Y'all finished up your first unit! Turned in your first 1,000 word essay! Created your own main characters out of thin air! Congratulations! And now we're going to buckle in and do it all over again. This blog post covers:
Let's Talk about SettingI think we all know a setting is: the place and time in which a story is set. In the state of Texas, the first time you are officially tested on your knowledge of setting is in the 4th grade. Of course, how we think about the setting of work of literature is different. In this Unit, I want us to use this question to shape how we learn and think about the setting of a work of literature: How does the cultural context of a work change our understanding of it? We are going to consider the setting present within each literary work we study, but we are also going to consider the cultural context in which the work itself was created. So what I'm telling you is that we have arrived to our first research unit! And I am very, very excited about this. Y'all, I truly love research. As I was working on my novel that I'm revising this past week, I realized there is a section about a quarter of the way through that needed more research. I was delighted. But I never realized that I loved research until I started doing it for myself to answer my own questions. (What the heck was it like to ride on an ocean liner in the 1950's?) So, I wasn't that big of a fan of research in high school. It was just something necessary that I had to do. There will be an element of student choice involved in every research project we do because I'm hoping that you will be able to enjoy research earlier than I did. We are reading three different short stories set in four different places written by four different authors. Each story represents a different research path, because your essay for this Unit will be comparing the cultural context of a work of literature to the setting and themes present within the story. Here are the three stories we will read and their contexts:
We are, of course, always limited by time. So, in order to expand your choices, you may also explore the context and setting of these two short stories we read from Unit 1, as long as you didn't write about them in your Character Analysis essay.
"The Allegory of the Cave" by PlatoAll three of the short stories from our first Unit were realistic literary fiction. Our two stories this week represent two different genres of writing. The "Allegory of the Cave," for example, is in fact an allegory. An allegory is the expression of truths or generalizations about human existence by means of symbolic fictional figures and their actions (Merriam-Webster). Although all literature on some level is engaged with understanding the world more deeply, allegories are specific tools that use story for the express purpose of trying to expand the readers' understanding of the world. If you are drawn to philosophy, this might be the story for you to write about. I first read it when I was in high school, and I've thought about it approximately 1 million times in the years since then. In a way, it is a story that engages the question that we will engage (how do our cultural contexts affect the way we perceive the world?), but it did so about 2,400 years ago. Here's a video that gives us an accessible entryway into "An Allegory of the Cave:" And here's a video that gives us a small taste of Ancient Greece: "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia MarquezAgain, the title of this story kind of gives away the new genre. Marquez is famous for writing magical realism, and we get a little taste of it in this story. Magical realism is related to fantasy and sci-fi because the events in the story diverge from reality. Old men don't have wings, for example. But otherwise, the setting remains generally realistic. The genre seems to explore the question: what if one strange otherworldly thing was introduced into our world? How would we react? What would we learn about ourselves? Magical realism draws heavily from myth. If you are interested in ways that myth and fantasy reflect our lives, this might be the story for you to research. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the second Nobel Prize recipient whose work we're looking at. Here's a video that gives us some information about Marquez's life filmed at the Harry Ransom Center right here in Austin: Here's an old travel film about Colombia from the 1940's: And here is a short film with footage of Colombia in the 1950's: Comments are closed.
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