Year 11 Advanced English

Have a good long weekend everyone, and remember to eat well and get enough sleep!  I should be online for most of the weekend, so feel free to email questions etc.

Good Luck! 

Winding our minds back into Othello…

Remember: this is supposed to be a CRITICAL STUDY.

That means that you don’t just have to retell the story/plot and prove how well you know the play. Remember what Mr. Wilkie said about ATTACKING the questions that you get. In a critical study you are expected to have something to say about the value of the text.

As we know that Othello has been labelled a ‘tragedy’, one thing we can do is look at how well it conforms to the conventions of a tragedy. From Wikipedia:

Aristotle once said that “A man doesn’t become a hero until he can see the root of his own downfall.” An Aristotelian tragic hero must have four characteristics:

1. Nobility (of a noble birth) or wisdom (by virtue of birth).
2. Hamartia (translated as flaw, mistake, or error, not an Elizabethan tragic flaw).
3. A reversal of fortune(peripetia) brought about because of the hero’s Hamartia.
4. The discovery or recognition that the reversal was brought about by the hero’s own actions (anagnorisis).

How well does Othello conform to these conventions?

And if your answer is “not all that well”, then does that lessen the textual integrity of the play?

Do you think Shakespeare was really all that concerned with making a perfect Aristotelian tragedy? Or did he just want to make a good and maybe clever story? (The Fintan O’Toole reading is helpful here)  And finally, DID HE make a good story – and what can you say was good/bad about it?

If you can find a better image of the court scene from To Kill a Mockingbird, send it to me or post it on your own blog – we will watch the scene from TKAM in class so you can see just how close these two sets are.  In Mockingbird the white people were allowed in the main area while the ‘coloured’ (black) people had to stand up in the balcony level.

Compare the scenes where the Mayor of Pleasantville is speaking to the town meeting to scenes from Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will. The Pleasantville Chamber of Commerce icon is a clear reference to Nazi iconography e.g. the swastika, and Hitler stands up above the crown, perched behind his podium, just as the Pleasantville Mayor does.

http://maximumbob.wordpress.com/2007/05/12/pleasantville-slideshow/

The slideshow is excellent – even if you’ve read the notes, the slideshow has extra analysis in it.  Go watch it, and thank me later

Significant quotes from all the main characters, plus important pieces of dialogue. Woot!

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pleasantville

And the entire screenplay:

http://www.hundland.com/scripts/Pleasantville.htm 

I never really specified a due date, huh?

Let’s say…by next Tuesday (31st July) but you’ll benefit from doing it sooner, or at least doing the research sooner if you don’t already know about these things.

Blog information about the following biblical references:

• The miracle of the burning bush
• The tree of knowledge of good and evil (and the apple that Eve got/ate)

Two weeks off – yay

A perfect opportunity for you to FINISH Utopia and to do some reflective blog work.

All of you should complete at least one reflective blog entry each week over the holiday break. ALSO you must make a comment on at least three other students’ blogs. You should have a look at the list of blogs on my blogroll and comment on the blog of:

• The person whose name is above yours on the list
• The person whose name is below yours on the list
• At least one other person of your own choosing.

Try to make these comments meaningful by posting a response to something the person has written about, or perhaps asking them a question or challenging their point of view.

The blogging subject for this week is:

Cite several conditions, laws and customs in England that were criticised by Raphael.

I can’t remember if I also set this question extension, but can I please suggest that you give it a go, especially if you were at our Friday class (we went through a lot of stuff that should make it VERY easy for you to do the ‘cite several conditions, laws and customs…etc.’ bit VERY easy)

Do you believe More was in full agreement with these criticism?

Don’t forget – this is ADVANCED English!  I want to see you WANTING to do extension questions like this!

Just came across a reference online to a book I want to go and find in the library called “SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film.” (Bauka, R. 2004).

If it’s any good I’ll copy the relevant pages for you guys.

The last chapter, devoted to films only, is entitled “Cue the Sun: Soundings from Millennial Suburbia,” and treats several cultural landmark films that uncover the emotional and spiritual torpor just beneath the surface of contemporary life: The Truman Show, Pleasantville, and American Beauty. Beuka designates these films as demonstrations of “suburbia as an American dystopia” (228).