What should my essay look like?
Your essay will have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Beginning:
Your opening, even for the shortest paper, will contain a thesis statement outlining the point of
your paper. This is where a paper like this differs from your close reading exercises. You need to
develop an idea that connects your analysis of the texts you choose. This could be thematic, it
could be about form, or it might be about style. Your thesis statement will identify this cohering
idea. This is a statement that outlines what is at stake in this essay: the what; the how; and the
why of your paper. In short – tell me what it is that the essay is trying to do, how it will go about
this, and why I might wish to read any further! So – a thesis statement does three things:
interest?
observation?
See the example below for how one might begin an essay of this length.
(without repeating lecture content!) alongside critical analysis and close reading to respond to a
specific prompt (chosen from those below). (I will attach lecture notes to make some connections from thesis and quotes/scene in the book. ATTACHMENT NAME: )
secondary criticism, in the form of a book, article or review (not Wikipedia or similar). Your paper
must include analysis of The Hunger Games and refer to “The Lottery.” by Shirley Jackson (I will upload a pdf of the short story). The
most logical way to begin this process is to find a passage or scene from the text(s) that speaks to
your selected subject, and use this as a way to introduce your thesis. Remember that a thesis is a
statement that is debatable, meaning that you will argue your case through the paper. If you are
having trouble coming up with a thesis topic and formulating your paper, or finding suitable
secondary material please don’t hesitate to me – in advance. WARNING: Do not repeat material
from lecture – you may use lecture materials as a reference, but make sure you give it your own
interpretation.
THE HUNGER GAMES:
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IDEA OF TRIBUTE/ SACRIFICE OF YOUNG PEOPLE/ YEARLY RITUAL –seems it comes from greek mythology
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Young innocence to be sacrificed is an important way to control because the youth are the future.
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Ability to take someone’s child and sacrifice them tells oppressed people that power is absolute
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Other idea more complex comes from the Roman Empire:
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Idea of the capital coming from our own capital building in Washington DC (traditional seat of power)
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Imperial Rome was the capital in hell
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Collins draws…
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Loss of liveliness of creativity in a way that’s very similar Orwell’s text
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“Controlling your own way of living is diminished” Juvenal, satire X
Some terms to think about in Collin’s novel The Hunger Games:
-”The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease” -Marcus Tullius Cicero
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So we see here the capital using the idea of spectacle and control to the purpose of media in particular to divert people from their actual hardships and maintain control over them
Collin describes the inspiration for the story as:
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“I was channel surfing between reality TV programming and actual war coverage when Katniss’s story came to me”-Suzanne Collins
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For her this came from this idea sort of simulation of reality TV takes part in. and how that blurs the lines between the real and the simulated.
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“One night I’m sitting there flipping around and on one channel there’s a group of young people competing for, I don’t know, money maybe? And on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting an actual war. And I was tired, and the lines began to blur in this very unsettling way, and I thought of this story.” -Suzanne Collins
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Slippage and idea of what entertains us and what diverts us
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And if we cant come to the point where the street culture media is able to control what we consume and the way we consume it to the point where we don’t really can’t distinguish the difference between these two forms of entertainment.
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As it were that deeply disturbing fact of seeing death it’s something that can be turned into a spectacle
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Reality TV is ultimately silly phrase because groups, people desperate for fame in the most contrived and artificial situations. So theres that kind of sense that the artificial being played off against the real that we know that reality TV isn’t real and yet we seem to consume it as though it offers us some vision of reality.
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We see contemporary television functioning as a space through which emotional responses segmented audiences in niche markets can be regulated and repurposed so that we as consumers of the spectacle itself are being manipulated through the things that we watch. !!!
Suzanne Collins: “The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that’s what it is…Then there’s the voyeuristic thrill- watching people being humiliated, or brought to tears, or suffering physically- which I find very disturbing. There’s also the potential for desensitizing the audience, so that when they see real tragedy playing out on, say the news, it doesn’t have the impact it should.”
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Saturation of reality is problematic for Collins
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The games in the novel are commodified and consumption of the games carries on long after and before the games
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Arenas as dark sites // disaster tourism
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Popular destinations for capital residents to visit vacation, go for a free, watch the games, take part in reenactments
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Food is excellent// becomes symbolic of all sorts of different sorts of consumption in the text
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Pg145: “the arenas are historic sites preserved after the Games/ Popular destinations for Capitol residents to visit, vacation. Go for a month, rewatch the Games, tour the catacombs, visit the sites where the deaths took place. You can even take part in reenactments. They say the food is excellent”
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The other thing for Collins: experience of having a parent sent off to war “The Lottery”
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The Vietnam draft lottery televised live, in December 1969. On YT – disturbing segment where we imagine young man and family watching it and if your name called out, you are required to show up to duty
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It was statistically shown that young men that were chosen by lottery to go and fight in Vietnam were more often to see frontline action that those who volunteered
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So there’s a strange kind of concept of tribute being folded onto this idea and certainly Collins is drawing on that
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We have this lottery that’s literally about life and death and it’s being televised live
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The reason it was televised live was to avoid suspicion about its fairness but the other side to this is this media spectacle (fate of the individual bond)
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Opening chapter of novel:
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(don’t read this novel in terms of character study at all, what acorns does is revolutionary in terms of what is why a fiction is that she has given us a hugely successful novel, a young woman protagonist who takes on the role that it perhaps normally reserved or expected and assumed to be a masculine one)
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Star power to 2-3 central figures has clouded the issue of how this novel is read (not interested in love triangle, interested in dystopian representation)
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Important thing about Katniss in opening chapter is:
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We get that sense of who it is, a subversive figure, one who can cross boundaries physically . she’s able to step out of the district itself and go hunting and then she also moves through the black market and things like that
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Katniss is a progressive character
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The most progressive thing about the novel for the genre fiction that it is, is that it advocates for kind of an idea of collective revolution for young people on a large scale
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Idea of Ritual:
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The reaping, is a powerful term because it suggests a harvest
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In this case, the harvest of it is that the bodies of young people (idea of having young innocent people be the tributes allows the capital to enforce division among different district) making sure that there is no opportunity for collective action