
Your comment posts are due by Tuesday, January 3, 2012. (the day we return from break). If you want to read annotations for the films listed below to get an idea of what might interest you, go to http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/the-top-50-dystopian-movies-of-all-time/.
(I put the movies in order: my favorites on top!)
The Matrix (1999)
Equilibrium (2002)
Dark City (1998)
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
Minority Report (2002)
Escape from New York (1981)
Total Recall(1990)
The Island (2006)
Gattaca (1997)
They Live (1988)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
The City of Lost Children (1995)
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Green Eggs and Hamlet
Hello, my little friends. You will find two new posts below: one serious, the other more for fun. This is the "fun" one. Please respond, intelligently, to both by Sunday, 11/6. After you read the piece on Ophelia, please vote in the poll found in the right column of our Blog page. Only vote once. We should end with a total of 19 votes. Enjoy:
I ask to be or not to be.
That is the question I ask of me.
This sullied life, it makes me shudder.
My uncle's boffing dear sweet mother.
Would I, could I take me life?
Could I, should I end this strife?
Should I jump out of a plane?
Or throw myself before a train?
Should I from a cliff just leap?
Could I put myself to sleep?
Shoot myself or take some poison?
Maybe try self-immolation?
To shudder off this mortal coil,
I could stab myself with a fencing foil.
Slash my wrists while in the bath?
Would it end my angst and wrath?
To sleep, to dream, now there's the rub.
I could drop a toaster in my tub.
Would all be glad if I were dead?
Could I perhaps kill them instead?
This line of thought takes consideration -
For I'm the king of procrastination.
I ask to be or not to be.
That is the question I ask of me.
This sullied life, it makes me shudder.
My uncle's boffing dear sweet mother.
Would I, could I take me life?
Could I, should I end this strife?
Should I jump out of a plane?
Or throw myself before a train?
Should I from a cliff just leap?
Could I put myself to sleep?
Shoot myself or take some poison?
Maybe try self-immolation?
To shudder off this mortal coil,
I could stab myself with a fencing foil.
Slash my wrists while in the bath?
Would it end my angst and wrath?
To sleep, to dream, now there's the rub.
I could drop a toaster in my tub.
Would all be glad if I were dead?
Could I perhaps kill them instead?
This line of thought takes consideration -
For I'm the king of procrastination.
By the Way, Ophelia was Pregnant...
Okay. So we have had our Socratic Seminars and debated whether or not Hamlet and Ophelia were really "an item" or if Hamlet's misogynistic attitude made it impossible for him to truly love a woman. Now it's time to really stir things up...In the article below, the author argues, quite powerfully, that not only were Hamlet and Ophelia a hot couple, but that Ophelia was actually pregnant with Hamlet's child!!!
Your job is to read the article carefully and decide if you agree with the author or not. In either case you must support your stance with excerpts from the article and your own knowledge of the play. Make sure your comments are intellectual and well supported with facts (text). Your comments are due by Sunday, 11/6. (Feeling lucky again, Shaine???) When you are done posting your comment, don't forget to vote on the right side of the blog; there is a poll question there. Just vote once. Enjoy:
Has anyone noticed that Ophelia is pregnant? In all the productions of Hamlet that I've seen, she is interpreted as an innocent girl in love with the doomed Prince. He breaks her heart, and her sanity goes with it. She drowns herself out of madness.
But I think her madness has a point to it. In Ophelia's first scene, her brother Laertes warns her to beware of Hamlet's affection for her:
" For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood...
no more."
In other words: the Prince is toying with you. Ophelia demurs ("No more but so?") but appears to submit to her brother's wishes.
Next, Ophelia's father Polonius complains,
"'Tis told me, he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you, and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous."
That is, "You've been spending a lot of time alone with this guy." Ophelia, in the time-honored fashion of daughters, claims the relationship is completely innocent: "he hath importun'd me with love / In honorable fashion."
All well and good, but in III:i, Ophelia is set to spy on Hamlet. (Some editors would have Hamlet overhear her father and Polonius asking her to do it. If we suppose a lost stage direction that has Hamlet entering seven lines before he speaks, we can explain why Hamlet suddenly turns on her with such otherwise inexplicable viciousness.) Ophelia listens to his suicidal soliloquy, which he ends by pretending to notice her for the first time:
Nymph, in thy orisons
be all my sins remembered.
Orisons are prayers. If Hamlet has importuned Ophelia in honorable fashion, why should his sins be remembered in her prayers? The implication is that they have sinned together.
Hamlet really lays into her in III:i, ending by telling her, "To a nunnery, go!" In high school they tell you that "nunnery" was slang for a whorehouse, and the rest of his barbed repartee suggests that he thinks she is as dishonored as she is dishonest. He knows she is deceitful from having just heard her agree to spy on him. The best way for him to know she is dishonored is if he has dishonored her.
But it is the mad songs that Ophelia sings in IV:7 that really give away her secret. More than half of her songs are songs of mourning; after all, Hamlet has just killed Ophelia's father. That might be why Ophelia warns, "They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be." After all, she is no longer the daughter of the King's chamberlain; she is now only the daughter of a dead old man. But perhaps she knows all too well what she soon may be, for shortly she sings:
Tomorrow is St. Valentine's day
All in the morning betime
And I a maid at your window
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn'd his clothes
and dupp'd the chamber door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
Why is Ophelia singing about a maid seduced by her lover? Aside from the songs of mourning, all her songs are songs of betrayed love. A few lines later, she is singing an even more pointed song:
Quoth she, "Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed."
He answers:
"So would I ha'done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed."
It is hard to avoid the thought that Hamlet has seduced and abandoned her.
When she returns, she has gathered herbs. "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you love, remember..." The various herbs have symbolic meanings well-documented in the scholarship, but the only herb she intends for herself is rue: "...there's rue for you, and here's some for me; we may call it herb of grace o'Sundays; O, you must wear your rue with a difference." The symbolic meaning of rue is, of course, regret. Ophelia has much to rue, but the symbolic meaning is not the only one. The herb rue (ruta graveolens, aka Herb-of-Grace) is a powerful abortifacient. My herbiary notes that rue is "Lethally toxic, do not use during pregnancy."
Herbal abortifacients tend to be mild poisons. The idea is that you poison yourself to the point where your body decides it's too sick to support the growing embryo or fetus, and rejects it. If you miscalculate in one direction, continued pregnancy; in the other direction, personal death. Rue, while toxic, would not be used as a poison, since it is not a pleasant way to go. Presumably Shakespeare would have given Ophelia hemlock if she had intended to poison herself.
A girl who has been seduced and abandoned need fear nothing but a broken heart, provided there is no evidence of her shame. But if she is pregnant, then there is no way to hide what she has done, unless she can abort the child, or kill herself. And, indeed, shortly thereafter, Ophelia drowns herself.
The conventional interpretation is that Hamlet has broken her heart and then killed her father. But the play seems to suggest strongly that Hamlet has seduced her, and to hint that she is pregnant as well.
It is not hard to imagine Ophelia falling in love with the romantic Prince, and giving in to his passions. He has promised to marry her, and it is not an impossible promise. The Queen later says (V: 2) "I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife." Ophelia might well have hoped to become Queen when Hamlet ascended the throne, as his uncle Claudius has promised.
Hamlet has been away at Wittenberg long enough for Claudius to murder Hamlet's father and then to marry his mother Gertrude, and then for the news to reach Hamlet. Presumably this would be a few months at least, long enough for Ophelia to know she's pregnant. When he returns, she is hoping he'll do right by her.
But Hamlet rejects her, kills her father, and to destroy all hope, is sent by King Claudius to England to be executed. What will become of the mother of the doomed prince's bastard? There is only one way to preserve her honor, and she takes it.
The point is, the next time someone puts on Hamlet, Ophelia really ought to be showing. Okay?
Your job is to read the article carefully and decide if you agree with the author or not. In either case you must support your stance with excerpts from the article and your own knowledge of the play. Make sure your comments are intellectual and well supported with facts (text). Your comments are due by Sunday, 11/6. (Feeling lucky again, Shaine???) When you are done posting your comment, don't forget to vote on the right side of the blog; there is a poll question there. Just vote once. Enjoy:
Has anyone noticed that Ophelia is pregnant? In all the productions of Hamlet that I've seen, she is interpreted as an innocent girl in love with the doomed Prince. He breaks her heart, and her sanity goes with it. She drowns herself out of madness.
But I think her madness has a point to it. In Ophelia's first scene, her brother Laertes warns her to beware of Hamlet's affection for her:
" For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood...
no more."
In other words: the Prince is toying with you. Ophelia demurs ("No more but so?") but appears to submit to her brother's wishes.
Next, Ophelia's father Polonius complains,
"'Tis told me, he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you, and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous."
That is, "You've been spending a lot of time alone with this guy." Ophelia, in the time-honored fashion of daughters, claims the relationship is completely innocent: "he hath importun'd me with love / In honorable fashion."
All well and good, but in III:i, Ophelia is set to spy on Hamlet. (Some editors would have Hamlet overhear her father and Polonius asking her to do it. If we suppose a lost stage direction that has Hamlet entering seven lines before he speaks, we can explain why Hamlet suddenly turns on her with such otherwise inexplicable viciousness.) Ophelia listens to his suicidal soliloquy, which he ends by pretending to notice her for the first time:
Nymph, in thy orisons
be all my sins remembered.
Orisons are prayers. If Hamlet has importuned Ophelia in honorable fashion, why should his sins be remembered in her prayers? The implication is that they have sinned together.
Hamlet really lays into her in III:i, ending by telling her, "To a nunnery, go!" In high school they tell you that "nunnery" was slang for a whorehouse, and the rest of his barbed repartee suggests that he thinks she is as dishonored as she is dishonest. He knows she is deceitful from having just heard her agree to spy on him. The best way for him to know she is dishonored is if he has dishonored her.
But it is the mad songs that Ophelia sings in IV:7 that really give away her secret. More than half of her songs are songs of mourning; after all, Hamlet has just killed Ophelia's father. That might be why Ophelia warns, "They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be." After all, she is no longer the daughter of the King's chamberlain; she is now only the daughter of a dead old man. But perhaps she knows all too well what she soon may be, for shortly she sings:
Tomorrow is St. Valentine's day
All in the morning betime
And I a maid at your window
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn'd his clothes
and dupp'd the chamber door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
Why is Ophelia singing about a maid seduced by her lover? Aside from the songs of mourning, all her songs are songs of betrayed love. A few lines later, she is singing an even more pointed song:
Quoth she, "Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed."
He answers:
"So would I ha'done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed."
It is hard to avoid the thought that Hamlet has seduced and abandoned her.
When she returns, she has gathered herbs. "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you love, remember..." The various herbs have symbolic meanings well-documented in the scholarship, but the only herb she intends for herself is rue: "...there's rue for you, and here's some for me; we may call it herb of grace o'Sundays; O, you must wear your rue with a difference." The symbolic meaning of rue is, of course, regret. Ophelia has much to rue, but the symbolic meaning is not the only one. The herb rue (ruta graveolens, aka Herb-of-Grace) is a powerful abortifacient. My herbiary notes that rue is "Lethally toxic, do not use during pregnancy."
Herbal abortifacients tend to be mild poisons. The idea is that you poison yourself to the point where your body decides it's too sick to support the growing embryo or fetus, and rejects it. If you miscalculate in one direction, continued pregnancy; in the other direction, personal death. Rue, while toxic, would not be used as a poison, since it is not a pleasant way to go. Presumably Shakespeare would have given Ophelia hemlock if she had intended to poison herself.
A girl who has been seduced and abandoned need fear nothing but a broken heart, provided there is no evidence of her shame. But if she is pregnant, then there is no way to hide what she has done, unless she can abort the child, or kill herself. And, indeed, shortly thereafter, Ophelia drowns herself.
The conventional interpretation is that Hamlet has broken her heart and then killed her father. But the play seems to suggest strongly that Hamlet has seduced her, and to hint that she is pregnant as well.
It is not hard to imagine Ophelia falling in love with the romantic Prince, and giving in to his passions. He has promised to marry her, and it is not an impossible promise. The Queen later says (V: 2) "I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife." Ophelia might well have hoped to become Queen when Hamlet ascended the throne, as his uncle Claudius has promised.
Hamlet has been away at Wittenberg long enough for Claudius to murder Hamlet's father and then to marry his mother Gertrude, and then for the news to reach Hamlet. Presumably this would be a few months at least, long enough for Ophelia to know she's pregnant. When he returns, she is hoping he'll do right by her.
But Hamlet rejects her, kills her father, and to destroy all hope, is sent by King Claudius to England to be executed. What will become of the mother of the doomed prince's bastard? There is only one way to preserve her honor, and she takes it.
The point is, the next time someone puts on Hamlet, Ophelia really ought to be showing. Okay?
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
The Oedipal Complex
Read the excerpt below and answer the two questions that follow. Your comments are due by Sunday, 10/9. While your responses should be intelligent in nature, don't forget to have some fun as well. Try and respond to each others' ideas. Use this Blog as a "Virtual Classroom." I will only chime-in on rare occasions as the deus ex machina. If you want a high-grade for the assignment, then we need some high-grade thinking...Enjoy:
"Dude, are you like totally at all familiar with Sigmund Freud's Oedipus Complex? Siggy Freud didn't get the idea from the story of Oedipus, but used it because it was an almost perfect symbolic fit. The idea of the Oedipal Complex is about the sexual identification young males have with their mother. Whoa, dude, lighten up, it was just because of proximity; it's not some sicko kind of thing. You see, the little dude identifies with his mother as a sexual partner and comes to view the father as a rival for her affection. Because of the psychological trauma involved, there can be only two outcomes: either the child kills his rival, or he represses the sexual feelings.”
1. What do you think? Had you heard of the Oedipal Complex before? Based upon your knowledge of the classic Greek tragedy, do you think Freud chose well in naming this psychological condition?
2. Do some quick research, and find out what the complex is called for females. Be sure to include from where the name is derived; that is, why the complex is given that name.
Important Notes:
• I have posted a link to the notes for our class discussion this coming Thursday on the right-side of our blog page, under “Helpful Links.”
• Be sure that you submit your payment for the course to WCC!!! The deadline is FAST APPROACHING!!!
"Dude, are you like totally at all familiar with Sigmund Freud's Oedipus Complex? Siggy Freud didn't get the idea from the story of Oedipus, but used it because it was an almost perfect symbolic fit. The idea of the Oedipal Complex is about the sexual identification young males have with their mother. Whoa, dude, lighten up, it was just because of proximity; it's not some sicko kind of thing. You see, the little dude identifies with his mother as a sexual partner and comes to view the father as a rival for her affection. Because of the psychological trauma involved, there can be only two outcomes: either the child kills his rival, or he represses the sexual feelings.”
1. What do you think? Had you heard of the Oedipal Complex before? Based upon your knowledge of the classic Greek tragedy, do you think Freud chose well in naming this psychological condition?
2. Do some quick research, and find out what the complex is called for females. Be sure to include from where the name is derived; that is, why the complex is given that name.
Important Notes:
• I have posted a link to the notes for our class discussion this coming Thursday on the right-side of our blog page, under “Helpful Links.”
• Be sure that you submit your payment for the course to WCC!!! The deadline is FAST APPROACHING!!!
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Hey, guys...
To the right of this post, you will find a link to the AP Literature list we discussed in class today. Please begin to decide what work you will read for your Midterm Paper and Project. Book choices are first-come, first-served. No two people may have the same title.
You must bring your book to class by Monday, 9/19. Go online if you want to get a "taste" of what your book is about (or speak with me), but don't read any "spoiler" information...
Happy hunting!
You must bring your book to class by Monday, 9/19. Go online if you want to get a "taste" of what your book is about (or speak with me), but don't read any "spoiler" information...
Happy hunting!
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