Daily Log Blog 12/19/17

Allegories Introduction

Today in class, we first reviewed what was expected for homework to help in our revisions for our Back to the Future and Ready Player One letter. For homework tonight we are expected to highlight on the rubric above our letter the areas we need to revise. There are 12 things specified in the rubric. We also are responsible for a copy of our letter with revisions. DO NOT make make changes to the original document however, that way the revisions can be seen across the two documents. The idea for revision is to build on the gut feelings we had on the film and text to bolster taste.
We had two objectives in class today: IWBAT analyze allegories through the analysis of symbolic actions, characters and objects and IWBAT interpret tone in figurative language to determine themes. We mainly discussed the first one by defining allegory and symbol. An allegory is a story or text with a hidden meaning that lies underneath the explicit story. We also defined it as a network of symbols that all represent other things that tie together. An allegory ties together figurative and literal worlds in a text. A symbol we defined as something that represents something else and usual takes a literal something to represent an abstract something. An example of an allegory using many symbols that we are all familiar with from freshman year is The Crucible. The Crucible is an allegory for McCarthyism during the 60's. The example Mr. Rivers used was X-Men. In X-Men, Magneto is a symbol for Malcolm-X and Professor X represents MLK. An allegory was used in this context because the audience was children of the 60's, when the civil rights movement was going on. By using a comic book as an allegory, the creators are available to avoid alienating half of their audience (racist people) than if they were to outright state the message they were creating. Using an allegory also places the message in their audience's head (children) in a way that goes under their parents nose but also teaches them the message for later in life when they will understand it.
We also talked about the continuum between literal and figurative language. The difference between figurative and literal language can be told by what evokes imagery. Figurative language evokes imagery.
Allegories connect to the outside world in such a large way. We say allegories everywhere in film and TV and literature outside of class. Allegories can be used to learn history and what was going on at the time it was written. Like The Crucible which is really about McCarthyism at the time. By reading the crucible we can get a sense of the fear or anger felt by people at the time because of McCarthy and the red scare. Another example could be Avatar which is allegorical to exploiting chinese citizens as well as indigenous tribes in India. Although they may just seem like stories, allegories can teach us a lot about a time period and human experience which makes them an important part of history and literature.