ESSAY: Group presentation and written commentary

[beccaelizabeth]

This one is hard to type up - we did a mini play in front of the class.  I did tech support, ie changing the backgrounds I had designed on the PowerPoint presentation as a backdrop, also doing the type up of the script.  I did the backdrops fine but mildly screwed up the script by failing to make it clear that the opening 'stage directions' were always intended to be the opening backdrop, so the audience would be told what the characters look like, rather than the actors trying to dress like that.  It was a whole Brecht thing that teach quite liked in practice but I forgot to write down clearly.
I contributed to the group work when we did discussing what the piece should be about.  It wasn't all my idea but I asked questions and made answers like you're supposed to.  The aim of the piece was to take the 4 texts we were studying - Great Expectations, Beloved, and the plays A Doll's House by Ibsen and Top Girls by Caryl Churchill - and make a new text that demonstrated how much we understood about them and the theory stuff we'd done in class.  Then once we'd done the presentation teach asked us questions about it that I rather figured were part of the assessment, so I didn't repeat those answers when I wrote up the commentary.  But teach wrote in that she preferred the other explanation on one bit, so maybe I should have repeated myself, because I meant it as well not instead.

The word limit was 600 words plus or minus ten percent.  My word count was 660 words.  Teach wrote at the end "A little short - I would have liked more."  I'd rather like to know how.

I supposed I should probably go and ask.

Anyways, the commentary which makes no sense without the live bits.
... urgh, now I can't figure out which of two drafts was the one I handed in.  Bother it.  Probably this one.  There's only 5 words difference.

Textual Intervention: Effects and Insights

 

We chose to take one character from each text and have them meet and discuss issues that concerned all of them.  This was inspired by the opening scene of Top Girls.  Characters from different sources – factual, fictional, assorted media – come together as if it were natural as a defamiliarisation strategy.  Finding some readers were uncomfortable with this made me look for logic that would work for them.  JTBurk [in Goodman, 1996, p246] believed that all the other characters were figments of Marlene's imagination.  So for our presentation the other three characters could be in Angie's imagination, which I attempted to represent with the introductory description that “Angie is alone, but we can see four people”.  The others could be read as aspects of Angie wrestling with difficult decisions – if she should leave, travel, kill her mother.  This focus changed the venue to her junk shelter.

 

Finding character voices was easiest with Dickens, who used memorable catchphrases for his serial readers.  It was hardest in Beloved, where omniscient narration doesn't always clearly distinguish who is thinking.  But the premis made it easy to get even reticent characters talking -  they're all thoughts together.

 

Re-reading the play in this light made me question assumptions.  Marlene is plausible, appropriate to the setting in time and place and consistent with our world's history; she is read as more real than the others.  May as well say that Marlene is imagined by Angie – whose hopes and dreams make her large in her life despite absence.  But Angie is as imaginary as everyone else, all creations of the playwright's imagination.  Even if their source was factual this story is fiction.  Which, to me, highlights the created nature of the beliefs they have about their own lives.  Win calls her life a success story; Marlene's toast reshapes other tales through a filter she wants to believe.  And that applies to her political beliefs too, even if taken from the real world and shared by many people.  Ideology as created narratives, made noticeable by the more incongruous fictions here.

 

Trying to find what the characters would talk about brought into focus that the four texts shared themes – parents/children, biological/adopted, lost/found.  Status linked to economics, changes in status, money, work, crime, punishment.  And death, and killing, though Nora only ever thinks of killing herself.  Our title, 'Free?' makes a central concept into a question, and can refer to both money and prison, but also to family ties and to some degree the idea death might bring freedom from obligation.

 

At the point our scene begins Angie has changed into her best dress, the gift from Marlene, and picked up a brick to kill her mother.  Then the others went inside and left her in the garden.  In our presentation she wrestles with her conscience, then decides against murder and simply leaves for London.  This resolves an ambiguity in the play, and in a way comfortable within dominant morality.  This was a pattern with our other three characters too, and made me realise the questions raised and often left unresolved in the other texts.  Whereas Nora of A Doll's House leaves because she can't understand how what she did can be wrong, Nora in Free? has apparently resolved that the law is correct, as she tells Angie that “Criminal offences are never worth it.”  The uncomfortable issues raised by Sethe's murder of her child are avoided by the use of Paul D as a point of view, who never did understand it, and so calls murder the devil's work here.  And while our Magwitch tells Angie to stick with her own judgement even if she's told she is wrong, he also says “What I did and look at me!”  Readers know what the character never did – his plans all went to ruin.  The irony again supports conventional morality.  But the original texts were more complex and contradictory.

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Churchill, Caryl, (1982) Top Girls.  1991 edition  London: Methuen Student Edition

Dickens, Charles, (1860) Great Expectations.  1996 edition  London: Penguin

Ibsen, Henrik, (1965 translation) A Doll's House.  1994 edition  London: Methuen Student Edition

Morrison, Toni, (1997) Beloved.  London: Vintage

 

 

Barry, Peter, (2002) Beginning Theory.  2^nd edition.  Manchester:  Manchester University Press

Goodman, Lizbeth, editor (1996) Literature and Gender.  Great Britain:  Routledge.

Pope, Rob (1995) Textual Intervention. Great Britain:  Routledge.

Pope, Rob, (2002) The English Studies Book.  Great Britain:  Routledge.

Short, Mick, (1996) Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose.  United Kingdom:  Longman

This teach wrote in the margins a lot.  Useful things like "give the full references for the editions of all texts used when you first mention the texts in your essay".  "Use the present tense."  And my favourite - "Good point - expand?"
I'd have loved to expand.  I can always make more words.  But to get it in under wordcount I squished out little words like 'my' and 'which is' and 'we', all of which got put back in by teach with helpful arrows.  But I stayed under the word limit, so I don't know which is the more important bit.

GROUP PRESENTATION
You obviously worked very hard together in order to produce a hybrid text combining elements of all four set texts in such an imaginative and thoughtful way.  The dialogue - both written and in performance - establishes (and almost sustains) strongly differentiated voices for each speaker, forming a genuine polyphony of voices.  There is evidence of excellent knowledge of all four texts, their original contexts, and the issues they throw up.  Nora's "What makes a mother?" is just one example.  Did you deliberately intend to end the text by emphasising how Angie's admiration of her auntie Marlene illustrates the process of hegemony, whereby Angie fails to recognise how she is almost certainly destined to be a victim of Thatcherite ideology rather than one of its success stories?  The use of graphics - as well as the title - functioned effectively as an abstract, foregrounding the themes visually, the location of Angie's 'den' worked very well, as did the vertical positioning of the speakers, and there were some strong performances, especially by your 'Angie'.
The dramatic script is carefully presented, although some of the opening extra dialogic stage directions could not easily be applied in performance and you should really have included indications of the contents of the graphis used in teh performance explaining the rationale behind the disappearing and reappearing shopping basket and the brick.  Your work was obviously underpinned by very thorough and judicious wider reading which you all managed to apply intelligently in the presentation.

(be adds - the brick thing requires some explanation.  I put the graphics up on LJ so I could grab them from school - there was a shopping basket which sometimes had a brick in it and sometimes turned into a gate opening out into a big wide bluescreen.
... you know, I'm not sure that'll make much sense even if I do explain it.  There was a whole hell-in-a-handbasket thing, and in the text the brick is nearly a murder weapon so it represents homicidal ideation, and it was suggested the character would end up stacking shelves at Tescos so the cagelike basket was the prison of her apparent fate, and the gate with the bluescreen was opening out into a wider world... to be made up later, cause you know, anything could go there, but it would be kind of imaginary.)
(Is it odd I can remember all that stuff still?)

COMMENTARY
Your commentary demonstrated an excellent grasp of the 4 texts.  You grapple with relevant theoretical issues and concepts, clearly drawing upon wide and judicious further reading.  Some of the (illegible, unhiq it looks like!) is a little elliptical:  you need to articulate your ideas more fully & clearly throughout.

Actually quite a few of those words are guesses, I'd have to ask teach what most of that handwriting meant.

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