Showing posts with label research paper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research paper. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
What am I trying to do here?
I'm trying to meet the English 102 requirement this semester, and this is my research blog. The instructor says that if I follow the prompts for the blog, it will help me with all of the projects for the class. I sure hope so. I think that I write okay, but at my high school we didn't have to write any long papers, so I don't know if I should be worried about that. Anyway, I'm going to be writing my research paper on a film.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
More Research? Say it ain't so!
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| Star wars me (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I shouldn't complain. I already wasted an hour today looking at my Facebook notifications. Some of the Star Wars fans are objecting to my argument that Kylo Ren is immature, but I had two comments that called those fans immature. What can you do?
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
People who never grow up should never have lethal weapons
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| Secrets of the Jedi (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Lotsa new secrets coming soon! |
to be continued . . .
Saturday, February 18, 2017
An Embarrassed Baby
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| This baby is totally outraged. |
The baby is rescued by his father, who doesn't laugh. He talks to the baby in a very sympathetic tone.
This baby has already started using the withdrawal script to deal with shame events. I'll talk more about what I've found on script theory in another post as soon as possible.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Writing about War is Hell
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| The "Heroic Age" roster of the Avengers. Cover art for Avengers vol. 4, #12.1, by Bryan Hitch. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I had a scheduled conference yesterday with the prof to talk about how she wants me to revise my research paper draft. She gave me some ideas about how to fix the wording of my thesis, and told me to quote both my sources and the film a lot more. Luckily, she thought the scenes I chose from AAoU (I'm kind of tired of typing out Avengers: Age of Ultron. Hey, I just did it again) worked, so I don't have to start anything over. It's going to be a lot of work.
Friday, April 8, 2016
A Great Book, Finally
Today is the second anniversary of my mother's death. I woke up thinking about her, partly because I had a dream about her, in which she told me to "get cracking on that homework." Since I'm just about up to date on everything else, I figured that this was my subconscious telling me I was missing something. That was when I realized that I hadn't been posting. So, here goes.
The book that has helped me the most with my paper is The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present, by Shannon E. French, who is a philosophy professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. Since she works in a military setting, it was probably only natural that she would want to write about this topic, and she obviously had access to plenty of current and former "warriors" to flesh out the research she did on warriors of the past. One of the things that helped me is that it seems that the people (virtually all men) she consulted or quoted seemed to be able to detail the codes that governed their behaviors as members of the military, which fit what I saw in Avengers: Age of Ultron. I'll talk more about that in my next post.
Anyway, it's a terrific read; I couldn't put it down. Check it out.
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Waiting is the Hardest Part
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| The "Heroic Age" roster of the Avengers. Cover art for Avengers vol. 4, #12.1, by Bryan Hitch. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The reason I'm asking this is that it seems to me that they don't, and they probably should for the good of the group. This brings me to the fact that I am worried that I am partly drawn to that conclusion because I have a pretty good idea what the filmmakers are planning for the future films, thanks to my older brothers, Paul and Brian. I'll get to that in my next post.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Starting my research blog
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| English: A panorama of a research room taken at the New York Public Library with a Canon 5D and 24-105mm f/4L IS. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Welcome to my research blog for my English 102 class. I’m a first-year student at a community
college that I’m not going to name because I just had a lesson in why you
shouldn’t name names (more about that later).
I did okay in 101 (I think the prof liked my grammar more than my
writing; he went on and on about how he appreciated not having to mark a lot of
mistakes. But he didn’t have much to say
about WHAT I wrote. He did ask on one
paper that I try not to use so many parentheticals. I guess he had a point.).
Anyway, this term I’m going to be writing a research paper, and the
materials I got on Blackboard make it sound as though this is a much bigger
deal than I expected. I mean, I’ve done
research papers before, and they got good grades.
I’m already over my
100 words, and I still haven’t said much about myself. I’ll save that for my next post. Tuesday, September 2, 2014
What's wrong with long hair?
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| This is not funny |
A couple of nights ago, Rebbie loaned me her DVD of Divergent, which I'm going to use for my research project. I saw it in the theater when it was first released, but I didn't pay much attention to details outside of how it "diverged" from the book. Anyway, I watched it again, and I think I've got an idea to get me going. The first fight Tris has is with another initiate, Molly (I think that's her name), a really tough-looking woman about her age, and she (Tris) gets beaten up. What I noticed this time was their hair. Molly's is about chin length, but Tris's is pretty long, and it's usually in a ponytail just below the crown. It suddenly struck me that this said something strange about her.
A couple of years ago, when Rebbie was starting college, our folks signed us up for a basic self-defense class that was taught by a couple of police officers, one male, the other female. After their lecture about how to avoid trouble in the first place, they did a quick demonstration of an attack with one of the other students. I mention this because it turned out that they picked her for her long hair (in a ponytail). The female officer grabbed her arm and used her other hand to grab the ponytail and pull her head back. They pointed out that not only is having a ponytail giving an advantage to a mugger (or worse), you can be injured, possibly badly, depending on how hard the attacker pulls. She suggested that we might want to think about changing our hairstyles.
I just thought of something else about this. I'll be back in a bit once I've given it some more thought.
Monday, January 27, 2014
It's a Shame about . . .
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| 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.
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Film Analysis Isn't Just for Scholars: Catching Fire with Katniss
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| Catching Fire Edit.jpeg (Photo credit: 1:00 AM) |
The point that the author, Paul Risker, is making is that the character of Katniss "is meticulously constructed to be an idealised role model," and he argues this with a lot of support from the text. The "meticulous construction" is the thing that strikes me as the key to why The Hunger Games works as a whole, and here I've got to refer to the last big thing, the Twilight saga. I never got into that, mainly because the heroine is so . . . well, boring doesn't begin to capture what she is. She's self-absorbed and selfish, she uses people who care about her, and she's pretty much unlikeable, as far as I'm concerned. My point here is that she is no kind of a role model for anybody who has anything resembling self-respect. Now, I'm not looking for a role model myself, but I can see that Risker is right about what the films do with Katniss. However, he also seems to feel that she's a bit too perfect, and I have to disagree on that score. She's not flawless.
Anyway, I'm thankful (ahead of time) that he gave me something to write about so that I'm getting close to hitting my goal of 20 posts for the semester.
Sunday, November 10, 2013
The Case of the Missing Mouse
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| The Missing Mouse (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Just in case you were wondering.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Two Demigods and a Satyr Walk into Medusa's Lair . . .
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| Perseus with the head of Medusa, by Antonio Canova, completed 1801 (Vatican Museums) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Starting with number 1 from the list in my last post, it should be obvious to those who have seen the film or read the book that Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is based on already existing Greek mythology: he's the son of Poseidon, his real first name is Perseus (the original Perseus's father was Zeus, but that's another myth), and he is destined to be a hero. The second requirement is also obvious, because as the film goes on Percy encounters all kinds of elements, fighting mythological monsters like the Minotaur, Medusa, and a hydra, meeting Chiron, visiting the land of the lotus eaters, and so on, but these, except for Chiron, whose role in the myths was as the mentor/trainer of demigods, are all serving different functions in this story than they did in the Greek myths.
And that's just for starters. There's more to come.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Another "Sword-and-Sandals" is Coming
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| Gladiator (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I've been following the Flickering Myth website for a while now, and yesterday they had an item about Hercules: The Legend Begins (not to be confused with Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, the '90s tv show with Kevin Sorbo), which is coming out next spring. The trailer that was just released for the movie bears out almost everything I've been reading in my sources. It's become obvious to me that this genre is alive and well, and it looks like my research paper (which I need to begin drafting next weekend at the latest) is going to use sword and sandals as a basis for arguing that Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief represents either a subgenre of it or a "sibling" genre to it, which I am going to call neo-mythology.
And Then There's the Gladiator Genre
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| Gladiator fights at "Brot und Spiele", Germany's biggest Roman festival (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Everytime I think I'm starting to get a handle on things, I come across a new source that forces me to rethink everything I thought I had resolved. This time, it's my mom. I was talking to her yesterday about how much work this is turning out to be, and she wanted to know all about it. When I told her about my neo-mythology idea, she said, "you mean like gladiator movies?" Aargh! So, I had to ask what that meant, and I'll just summarize her explanation.
Gladiator movies, according to Mom, were all over the place in the '50s and '60s, especially at drive-ins and on late-night television. The hero was obviously a bodybuilder and was usually dressed in a way that exposed his chest and most of his legs. He always won his fights through his superior strength, and you could never remember the storyline afterwards.
This sounds to me like what they call pepla, and I'll have more to say about that next time.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Sword and Sandal, Neo-Mythology, and Percy Jackson, Part 2
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| עברית: Biblical Sandal (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I know I can't use Wikipedia as a source in my literature review, but it had a really interesting entry on sword and sandal films, not to mention a whole lot of discussion on their Talk page, where the contributors hash out any problems with the entries. Based on what I read there, it looks like you really can't call Percy Jackson/ Lightning Thief a sword-and-sandal movie, mostly because it has high production values and isn't Italian. That sounds crazy, I know, but if you read the Wikipedia entry, it'll make sense. So, I've decided to go with Neo-mythology, which was mentioned in the entry as having been coined as a term by an Italian film director, Vittorio Cottafavi, who apparently just didn't like "sword and sandal" (I don't blame him, because it does sound kind of low rent).
All this led me to my proposal for the project. What I'm proposing is to establish neo-mythology as a subgenre of action/adventure, based on PJI. I need to find scholarly sources on the sword-and-sandal genre so that I can compare and contrast, and my research question is "Is Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief a sword-and-sandal film?" I'm going to argue that while it fits a lot of the criteria for s-and-s, it's something different.
I turned it in on Thursday, and I've got my fingers crossed.
Sword and Sandal, Neo-Mythology, and Percy Jackson, Part 1
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| English: The Jules Verne Festival launch in Los Angeles, October 2006. L-R: Ray Harryhausen, Harrison Ford, Malcolm McDowell, Jane Goodall, James Cameron, George Lucas. Front: Jules Verne Festival founders Jean-Christophe Jeauffre and Frédéric Dieudonné. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
What I remembered about the movie was the fight with the skeletons and the scene with the harpies-- and I think the harpies are what made Dad see a connection. In PJI, there is a scene near the beginning where a fury attacks Percy in a museum, kind of like the harpies in JATA. So, I asked him what genre he thought JATA was, and he said that he thinks it's called "sword and sandal." Based on that, I started doing some web searching (mainly to get terms to use for searching later in scholarly databases), and that's where I'll leave it for now.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
What about the fantasy-adventure genre?
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| Strange Fantasy 01 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The critical approach that I'm taking for my research project is genre criticism, and the film I'm analyzing is Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. My understanding of this approach is that it looks at how a film fits into an established genre, or doesn't. Science fiction and fantasy is one of those genres, as is Action/Adventure, and it seems that my film fits into both, but it's not really science fiction or action: it's fantasy-adventure. Beyond that, it is also part of a subgenre that features kids as the heroes.
And there's the problem for me as well as the benefit. It seems to me that I'm going to be trying to identify and define a new(ish) category, so there might not be a lot of material available on this genre (bad) while I will have to do a lot to explain my model (good, in terms of meeting the length requirement). Not only that but I have to include a lot of different films if I stick to what I have so far. The characteristic that all of them share is that the adults are not involved in the stories except as villains or advisors (and their advice is frequently ignored by the kids). However, I think that I have to exclude all of the teen-dystopia films (like The Hunger Games), because some of them are almost horror films, going all the way back to the first Halloween, which actually is a horror film. And that's just the start!
This is going to take a lot of thinking. I'm hoping to get started on my library research in the next week.
Monday, April 15, 2013
The Moment of Truth
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| Виньетка: герои "Илиады" Гомера. С оригинала Г.В. Тишбейна (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The peer review I got was okay. The paper I reviewed was only 4 pages long, and didn't make much sense to me -- I told the guy he should look at a scene I remembered from his movie (300), and I thought for a moment that he didn't see why. Then he seemed to get it, so maybe I helped. Hope so.
Fingers crossed for today. I'm hoping I won't have too much revising to do. I've got stuff due in all my classes.
Friday, March 22, 2013
New Ideas for the Research Project
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| Bilbo writing There and Back Again in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring; note subtitle "A Hobbit's Tale" (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Yes, I know I've fallen behind, so you can expect to see several entries in the near future. I've been working on my literature review, mainly focussing on hero archetypes, and I think I've reached the point where it's not going to get any better. Therefore, I'm moving on to the research paper itself, and I just got some more ideas by watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey yesterday. There's an interesting contrast between its overall story and that of The Fellowship of the Ring when it comes to the makeup of the band of questers in each. The guys in The Hobbit are NOT all heroes, unlike the fellowship members.
Once I noticed that, I started having some self-discussion (am I inventing that term?) about what the difference means, which led me to some other thoughts about what exactly makes the FOTR guys heroes that The Hobbit's characters lack. And I'll talk about that next time.
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