Monday, March 4, 2013

Yes and No

Yes, I have reviewed my own writing. No, I haven't found a topic that interests me.

Admittedly, I've had a little bit of a hard time keeping up with DD posts, but the topics I've written on don't seem like a very good basis for an argumentative paper.

My posts are primarily about the historical significance of the plays (which doesn't really leave much to argue), or about the significance of small changes in the film/stage productions (which is much too broad).

Perhaps I could tweak this approach bit--in one of my posts, I wrote about Henry V as a propaganda tool--but that still doesn't seem like a very strong topic.

One topic I was really looking forward to was examining the character Shylock the Jew from The Merchant of Venice. His portrayal is, to say the least, complex: although he's very stereotypically Jewish, and not a very nice person overall, he (at least once, possibly twice) gives a very eloquent, emotional speech about how Jews are just the same as other people ("If you prick us, do we not bleed?"). However, scanning the blog, it appears that that's the ONLY thing people write about in regards to this play--or at least, it's common enough to make it difficult to write on.

Hm. I shall have to think on this.

3 comments:

  1. I mentioned in class e few weeks ago that looking at Henry the V as war poetry could be really interesting. "dulce et decorum est" by wilfred owen sparked this. Some others I could scrounge up written by a women's perspective during the WWII era so you could compare to the tavern keeper woman. I really thought this was a good idea when I talked about it with Briton and Steve in class weeeeeeks ago. I would love to see it come to life! This may not be what you're going for at all though.

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  2. You sound very interested in "The Merchant of Venice." There is no reason you shouldn't write about it if that's what you care about. In fact if more people have written about it, then you will have more to go off of. Maybe you could talk about the other characters and how they relate to Shylock. Just a suggestion.

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  3. Honestly, if you're really getting interested in Shylock as a character, go look around for more writing about him! Sometimes it's hard to think original thoughts in a vacuum, and you really need to find out what kind of things have been said. Go search around other blogs using the Google blog search, and just search for "Shylock" in MLA International Bibliography. You might be able to do some tentative research and get some new perspectives.

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