What can you say about a Research Schedule?

Time Management
 (Photo credit: Intersection Consulting)

And the answer is:  not much.  I've been spending a couple of hours a week thinking about this project and making notes about the film, but I'm not sure if I can actually pin down how much time I need for everything involved.  I need to have my bibliography and the final revision of my Review of Scholarly Literature done on March 12, which is not that far off now, so it's time to step it up. 

I'm now (as of this minute) planning on giving at least an hour a day, every day, until the two projects are done, and if I do more than an hour, I will NOT deduct that time from the next hour.  I will also probably have to adjust that daily hour upwards in order to get it all done, but I think an hour is a good starting point.  Here's my to-do list, in chronological order:

• Find at least six articles that use shame theory to analyze something comparable to a film.
• Find two more books on the theory (I already have one) AND reviews of the books from scholarly journals.
• Create the MLA citations.
• Start reading the articles (at least two a week), writing the annotations as I go.
• Decide on which articles to use for the lit review, then write summaries (remember, they have to define the terms I'll be using).
• Examine the books to see what I can get from them, prepare annotations (and summaries as above for the two I'm using for my lit review).

That's what I absolutely have to do, but I'd also like to do a starter analysis of the three scenes I want to use in the research paper, since that's my primary research and I won't know for sure how much and what kind of stuff I need from my secondary sources until the analysis is done.

And, I just decided that I'm not counting the time it takes to write my blog posts as part of my scheduled hour.  Now all I have to do is stick to the plan

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A Secret Humiliation

Don't Look at Me!

I meant to post this last week, but it kind of got away from me. 
The prompt asks me what I have found in a scene from my film using the critical model, and I just didn't have time to re-watch the film then.  Things are better now, so here goes.
Looking at The Four Feathers from a shame point of view is amazing -- and I'm not exaggerating.  I can't believe how much stuff in it connects to shame theory, and a lot of it doesn't even involve dialogue.  I already know that I'm going to use the moment when the men get their orders.  In this scene, Harry's reaction is radically different from the others.  They are all excited and eager to go, and they get pretty loud about it.  While they're whooping it up, he goes absolutely blank-- no facial expression, no speaking-- he kind of closes in on himself (you can see it in the picture above).  None of the other men seem to notice that something is wrong with him, but the camera is on him, so the audience is very aware that his reaction is not what it should be, but they probably can't tell what's wrong.
Well, I can.  What he is doing is the withdrawal script.  He is feeling shame (or one of the shame emotions, like guilt or embarrassment), and this withdrawal is the method he habitually uses to restore his pride.  What's really interesting is that he is the only one who knows he's ashamed and why at this point.  Since my notes on shame say that it usually involves exposure, meaning that somebody witnesses the shame in action, this is pretty unusual.
And, now that I've given some thought to it, what's causing his shame can't be that he knows he is not going to go to war.  He decides that later, and it's a shame event all by itself.  I think the most likely cause is that he is just realizing that he doesn't want to go, that he's afraid to go, and he is ashamed of himself.  A couple more thoughts:  is he also afraid that the other men can see this in him?  Could be.  Is he ashamed because he's bought into all the gung ho attitude that the others feel?  Maybe, and if that's the case, what does that tell me?  Not sure yet, but I'll work on it.  
 

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It's a Shame about . . .

SHAME (Photo credit: BlueRobot)

I got a phone call from a machine yesterday telling me that all our campuses would be closed today because of the weather (-45 wind chills!), which seemed great at the time, but now I'm kind of sorry I'm at home.  And I'm kind of embarrassed about that.  Snow days are supposed to be fun, aren't they?  Somehow, when you've been stuck at home a lot because of the weather, it loses its appeal. 

Anyway, this week I'm supposed to be writing about my "critical approach," shame theory, and I've actually read the notes on it that the prof put up on Blackboard (we were going to get hard copies today, but that will have to wait for Wednesday, assuming the weather improves).  So far, the most interesting thing about shame, to me, at least, is how shame works as a kind of social control.  If the people around you think that something is shameful (like wanting to be at school, for example), then you try to avoid doing it (in this case, by not expressing your preference for being at school).  It seems like a good explanation for how peer pressure works, and it also covers the entire plot of my film, The Four Feathers.

Now, I'm thinking about how random my example is-- I mean, why should that be shameful?  Is that something the film is saying, too?  Do the characters around Harry Faversham think that what he does is shameful for no good reason?  Does he agree with them?  I guess I've got a lot of questions.  I just hope that means I'll have a lot of material when it comes time to write the research paper. 

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Getting a jump on the new semester

Cover via Amazon

For me, spring semester starts tomorrow, but I just checked and my English 102 class is already set up on Blackboard.  I read the syllabus and the first assignment, which is to set up a blog and do 20 posts by the end of term.  The first post has to be about the topic for my research project, which has to be a film.  I looked at the list of films, and the one that jumped out at me was The Four Feathers (all the rest are newer movies), probably because Rebbie (Rebecca, my older sister, who had a big Heath Ledger crush) made me watch it with her when she first got the DVD.  It was pretty intense for me, since I must have been about eight or nine years old at the time.  I've seen it since then -- and I have a better understanding of what's going on in it than I did as a kid -- so I think I'm going to go with it.

I also have to have a "critical approach," which I'm not quite sure I understand yet, and the one it was listed under is something called shame theory.  This makes sense to me.  If you haven't seen the film, it might not make sense to you.  The feathers in the title are symbols of cowardice that people give to men who have acted cowardly in some major way.  The hero of the story is a British army officer who resigns when his unit (or whatever it's called) is ordered into action.  He does this because he is afraid, and then he spends the rest of the film doing incredibly brave things in order to give the feathers back and redeem himself.  Basically, now that I think about it, it's all about shame.

I'm not sure how this is going to work, but I guess I'll find out more tomorrow morning (assuming we don't have a blizzard or get frozen by a polar vortex again).

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