Wildcat Sophomore English
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  • About Me
  • Focus Areas
  • Honors 10
  • Unit 3 : Master Speeches
  • Julius Caesar
  • SummIT FAQ
    • Cornell Notes
  • UDHR Research Project
  • Senior Research
  • SummIT FAQ

March 10

3/10/2014

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Dystopia/Propaganda/Censorship

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EQ:   What is a Dystopia?  What does it look like?

Today in class:
  • We took a Pre-test (Link to file)
  • OPTIC Charts for Thomas Cole's "The Course of an Empire" series (Link to OPTIC file)  (Link to Cole's Pictures)
The prefix “dys” means “apart, away, negative, bad.” We use it in words like “dysfunctional” or “disappear.” When paired with “utopia” to give us “dystopia,” we have an image of a place that is the opposite of ideal, or ideal gone bad. 

The painter Thomas Cole did a series of works called "The Course of the Empire. " It was based on a few lines from a poem by the poet Byron about the rise and fall of humanity.   Byron wrote: 
 
There is the moral of all human tales; 
This but the same rehearsal of the past 
First Freedom, and then Glory: when that fails 
Wealth, vice, corruption 

 
Look through the paintings in the series, noticing how the sun rises and moves through the sky like a day beginning with the sun rise and ending with the sunset. The mountain in the background is a constant, but the foreground changes drastically. As you look through the paintings, think about the parallels between them and the rise and fall of civilizations. 


Discussion
  1. Do you think that they are an appropriate metaphor for the rise and fall of America? If so, what stage do you think America is in? 
  2. Are the paintings utopic or dystopic? Can the same place be both utopic and dystopic? 

  • Video on banning F451 "Religious Nuts in Texas..." (see below)
  • Reasons for banning a book/Where does it go from there?
  • Special "Guests"

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    Vocab

    Picture

    Ray Bradbury

    FULL TITLE  ·  Fahrenheit 451

    TYPE OF WORK  · Novel

    GENRE  · Science fiction

    LANGUAGE  · English

    TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN  ·  1950–1953, Los Angeles, California

    DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION  ·  1953 (a shorter version entitled “The Fireman” was published in 1951 in Galaxy Science Fiction)

    PUBLISHER  · Ballantine Books

    NARRATOR  · Third-person, limited omniscient; follows Montag’s point of view, often articulating his interior monologues

    CLIMAX  · Montag’s murder of Beatty

    PROTAGONIST  · Montag

    ANTAGONIST  · Beatty, but also society in general

    SETTING (TIME) · Sometime in the twenty-fourth century; there have been two atomic wars since 1990

    SETTING (PLACE)  · In and around an unspecified city

    POINT OF VIEW  · Montag’s

    FALLING ACTION  · Montag’s trip out of the city into the country

    TENSE  · Past, with occasional transitions into present tense during Montag’s interior monologues and stream-of-consciousness passages

    FORESHADOWING  · Montag’s uncanny feelings of prescience; early descriptions of the Mechanical Hound; Montag’s nervous glances toward the ventilator shaft where he has hidden his books; discussion of the qualities of fire

    TONE  · Foreboding and menacing, disoriented, poetic, bitterly satirical

    THEMES  · Censorship, knowledge versus ignorance

    MOTIFS  · Paradoxes, animals and nature, religion, television and radio

    SYMBOLS  · Fire, blood, the Electric-Eyed Snake, the hearth, the salamander, the phoenix, the sieve and the sand, Denham’s Dentifrice, the dandelion, mirrors


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