Image analysis: Holocaust

On this post, I will be giving to you my own and personal analysis of a picture I chose, which I chose.

 

Observation:

On the image, we see a sad men, wearin old and spoiled clothes, and looking through a fence, with dead people behind.

Inferences:

Jewish pople on concentration camps, during the Wolrd War II, and torture and confinment on this prisions. Death turns into an everyday image, within the impossibility of scaping.

Questions

What is the meaning of the fence and the corpses in the image? What does the artist wants to tell us with this symbols?

Mood of the image

Sadness, hoplessness; freedom is impossible. There is no way of scaping an unfair death. The fence represents hopelessness, because it is avoiding you to get what must be yours: your freedom. The corpses mean the presence of death, as an inevitable end.

Already known information

The holocaust was one of the most sorrowful and horrible periods in mankind, because of the antisemitism that ended on series of murders, or genocides, developed by the nazi regime, under command of Adolf Hitler.

Men writing as women and women writing as men

The totle might sound sort of confusing, but is actually very simple. What I will talk about on this post is about men writing stories about female character, and the same but otherwise with female authors. Some male authors have famously succeeded, such as Gustave Flaubert in “Madame Bovary” and “Anna Karenina”, by Leon Tostoi.
The same happens with female authors, with novels such as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome.

I believe that this style of writing brings more complications than benefits. Eventhough you are able to experience, and to change the way of thinking of your characters, I think that to write as the opposite gender means a problem because of the way different genders think: while the men is more superficial, the women is more interested in emotions and feelings. This is why I believe that most authors prefer to write as what they are.

On the movie, there is a particular, and under my point of view very well produced, scene, where we see french and british soldiers on a beach, and between them, is Robbie, who was fighting for the British army. This images are part of what we know as the "Dunkirk evacuation". But, what is this about?

The Dunkirk evacuation, commonly known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, code-named Operation Dynamo by the British, was the evacuation of allied soldiers from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, France, between 27 May and the early hours of 4 June 1940, because the British, French, and Belgian troops were cut off by the German army during the Battle of Dunkirk in the Second World War. The evacuation was ordered on 26 May. In a speech to the House of Commons, Winston Churchill called the events in France "a colossal military disaster", saying that "the whole root and core and brain of the British Army" had been stranded at Dunkirk and seemed about to perish or be captured. In his We shall fight on the beaches speech on 4 June, he hailed their rescue as a "miracle of deliverance".


From 28-31 May 1940, an event known as the Siege of Lille involved the remaining 40,000 men of the once-formidable French First Army in a delaying action against seven German divisions, including three armoured divisions, which were attempting to cut off and destroy the Allied armies at Dunkirk. According to Churchill, "These Frenchmen, under the gallant leadership of General Molinié, had for four critical days contained no less than seven German divisions which otherwise could have joined in the assaults on the Dunkirk perimeter. This was a splendid contribution to the escape of their more fortunate comrades of the BEF".

On the first day, only 7,011 men were evacuated, but by the ninth day, a total of 338,226 soldiers (198,229 British and 139,997 French) had been rescued by the hastily assembled fleet of 850 boats. Many of the troops were able to embark from the harbour's protective mole onto 42 British destroyers and other large ships, while others had to wade from the beaches toward the ships, waiting for hours to board, shoulder-deep in water. Others were ferried from the beaches to the larger ships, and thousands were carried back to Britain by the famous "little ships of Dunkirk", a flotilla of around 700 merchant marine boats, fishing boats, pleasure craft and Royal National Lifeboat Institution lifeboats—the smallest of which was the 14 ft 7 in (4.45 m) fishing boat Tamzine, now in the Imperial War Museum—whose civilian crews were called into service for the emergency. The "miracle of the little ships" remains a prominent folk memory in Britain.

Atonement: dunkirk evacuation!

Atonement: some analysis questions!

Following Jane Austen's novels, we are now on Ian McEwan's "Atonement". After watching some short clips from the film, I will now answer (as usual) some questions analysing characters and themes of these deep love strory.

1. What sort of social and cultural setting does the Tallis House create? What emotions and impulses are being acted upon or repressed by its inhabitants?


2. A passion for order, a lively imagination, and a desire for attention seem to be Briony's strongest traits. In what ways is she still a child? Is her narcissism - her inability to see things from any point of view but her own - unusual in a thirteen-year-old?


3. Why does Briony stick to her "version of the story" with such unwavering commitment? Does she act entirely in error in a situation she is not old enough to understand, or does she act, in part, on an impulse of malice, revenge, or self-importance?


4. As she grows older, Briony develops the empathy to realise what she has done to Cecilia and Robbie. How and why do you think she does this?

Answers:

1- We can clearly apreciate from what we see on the film that the well known as "Tallis house" is a huge country-side house, where people who live there are a wealthy family, part of the higher society. Under this circumstances we see the impossible love between Robbie and Cecilia, because of social differences.

2- She is in almost all aspects still  child. The best example of this is the lively imagination, as mentioned on the question. She actually creates stories about what she sees, because, under my point of view, she prefers not to believe in what reality shows her; she prefers to create her own versions of reality, and that is why she is such a good writer. Is in here where her naecissism takes places, because of what I just explained: she prefers her story, her own reality.

3- I believe that she sticks to her version because, as I said before, she doesn't like what reality shows, and, in this case, the love between Cecilia and Robbie. She was jealous, because she wasn't the centre of attention any more. This si the same thing that happens to children when they have a younger sister; it is a very childish behaviour. Maybe she did this because she thought that what she was doing was correct, this as the result of a mixture between imagination and reality.

4-Everybody grows up. This is what happened to Briony, who, now being a grown up, realises that what she had done practicaly destroyed Robbie and Cecilia's life together. She is no longer a narcissist, so she is now open to new ideas and point of views. She accpets reality as it is.

Jane Austen and women's emancipation

What this post will be about is basically some questions, about the already mentioned novel "Pride and prejudice", but more specifically, its relation with women's emancipation, as said in the title. The questions are the following ones:

1. What degrees of emancipation and/or conservative reinforcement of 18th-Century family values does Elizabeth Bennet's marriage to Mr. Darcy support?

2. What attitudes to marriage does 'Pride and Prejudice' convey? What other options did Elizabeth Bennet have?
3. How does the introduction made by Vivien Jones affect your reading and approach to the novel?
4. How could the social circumstances and contexts of 'Pride and Prejudice' apply to different cultures and contexts today?
Answers:
1-Emancipation in this case is showed by Elizabeth's attitude 
over this marriage. He wanted to live her life as a free person, just like men did.
2-As we already have been studying, women in that time where supossed to marry "their best choice", or in other words, a man who would be able to give her a wealthy life. The idea of the author is to show the opposite, that women can stand by themselves, with no need of an arranged marriage. Basically because it is written under a feminist point of view.

3- It tells you what the novel is about, the context, the themes that are covered, and somehow, it also shows you that what you are about to read is written under a feminist point of view.

4- As I mentioned it on a post before, everybody can feel identified with the problems that characters from the novel must encourage, because these ones are related with emotions and feelings that belong to humans.

Pride an prejudice: Questions related to context

Throughout this classes, we have been spending our time in watching trailers of different versions of Jane Austen's "Pride and prejudice", what I think it has been quite productive. This, because this novel is deeply related with the context, both of production and reception. That is why I am answering the following questions related with this:

1. Why do you think "Pride and Prejudice" continues to be a referent for modern tales? 

2. What do you think is the effect that these different authors (film directors, producers, modern writers) want to achieve in today's audiences?

3. If you had to choose one of the previous versions to analyse, which would be the one and why?

Answers:

1- Because it doesn't envolve themes specifically from that times, but more themes that are related with the human itself; human being's emotions and feeligns are not from a specific period of time, or as I said before, context.

2- I believe that author or producers want to make the audiece feel identify with the characters and their problems, becuse, as I said before, those are human's problems. I also believe that they would like the audiebce to take as an example some specific characters, because thew show a value that is worthy to be followed.

3- I thing it would be interesting to analyse the last and less classic novel, "Pride and prejudice and zombies", because it will implie the struggle for survival, a problem that mankind encourages everyday. Also, I believe that it would be more entertaining than the original one.

Writing techniques: PEE

When your plan is to explain or demostrate a thought of yours, the best way of doing this is usin the P.E.E structure or method. This technique is based on writing your point, then your evidence, and finishing with your explanation. Moreless, this is how it goes:

Point: it is your idea, your basic thought.
Evidence: it is the proof that you got, the backup that is going to defend your point.
Explanation: as the name of this step says, here you must explain your evidence, why you chose it, what is the relation between this one and your point, etc.

Once you are using P.E.E structure, you thoughts and ideas will be more clearly stated and also more convincing!