C.S. Lewis, a Christ-like Teacher

So I've been reading "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis lately, inspired by a renewed love for Christian apologist writing. I love it because it's written from the point of view of a devil giving advice to another devil on how to sway a christian into submission to Satan. C.S. Lewis was a very insightful and brilliant man, and he shows it in his writing. I love the moments while I'm reading this book that make me stop and say, 'hey, maybe I've had that very same problem in my prayers. I should probably do my best to prevent that in the future.' When I read the Narnia chronicles as a little kid, of course I had no idea about the extended metaphor throughout the stories. I just thought that they were good stories. And he is such a great writer, that the stories were fun to read even though I was completely missing the whole theoretical side of it. That's the kind of writer I'd like to be one day; one who can entertain the masses and yet at the same time be able to teach to those who are willing to listen. I think Christ did the same thing with his parables. He kept the truth away from those who were not willing to look for it by entertaining them with interesting stories about real life. Honestly, I think sometimes it's the only way one can speak to the public about religion, especially a critical and skeptical public. To those who don't know what you're talking about, you may seem cryptic or simply entertaining. But to those who know what's really going on and who are willing to study and learn, great truths can be taught more effectively in this way. So as a type of Christ, C.S. Lewis represents to me an excellent teacher, a brilliant, and an inspired writer whom I emulate.

Learning Outcomes

• 1. Gain Shakespeare Literacy
  Demonstrate mastery over fundamental information about Shakespeare’s works, life, and legacy

  a. Breadth (knowledge of a range of Shakespeare’s works)

  b. Depth (more thorough knowledge of a single work)

  c. Performance (stage and screen)

  d. Legacy (history, scholarship, popular culture)

I can honestly say that I had never read any of the plays I did during the course of this semester. I had never seen a Shakespeare play either. Thankfully, I was able to experience The Bard's plays in all of these dimensions: the breadth of his works I am now familiar with has been expanded significantly, mostly because I decided to start watching movie productions of Shakespeare plays for fun, I've become intimately familiar with Hamlet especially, and I've seen two on stage performances and evaluated them, as well as the many I've seen on screen. I've also done a few blog posts about Shakespeare's background, exploring the question of his authorship, and some biographical information.

• 2. Analyze Shakespeare Critically
  Interpret Shakespeare’s works critically in their written form, in performance (stage or screen) and in digitally mediated transformations. This includes 
  a. Textual analysis (theme, language, formal devices)
  b. Contextual analysis (historical, contemporary, cultural)
  c. Application of literary theories 
  d. Analysis of digital mediations

I've had the chance to evaluate Shakespeare performances both on screen and on stage as mentioned above. I've become very familiar with the text of Hamlet, as my research paper was mostly textual analysis. My thesis is based largely on Hamlet's context as part of the tradition of revenge tragedies. I regret that I didn't apply established literary theories as much as I could have, but I certainly had experience with digital mediations with my analysis of how my experience with fanfiction affected my view on the text.

• 3. Engage Shakespeare Creatively
  a. Performance (memorization, recitation, scene on stage or video)

  b. Individual creative work (literary imitation, art, music)

  c. Collaborative creative project

Performance: probably the only time I got a chance to do this was in my prototype video, but it wasn't really my best, uh, performance. :) I definitely did individual creative work with my fanfiction, and I'm participating in collaborative work by combining my project with Cortnie with reference to her ideas on fanfiction.

• 4. Share Shakespeare Meaningfully
  This includes engaging in the following:

  a. Formal Writing. Develop and communicate your ideas about Shakespeare clearly in formal and researched writing and through a format and medium that puts your ideas into public circulation.

  b. Informal Writing. This mainly means through regular online writing

  c. Connecting. Share one’s learning and creative work with others both in and outside of class.

Formal writing: research paper. Informal writing: my blog. Connecting: I've had several chances to share a synopsis of my project with friends and family. It sometimes comes up with "what classes are you taking?" or "What's your major?" One of my friends even demanded that I send her the link so that she could read my fanfiction piece.

• 5. Gain Digital Literacy
  Students use their study of Shakespeare as a way of understanding and developing fluency in 21st century learning skills and computer-mediated modes of communication. Those skills are grouped under the following categories.

  a. Consume - Effective and independent selecting, searching, researching, 

  b. Create - Producing content that demonstrates learning and which can be shared for others to profit from. 

• c. Connect - Engage with other learners within and outside of the class to develop thinking and share more formal work.

Consume: a lot of this was done during the research portion of my research paper, though i think the process could have gone a little more smoothly, had I given it more time. Create: this should be demonstrated during the final, and when I tell everyone about my fanfiction. Connect: As I mentioned above, I've had many opportunities to share with family and friends, but I've also been able to share on a small scale with 'Blogging Shakespeare' and with Henry Jenkins in my requests to do guest blog posts. 

Finally!

So here's my spiel for my final final final stuff!

Here's a link to my original research paper:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXiQIUKxggKOe9T9--vQUiMxS8wmg4r7PRl__hnqER0/edit
Here's a link to my fanfiction piece:
 http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7986893/1/Jameson
Here's a link to a Prezi, summarizing my ideas:
http://prezi.com/nhejdc_j0net/hamlet-the-isolated-villain/
Here's a link to my trailer video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G3QnyWFnhM

And, my Tweethis statement:
"Hamlet is isolated from the societal norm due to his obscure perceptions of right and wrong, much like Iago, and may therefore be labeled as a villain. This characterization of Hamlet is explored in my fanfiction piece, in which Hamlet is a psychopath and a homicidal maniac."

Education

So I made a little blurb on the prezi that all the girls working on educational projects are putting together. The prezi is about how to update Shakespeare Education into the digital age by making use of digital tools. I just posted about how it could be a good idea to use fanfiction as a teaching tool.

Check it out!


(This is the link Tara gave me)

Last Chapter...

I decided to add a ninth chapter, sort of as a recap of the events. It confuses the plot more, showing the events from a communal perspective, inspired by Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." It takes the reader out of Jameson's head for a moment, and may hint at an explanation for the way he is now.

Also, if I were to rewrite my research paper, I would include my own definition of villainy. So my new tweethis would look like this:
"If a villain is someone who is isolated from society due to his obscure views on right and wrong, Hamlet fits the model of a villain just as easily as Iago." 

So, a note on my trailer video:
I've made a simple animation video of Hamlet talking to Iago, but I think I might want to remake it to include my definition of villainy. Plus, the voices are kind of weird-sounding, and if I make the speech visual, I could probably add music. But here's what I have right now, so you can take a look:

GoAnimate.com: Hamlet vs. Iago by taylor.mccomb

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

FANFICTION PIECE

Here's an official link to my finished fiction piece!
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7986893/1/Jameson

"Comparable Work" Bibliography

So I looked into how I can make my fanfiction piece accessible to teachers as a teaching tool, and I found

• this lesson plan website that lets you post your own lesson plan to share with other teachers. I can post a lesson plan on this site, suggesting to high school teachers that they can have the kids compare fanfiction with the original text - maybe the fanfiction will open up the text in ways that weren't thought of at first. Like mine, for example: maybe you didn't think that Hamlet could be making up the ghost in his mind, or that he is the real bad guy! I'll let you know how it goes...
• I sent in a request to Blogging Shakespeare to see if I could do a guest post on their site, displaying my research content. 
• I sent in a request to Henry Jenkins' blog, asking if I can do a guest blog post talking about my research topic. I let him know that I'm a student studying Shakespeare, and I've done a fanfiction piece testing out Cortnie's theory that Fanfiction works as a legitimate form of character analysis.

Technical Difficulties

Sorry guys, I posted my fanfiction piece last night, but it seems that "Jameson" is not showing up on the general search. I want to make sure that it's searchable, so I took down all the chapters except chapter 1. I'll wait a bit, and see if it posts successfully, then post the rest. Keep your fingers crossed!

Going Live!

ok, I've finally posted my fiction piece on the fanfiction website. I definitely had fun writing. Let me know what you think!

Oh, and here's a direct link to my piece.  Enjoy!

New "Teaser Content" video

... This one is actually under 90 seconds. Sweet!

Iago vs. Hamlet animation

As for the repurposed content, a.k.a. my fanfiction piece, I'm working on it! I just got a bunch of good feedback on it, and I want to make the revisions before I post it on the website. I'll let you know when it's up!

Love's Labours Lost at BYU

Setting the play "Love's Labour's Lost" in wartime is an exciting idea, invoking the jazz club scenery and atmosphere where song and dance could break out at any time. We Americans seem to like the theme as a backdrop for movies, especially romances (i.e. "The Notebook," "Captain America," "Australia"... ), probably because of the easily recognizable costuming and nostalgic familiarity. It also helped us distinguish the men on separate levels, as they were all dressed according to rank. Although I couldn't figure out why Biron was dressed as a lower rank than the other three lover-boys. It's like it set him apart as the center character that he is, without allowing him those extra lines that make him an obvious focus in Shakespeare's original. In fact, after I'd read the play, I could have sworn that Biron was the main 'hero' of the play, but the presentation seemed to downplay that by dressing him down, I suppose.
I think the wartime theme meshed especially well with the resolution of Shakespeare's storyline, as the women could assign the men to service in the military as proof of their love, rather than to isolation in the mountains as hermits. The set up with Moth and Don Armado throwing jokes back and forth really worked well also. It is full of Shakespeare jargon that normally doesn't make a ton of sense, but my friend Ashley, who hadn't read the play, laughed at all the right times, probably also with the help of the cue cards. I think the pacing of this scene was really smart, because the whole play ran pretty evenly, until this scene, which made it seem much more like a battle of wits, and you could tell it was funny even if you didn't understand it. The other time I noticed the pace speed up a little was when the women were gossiping, which I think was very fitting for a vanity mirror scene with a bunch of girls talking a mile a minute.
I thought I had missed something important when I missed the first scene, because all the men were dancing with women, and I thought the story was supposed to be set in a women-free zone. This is what made Costard being caught with a woman so confusing, and there were also a few other things that added to that confusion, including the additional characters that shared some of the women's lines, making it hard to tell which girls were the lovers.
I was also a little disappointed because I think some of Biron's speeches were cut out, including his monologue on love, which is kind of funny. And some of Don Armado's lines were cut short too. Those were just the ones I noticed, so there might have been more. But I think it was probably necessary with the addition of the musical numbers, because the play ended up taking about two and a half hours! I think I actually like the stylistic choice of adding in the musical numbers, because it added to the atmosphere of a night club in that time period. Though I think if the dancing was added in for this purpose, it probably wasn't worth it, considering the confusion it caused. 
However iconic the scenery and costuming, the production probably desired a little more thought towards the application of an older text that had not anticipated this era, but I'm sure it started out with something brilliant!

Prototype "Teaser Content" Video

I'll probably have to figure out how to make this video a bit shorter! I think maybe for my second attempt I'll do a Prezi or a Powerpoint just because the camera makes me somewhat uncomfortable. But, here it is.

As for my market study, I'm thinking the readers of fanfiction are a pretty well-defined group. But beyond that, Dr. Burton said that teachers may be interested in this sort of media as a teaching tool, and psychologists may also be interested in Hamlet as a psychological specimen of homicidal mania. I figure the best way to get this sort of content out to teachers would be through lesson plans, but I'm not totally sure yet how to bring this sort of material to the attention of this group. I'll keep you updated!

The English Symposium

     I attended the section on fairytales, as well as the one titled, "The bard, and the man." Professor Bruce Young, who was moderating the event section, mentioned that Shakespeare was never called "the bard" in his time, which I thought was kind of interesting. I wonder why people really call him that, as I've always thought it was kind of a weird name. Anyway, the first girl's paper discussed how the many interpretations of Othello have inspired filmmakers to present Othello in ways that highlight certain aspects of the character, mostly discussing the lighting in Orson Wells' film production of Othello. She also points out that Othello refers to himself as a changed man in the end when he says, "That's he that was Othello, Here I am." She uses it to support her thesis that there is a difference between the Othello who loved his wife, the Othello who became jealous, and the Othello who regrets his deeds.
     Then the next person presented on "The Tempest" and how Shakespeare was critiquing humankind, which has a tendency to "play god," like Prospero, and is punished for it. Prospero learns his lesson, and gives up his powers because he cannot control the power of God, being human. The third paper was about emasculated male characters in "Peter and Wendy," and I didn't exactly see the connection between the three, besides maybe the theme of "what it means to be a man." :)

My Intro

Here's a copy of the intro to my whole piece. Let me know if you have suggestions!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o_TzX3itDQgTHvf8wHGZ5jB8U1M_xFo1BaThiNbmCk8/edit

I'm going to keep adding onto it, so you might see me in the middle of my writing process!

Love's Labours Lost

Probably my favorite part about this play is the rhetorical word games all throughout. Like when Costard tries to get himself out of punishment: "The manner of it is, I was taken with the manner." he sort of skirts around the subject, claiming to present the reason why he is there, but not explaining himself clearly: "In manner and form following sir, in all those three: / I was seen with her in the manor-house, sitting with / Her upon the form, and taken following her into the / park; which, put together, is in manner and form / following." And in the performance done at Shakespeare's Globe, Costard was such a little performer. http://streaming.factsonfile.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/PortalViewVideo.aspx?xtid=41375
But my favorite character was actually the princess. Just like Mikhaela said in her paper, Shakespeare writes strong women characters. I'm not really convinced that the Princess cares for Ferdinand until the end, and even then, she has the guts to challenge him to a year of hermitage. She must be playing with his head, and certainly with the audience as well.

Prototype

Ok, here's my 'prototype' of my fiction piece. I wrote out the climactic scene in the story.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hqQG5U7yUsT33rGUYqkprU6f_bJ2GpEWGUrcKoOBWGM/edit

Ellie's Paper

Ok, I LOVE Ellie's ideas, and I was surprised to see how well they actually fit with mine. We used a lot of the same quotes from the text to make a similar argument. As a part of both our arguments, we said that Hamlet's ghost is really just a projection of his inward desires, but I think using Jung really helped Ellie express this idea more clearly. I felt like some of the textual quotes could have been explained more for those who haven't been studying Hamlet closely, and there were a couple style suggestions i could give, but I thought it was very articulate and well organized. Here's Ellie's paper. It was surprising to see how close our papers were, and I think I could bring in some of Ellie's ideas into my creative writing project! I'll have to ask her opinion on how I could go about that... btw, here's Ellie's blog.

Homicidal Mania in Hamlet

In doing some research for this fanfiction piece, I found a scientific article discussing how a diagnosis of homicidal mania has affected legality over the years.
Eigen, Joel Peter. "Diagnosing Homicidal Mania: Forensic Psychiatry and the Purposeless Murder."
Medical history 54.4 (2010): 433-56. ProQuest Research Library. Web. 7 Mar. 2012.

The working definition we have now for homicidal mania is, "the propensity to kill related to an actual
delusion, an absurd motive to kill related to no known motive, or an impulse to kill that was
"sudden, instantaneous, unreflective, and uncontrollable".21"

I think this perfectly describes Hamlet, as his mania is directly related to a delusion, with an absurd motive to kill. I also mentioned in my paper how Hamlet was "unreflective" towards his actions, in the same way that some of the people described in this article show a lack of remorse. I think Hamlet really is suffering from Homicidal Mania, and I'm also playing with the idea of sociopathy.

I wonder if any scholars have tried to diagnose Hamlet's psychological condition....



So this has sort of morphed with another one of my assignments from my creative writing class. For that class, I need to write a 15 page character development in response to these questions.
so here it is!

Final Draft

MY FINAL DRAFT...Just so you know where it is.

Fanfiction

Before I start, I suppose I need to make some decisions about how close I need to stay to the text. The ideas I'm throwing around are more like adaptations, so I'm hoping Cortnie will have some feedback on how to go about creating fanfiction. I'm staying away from archaic Shakespeare language, because I think that defeats my purpose of making Shakespeare more accessible, specifically to fanfiction readers. I let her know some of my ideas here. Here are some of the ideas I'm working on:
I'm thinking setting could be a sort of modern-day murder mystery, where Hamlet's mother dies slowly of cancer, but Hamlet suspects his dad of giving her drugs and taking her life away too early. So when he goes to see a grief counselor (Polonius), he starts showing signs of obsession and madness, and after a hallucination of his mother's ghost, he kills his counselor/psychiatrist, and gets away with it. So then later, he finally kills his father, his brother (Laertes) suspects his guilt and confronts him about it, getting himself killed.