The Handmaid's tale

The Handmaid's Tale takes place in an unspeakably awful future that Margaret Atwood first envisioned in her 1985 novel of the same name. Spurred by a global plague of infertility, an extremist group called the Sons of Jacob staged a coup on the U.S. government and sent progressive American society reeling backwards to totalitarianism, organized on Old Testament principles. In addition to enforcing incredibly strict gender roles, Gilead has introduced an entirely new vocabulary for its citizens to internalize. Women must identify with their new position as Marthas, handmaids, or Wives. They must learn that the term "the Colonies" should inspire terror.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/05/197964/handmaids-tale-sayings-words-meaning-vocabulary

The Cold War

Berlin Wall

Korean War

Vietnam War

Cuban Missile Crisis

1984 - Literary Essay

Language and Culture II

Choose ONE of the following tasks and develop it thoroughly in an essay.
It should include an introduction, the main body and a conclusion.
Develop the corresponding theory, and account for it quoting from the novel.

Psychoanalytic Criticism (1930s-present)
How do the operations of repression or structure inform the work?
How can characters' behaviour, narrative events, and/or images be explained in terms of psychoanalytic terms: id, ego, superego?

MARXISM
Which class does the work claim to represent?
What conflict can be seen between the values the work champions and those it portrays?
What social classes do the characters represent?
How do characters from different classes interact or conflict?

New Historicism
How are events' interpretation and presentation a product of the culture of the author?
How does this portrayal criticize the leading political figures or movements of the day?
How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical/cultural texts from the same period...?
How does the work consider traditionally marginalized populations?

Feminist
How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?
What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters assuming male/female roles)?
How are male and female roles defined? What constitutes masculinity and femininity? How do characters embody these traits?

The Great Gatsby

The USA: 1919-1941

Coming soon..."The Great Gatsby"

Happy Students' Day!

Nazi Germany: Hitler's children

Episode I: Seduction

Episode II: Dedication

Episode III: Education

Episode IV: War

Episode V: Sacrifice

War Poetry: The Soldier by Rupert Brooke

The Soldier 

Rupert Brooke, 1887 – 1915

If I should die, think only this of me:

   That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.  There shall be

   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

   A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

     Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

   And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

     In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

War Poetry: Break of Day in the Trenches By Isaac Rosenberg

Break of Day in the Trenches  
By Isaac Rosenberg

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

War Poetry: Poems by Siegfried Sassoon

The General 

By Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,

And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack

'They'  By Siegfried Sassoon (1917)

       The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back

       'They will not be the same; for they'll have fought

       'In a just cause: they lead the last attack

       'On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought

       'New right to breed an honourable race,

       'They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'

       'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.

       'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;

       'Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;

       'And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find

       'A chap who's served that hasn't found some change

      ' And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange!

IV Jornada de Lengua

War Poetry: Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est 
By Wilfred Owen(1893 – 1918)

Published Posthumously in 1920.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

The Panopticon

Watch the video below and then read the following article "Bentham and Big Brother: The Power of Supervision in 1984"

War Poetry: Futility by Wilfred Owen

Futility 
By Wilfred Owen (1918)

Move him into the sun— 

Gently its touch awoke him once, 

At home, whispering of fields half-sown. 

Always it woke him, even in France, 

Until this morning and this snow. 

If anything might rouse him now 

The kind old sun will know. 

Think how it wakes the seeds— 

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides 

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? 

Was it for this the clay grew tall? 

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil 

To break earth's sleep at all?

To Germany, by Charles Hamilton Sorley

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each others dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again
With new won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

Interpellation

Interpellation: This term was coined by Louis Althusser and it derives from the French verb appeller, which means ‘to name’. Interpellation is a process by which individuals internalize cultural values or ideologies. For Althusser, ideology calls on us to accept unquestioningly certain elements of our culture as fixed, natural and disinterested because we are free, autonomous and choosing subjects. A subject can be interpellated by institutions such as the police, the school, the family, the church and the army. There are different reactions to interpellation: response, negotiation and resistance through silence, action or passive resistance.