Story of my paper

The story of my paper all began on a boring, run of the mill, Saturday night. My wife and I were just hanging out and decided to watch a movie at home. This naturally lead us into the Netflix trap. After spending a sizable amount of time just trying to choose a movie we both could agree on we finally settled on a little known Shakespeare adaptation starring Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler. After watching this adaptation of Coriolanus I became really intrigued.  The movie was so great I couldn't figure out why this particular Shakespeare play didn't receive as much attention as the others.  Because of this, and my own unfamiliarity with the play, I decided it would be a fun and interesting play to research.

After deciding on my play I really didn't have any idea what particular aspect I wanted to research. Initially, I thought looking into and breaking down the theme of 'exile' but that idea fizzled out pretty fast. Struggling with research ideas actually turned out to be a really helpful process because it caused me to really read between the lines of the primary text. Coriolanus was always on my mind. I was constantly trying to correlate the play to whatever it was I was occupying myself with. Eventually this payed off one night as I was watching T.V. and John Hughes' classic "The Breakfast Club" came on. All of the sudden the lessons I had taken from Coriolanus were being reflected back at me through the character of Andrew. My Breakfast club post goes into greater detail about these ideas. I began to get great feed back from the class about these parallels and I began to explore Coriolanus as the basis of T.V. tropes. I didn't end up following through with these ideas very long as I became more interested in the Nature vs. Nurture aspects of the play.

As I looked at what was causing me to draw comparisons of Coriolanus and other popular T.V. and movie character I found that it was similar nurturing factors in their characters that drew me to them.  As I did more research of the primary text as well as outside research I found that there was a lot of material to support my claim that the tragedy of Coriolanus was the fault of the peoples cultivation of his pride. However, the more I researched the more I felt that my idea was lacking something. Getting some great feedback from Lauren R. and Britton and a meeting from Professor Burton helped me to refine my ideas one last time.  Through their outside perspective I was able to direct my paper more towards the innovations that Shakespeare was doing with the genre of tragedy. Bringing in my research on Nature vs. Nurture as well as applying Aristotle's definition of tragedy. I argued that Shakespeare was transcending the classic ideals of tragedy being defined within the individual by applying the tragedy to society as a whole.

I really appreciated the way this class was set up and how it facilitated the refinement of my paper. Though I didn't have any great enlightening experiences with social media I did have some great enlightening moments with many of my fellow class mates and I feel that made all the difference with the way my paper turned out.