Monday, March 17, 2014

Here, There and Everywhere

Open Clipart
At this point in the process, it seems that my ideas have been all over the place. I've been very unsure about my topic throughout the entire ordeal...that is until today. By creating this "paper shell" and reflecting back on what initially inspired me to pick my topic, I've realized that there's a lot that I can do with it. I've also realized for the first time the I'm super stoked to write this paper. I've been dreading it from the abstract perspective of "what am I doing?!" Now, however, I realize that it's actually a work in progress. It's becoming something, rather than just sitting in a loose pile of thoughts in my mind. The thing I owe credit to for this stage of progress is the out line I initially made when we received the assignment to spend time with our book and "rediscover" why we ever liked it to begin with. Here are my ideas from that time.
I started making comparisons between Alice in Wonderland and Watership Down to see what sorts of literary elements they shared in common, and I found that they both contained:


  1. Extensive lists of characters.
  2. Intense background for those characters.
  3. A detached narrator who is not part of the story.
  4. Themes of weak protagonist overcoming strong protagonists.
  5. Frame stories containing lore and mythology giving extra background for the reader.
  6. The feel of a children's story with the potential be read with deeper meaning.

As I looked at each of these elements, I realized that there was far more in common between the two authors and their stories that I originally thought. If there are this many similarities, what other things could I find? This led me to want to compare the lives of the authors themselves from a biographical approach. Here is the paper shell it has led me to so far.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzDQGRx5zRlkMDB2QUVvV2drUTQ/edit

1 comment:

  1. Great! I'm always a fan of making lists of similarities and differences. I think having such a list visually in front of me helps me brainstorm. (That's what I'm doing in my own "Paper Shell" post... *ahem hem*...)

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