Preparation for April 29th & May 1st
Posted on April 21, 2008
Filed Under Understanding English and American Popular Culture
UPDATE: The Internet Archive link is down, but you can see it on Google Video.
Here’s a list of the things you need to check out for the first week after midterm exams:
For April 29th:
- Civil Disobedience, an essay by Henry David Thoreau, available here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
- The film V for Vendetta
- The film The Departed
While V for Vendetta offers us the chance to examine bad leaders a little, something I will lecture about, as it’s an interesting and important contrast to the optimism of The West Wing — we’ll be mostly focusing on those people who enforce leaders’ decisions… that is, one form of the Man of Action, “Cops” (another archetype that should remind us of Jack’s role as The Sherriff on Lost).
For May 1st, we’ll have a panel discussion focusing on another form of the “Man of Action,” The Soldier. For this panel discussion, you should check out two films:
- Clint Eastwood’s recent WWII film Flag of Our Fathers
- the WWII American propaganda film It’s Everybody’s War,
which can be downloaded here. (If the video won’t load onscreen, look in the left side of the screen, where there are download links. You might need to install some codecs to get it to play on your computer, depending on your OS and setup, but it should load for you on the computers at school, at the very least.)
Remember that for both of those discussions, you will need to prepare Panel Discussion Question/Thoughts sheets beforehand, and Reaction Papers afterward. It’s going to be a busy week!
You might think of working ahead by checking out the films Fight Club and Catch Me If You Can, which will be for the following week’s discussion. I’ll post more about what else you need to prepare for that week a little later.