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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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