Inspiration for the Project
The inspiration for our perspective project was: Serial, In Cold Blood, and Critical Literary Lenses. These three mediums allowed us to create our own perspective as well as use others perspectives in our writing.
Serial
On the second day of school we started listening and analyzing Serial. Serial Season One is a podcast about a murder of Hae Min Lee, a high school senior at Woodlawn, in Baltimore in 1999. They accused Adnan Syed, the ex boyfriend of Hae Min Lee, of the murder. The Podcast analyzes if Adnan received a fair trial and helps its audience understand the facts and inconsistencies of the trial. As a class this story brought up a lot of controversy. We had a lot of discussions (which turned into debates) about the american justice system and if it is just. Who should decide if someone is guilty? What do we do with people when we think they are guilty? We also talked about our opinions of if Serial did an effective job of talking about the justice system. After we listened to an episode we would vote if we thought Adnan was or was not guilty. This vote varied on the information being presented to us as well as Sarah Koenig's perspective/feelings of Adnan. This made us think about when does someone else's story become the storytellers? Overall Serial is a very interesting story that leaves you with a lot of questions (as you can see). Lucky for us, Sarah and her coworker came to San Diego on a tour to talk to us about the creation of Serial and answer any burning questions we had. It was really fun to hear about the backstory of the podcast.
In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood is an imaginative nonfiction about the murder of the Clutter family, written by Truman Capote. A nonfiction novel is a term created by Capote and is a true story written in a novel format. When reading In Cold Blood it is easy to forget that it is a true story. The book is not just a murder mystery, it explores ideas such as: what role the criminal justice system plays in our society, if murder is nature or nurture, characters can be good and bad. Capote uses a lot of critical literary lenses in his writing which makes readers think.
Stereotypes and Lenses
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In the beginning of the semester we learnt about critical literary lenses, which are different perspectives that scholars read and interpret literature with. The six that we learnt about were: Critical Race Theory, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Gender Theory, Feminism, and Reader Response. We used one of these lenses to analyse In Cold Blood and a book of our choice, if we were in honors. In my In Cold Blood Essay I used a psychoanalytical lens and discussed how Perry’s childhood affects his actions and the way he views the world as an adult. For my honors essay I decided to analyze Harry Potter through a reader response lens, because I am very passionate about Harry Potter. In this essay I talked about why pureblood prejudice occurs, how it affects key characters, the role it plays on the structure and hierarchy of the wizarding world. I also discussed how the series relates to the issues we are facing today including Black Lives Matter, Institutionalized Racism, White Privilege, and White Supremacy. You can read the full essays in the link to your left. In addition to these essays we also did a mini project called the "Unfair Project." In this project we wrote stereotypes on our face that people tell us or we think about ourselves (mine is above). A lot of these stereotypes corralated to the critical literary lenses that we had learnt about. This mini project was very powerful because it showed us we all feel judged and stereotyped on a daily bases. People are constantly putting/pushing their own perspectives on you and it is important to understand your own beliefs
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