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| Overview: The ultimate questions that your education is trying to help you to figure out are as follows: who you are and what you believe. "Who you are" and "What you believe" are constantly shifting concepts, making this essay a bit more bizarre and off-the-wall, but I like bizarre and off-the-wall things, and hope you will find this assignment interesting. You are really trying to figure out who you are in this essay and what you want out of life. | Student-Learning Outcomes: see below. | |
Tasks: 1. Identify your personality traits as they can be found via astrology, pop-culture, and psychology. You may want to really think about things that you can change about yourself and things that you can't really change about yourself. 2. Discuss the various elements of your identity, choosing to structure elements from general to specific. 3. Point out various quirks about yourself that will help you to really hone down a thesis value, one that really emphasizes the answers you forsee for "Who am I" and "Where am I headed?" 4. Craft a viable thesis statement that clearly identifies the scope of your identity and your future aspirations. 5. Draft your essay. |
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Student-Learning Outcomes. In this students, students should attempt to:
--Analyze and interpret their lives, focusing most of their analytical approach by answering the following questions that they will presumably ask throughout their lifetime: Who am I? How will I apply this knowledge of self to help me go where I want to go/be who I want to become?
--Consider the methodologies, both ancient and modern, that people have always tried to use to identify their own character archetypes (astrology, psychology, pop-culture quizzes):
Employ Western or Chinese astrology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Astrology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Zodiac (do Google searches on various astrological webpages) |
Employ Myers-Briggs Type indicators: (Psychology) http://www.personalitypage.com/ http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs (find other searches on Myers-Briggs/other personality type indicators) |
Employ pop-culture resources that allow us a quick-and-easy sense of who we are based on existing character archetypes: http://www.cigamerisedi.com/quizbyliz/battleroyale/brquiz.htm http://www.quizilla.com/users/jooks/quizzes/Which%20Battle%20Royale%20Character%20are%20You?/ http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=2812 (do other quizilla or fun character quizzes like "What anime character are you, etc." |
See the career counselor at the Maida Kamber Center for advice on a viable career that is suited for your interests and personality type:
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--Construct a viable thesis statement, one that identifies your core personality trait(s)--essentially, WHO YOU ARE, and one that identifies your goals and aspirations in life, essentially--WHERE YOU WANT TO GO/WHO YOU WANT TO BECOME.
Sample: As Davin Kubota, my entire desire in life prior to my death can be summarized in an amalgamation of two words: wor(l)d. Ultimately, I want my students in my English classes to recognize that if they have power over the "word," then they have the world in their thrall—they have power in their voices. Once they have that power, then they have control over a large part of their ethos.
--Identify early on in your paper what various fields of inquiry say regarding who you are—astrology, psychology, pop culture. You may want to consult with your parents, teachers, and counselors to figure out who you were as a child, and how that child developed to become an adult today—ultimately, who is that adult today, writing this essay, now? (BACKGROUND SECTION)
--Identify some of the obstacles that the various fields of inquiry say about who you are: personality quirks, difficulties in the past, inner weaknesses and foibles. (DESCRIPTIVE and NARRATIVE sections)
--Compare or contrast characters whom we have discovered in our reading to YOU. What are these characters like? What are you like? How are you similar, and how are you different? (COMPARATIVE section)
--Explain what it is what you'd like to do with your life or who you would like to be in your life. Explain your reasons for having those ideals. In this section, you might need to find interviews or information to back up your claim. For example, I never really planned on being a teacher here at K.C.C.—it just happened, so I might interview other teachers to assist me in this section. (SUBJECTIVE and NARRATIVE sections) You might also want to talk to this school's career counselor for help with this assignment.
--Stay on track by remembering that your goal in this "Heroic Life Battle Plan" is to explain how you can best get to your goal based on who you are, despite the obstacles and tensions that you have expressed in earlier sections.
--Apply proper P.I.E. paragraph structures to the essay so as to outline and organize the major points consistent with the essay's thesis statement (e.g. setting, character, plot-conflicts, point of view, symbols); (wherever and whenever applicable);
--Apply proper M.L.A. or A.P.A.-based quoting conventions to the essay with regards to proper quote introduction, parenthetical citation, and other quote dynamics;
--Examine quotes or images from the formal and informal text or visual-based resources so as to significantly comment on the relevance and impact of those selected images/words.
--Employ at least 3 quotes from various source materials that you find, of a textual or visual nature.
--Create a final, polished draft of at least 4-6 pages, with a List of Works Cited.
--Become who you say you want to become, and do what you say what you want to do with your life.
A Seemingly More Conventional Essay Dealing with Socio-Cultural Attitudes about Education, Reality T.V., or other themes raised by Takami's Battle Royale.
Note: Option three might not be as radical as the others, but it can still be a powerful analysis. This time, however, much of your attention will be focused in on the text iitself more than on your life.
Student-Learning Objectives, Option Three
| In this essay, students should ultimately endeavor to: | ----Analyze and interpret Battle Royale with a clear, defensible thesis statement in mind; the thesis statement should discuss important cultural, ethical, political or psychological issues raised by Battle Royale and related texts (the nature of the educational environment, reality game t.v. programs, dystopian governments and societies, game theory and trusting one's opponents). --Apply what you know about basic research principles so as to find expository information about Battle Royale; Apply what you know about analytical essays so as to comment on why Battle Royale signficantly engages issues found in Japanese culture/educational culture. --Assemble information about cultural, ethical, political, or psychological insights into the text via research and apply it to your text; --Apply proper P.I.E. paragraph structures to the essay so as to outline and organize the major points consistent with the essay's thesis statement (e.g. setting, character, plot-conflicts, point of view, symbols); --Apply proper M.L.A. or A.P.A.-based quoting conventions to the essay with regards to proper quote introduction, parenthetical citation, and other quote dynamics; --Examine quotes or images from the formal and informal text or visual-based resources so as to significantly comment on the relevance and impact of those selected images/words. --Employ at least 3 quotes from various source materials that you find, of a textual or visual nature. --Create a final, polished draft of at least 4-6 pages, with a List of Works Cited. |
Potential Topics:
| 1. Using two source materials as intertextual fodder, depict the relationship between the dead and the living. What makes this relationship mysterious, challenging, tragic, ridiculous at times? |
| 2. Who is the most compelling character in Battle Royale? Analyze that character and assess their appeal. |
| 3. What makes Shuya Nanahara in Battle Royale the definition of a protagonist? How is Shogo Kawada his alazon-figure? In essence, depict the role of the protagonist and the supporting characters. |
| 4. In Battle Royale, is Mitsuko Souma a tragic character? What makes her tragic? |
| 5. Choosing/adopting the voice of one of the characters in Battle Royale, write their "hidden" chapter. |
| 6. Comment on the controversy in Japan that Battle Royale caused. If released as an American remake, what controversies will potentially erupt, if any? |
| 7. Why is Orpheus such a popular character to artists, poets, and musicians? |
| 8. How have your readings of two of the "Earth" texts (Takami, Ovid, CoRead) contributed to your personal understanding of mortality? |
| 9. Using at least two texts related to the myths we've studied, what is the conception of the Underworld across times and genres? |
| 10. How are any of the protagonists in the myths or stories related to death heroic? |
Other questions found on the "Earth" page:
Do these myths serve a cathartic purpose for societies? Across
all cultures, why is death the ultimate horrific tale?
Is the story of resurrection a story of the hero? What does the
hero's triumph over Thanatos represent?
Is there a redemptive, consolatory message provided behind our return
to the earth?
As technology begins to encroach upon the earth, how can we show
more respect for the earth? How can we show more respect for the
people and things that went before us?
Option Four: Symbolic Constructions in Marketing
Overview: One of the core themes in BR is the successful construction of ethos and a well-defined worldview. For example, Yumiko and Yumiko construct a worldview based on their religious perspective, while Shuya often constructs his identity by what happens in the course of the novel.
Marketing companies also construct a worldview based on the symbols that they use.
In this project, you will be creating a marketing project that will hopefully capture your imagined company's worldview via an advertising campaign, creation of a logo, and a marketing analysis. This project can hopefully show you that the symbols that we see very often in the world are the result of laborious studies regarding age demographics, powerful marketing appeals, and rhetorical principles.
Student-Learning Outcomes: 1. Use creativity to decide upon a specific product line or a company service. Are you a fashion company, an eatery, a hotel, a game company? What product are you marketing? 2. Create a logo and on an attached page, use visual rhetoric principles to justify the success of your logo in "branding" your company. 3. Create a marketing overlay, discussing what elements you think any fledgling company would want to consider: a) age demographic of intended audience; b) consistent appeal and rationale for consistent appeal to the core demographic; c) discussion of marketing tropes and advertising style, marketing methods: word-of mouth, print, online; d) product development, research and design of product. 4. Create a subjective page in which you try to "hype" up your product; in many ways, this is akin to a marketing press release that attempts to "sell" your product to interested distributors. For example, if you were creating a toy line, you would want to "hype" up the product by being descriptive and inviting to the readership. 5. Employ other relevant marketing techniques, especially highlighting how the rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos might apply to the successful creation of your product. 6. Consider going the extra step: creating a storyboard for a visual advertisement or even filming the advertisement digitally for consumption on YouTube. |
