Week 13

Mockingbird

Mockingbirds are a group of New World passerine birds from the Mimidae family. They are best known for the habit of some species mimicking the songs of other birds and the sounds of insects and amphibians, often loudly and in rapid succession. There are about 17 species in three genera. These do not appear to form a monophyletic lineage: Mimus and Nesomimus are quite closely related; their closest living relatives appear to be killers and thrashers, such as the sage thrasher. Melanotis is more distinct; it seems to represent a very ancient basal lineage of Mimidae.

    

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 is a 2014 American dystopian science fiction adventure film directed by Francis Lawrence with a screenplay by Peter Craig and Danny Strong. It is the first of two films based on Suzanne Collins' novel Mockingjay, the final book in The Hunger Games trilogy, and the third installment in The Hunger Games film series, produced by Nina Jacobson and Jon Kilik and distributed by Lionsgate. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, Stanley Tucci, and Donald Sutherland. Principal photography for both parts of the film began on September 23, 2013, in Atlanta, before moving to Paris for two weeks of filming and officially concluding on June 20, 2014, in Berlin.

             

website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PkkHsuMrho

Suzanne Collins 

Suzanne Collins (born August 10, 1962) is an American television writer and author, best known as the author of The New York Times best selling series The Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games trilogy (which consists of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay).

   

Dystopia

A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia, kakotopia, or simply anti-utopia) is a community or society that is undesirable or frightening. It is translated as "not-good place", an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, Utopia, published 1516, a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence and poverty.

     

utopia

A utopia (/juːˈtoʊpiə/ yoo-TOH-pee-ə) is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens. The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia. One could also say that utopia is a perfect 'place' that has been made so there are no problems.

Utopian ideals often place emphasis on egalitarian principles of equality in economics, government and justice, though by no means exclusively, with the method and structure of proposed implementation varying based on ideology. According to Lyman Tower Sargent "[t]here are socialist, capitalist, monarchical, democratic, anarchist, ecological, feminist, patriarchal, egalitarian, hierarchical, racist, left-wing, right-wing, reformist, free love, nuclear family, extended family, gay, lesbian, and many more utopias".

     

Animal Farm

Animal Farm is an allegorical novella by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude that was critically shaped by his experiences during the Spanish Civil War.The Soviet Union, he believed, had become a brutal dictatorship, built upon a cult of personality and enforced by a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described Animal Farm as a satirical tale against Stalin ("un conte satirique contre Staline"), and in his essay "Why I Write" (1946), wrote that Animal Farm was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole".

George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.

Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, are widely acclaimed, as are his essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel published in 1949 by English author George Orwell. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation. The superstate and its residents are dictated to by a political regime euphemistically named English Socialism, shortened to "Ingsoc" in Newspeak, the government's invented language. The superstate is under the control of the privileged elite of the Inner Party, a party and government that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrime", which is enforced by the "Thought Police".

Terroeism

Terrorism is a term used in its broadest sense to describe the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror or fear, in order to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim. It is used in this regard primarily to refer to violence against civilians or non-combatants. Although the term has been in use since at least the 1970s, it initially became popular when journalists and politicians publicly introduced and started using the term "Islamic terrorists" following the September 11 attacks. Rather than being used to describe a type of activity, the term has often been used politically as a term of abuse or denunciation, both by non-state groups and by governments against each other. There is no universally agreed upon definition of the term, and many definitions exist.

     

Theme

In contemporary literary studies, a theme is the central topic a text treats. Themes can be divided into two categories: a work's thematic concept is what readers "think the work is about" and its thematic statement being "what the work says about the subject".

"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"

"It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" is a song written and performed by Bob Dylan and featured on his Bringing It All Back Home album, released on March 22, 1965 by Columbia Records (see 1965 in music). The song was recorded on January 15, 1965 with Dylan's acoustic guitar and harmonica and William E. Lee's bass guitar the only instrumentation. The lyrics were heavily influenced by Symbolist poetry and bid farewell to the titular "Baby Blue." There has been much speculation about the real life identity of "Baby Blue", with suspects including Joan Baez, David Blue, Paul Clayton, Dylan's folk music audience, and even Dylan himself.

website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af7ngGxEusE

       

Decrepit car

A decrepit car is one that is often old and damaged and is in a barely functional state. Numerous slang terms are used to describe such cars, which vary by country and region, including jalopy and banger.

Age, neglect and damage tend to increase the expense of maintaining a vehicle. The vehicle may reach a point where this expense would be considered to outweigh the value of keeping it. Such vehicles are generally stripped for parts or abandoned;^{[nb 1]} however, some owners choose to keep the vehicle. These old, neglected and often barely functional cars have been used not only for transport but also as racing vehicles. Their use has earned them a place in popular culture.

      

Paul’s Cas

"Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament" is a short story by Willa Cather. It was first published in McClure's Magazine in 1905. It also appeared in a collection of Cather's stories, The Troll Garden (1905). For many years, "Paul's Case" was the only one of her stories that Cather allowed to be anthologized.

The symbolism of this lifestyle in "Paul's Case" is the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The cities offer contrasting models of the humdrum life of routine and lived in high style

        

Willa Cather

Willa Sibert Cather  was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.

Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick.

One of Ours 

One of Ours is a novel by Willa Cather that won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native around the turn of the 20th century. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise.

Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize /ˈpʊlᵻtsər/is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of American (Hungarian-born) Joseph Pulitzer who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher, and is administered by Columbia University in New York City. Prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and a US$15,000 cash award (raised from $10,000 in 2017). The winner in the public service category of the journalism competition is awarded a gold medal.