In this case, brainstorming means trying to remember what I said.
“The Use of the Familiar to Introduce Literature”– a paper on using fairy tales to introduce literary analysis. I really enjoy using The True Story of the Three Pigs by A. Wolf as an example of an unreliable narrator. I’m not sure how well that would go over to college academics as an audience… Children’s books and fairy tales. It works great though.
“Teaching Everyman off the web.” Don’t know if that would be relevant, but surely there are teachers out there who don’t have the background to teach this play but do.
Discussion of genre, specifically genre-challenged works like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Frankenstein, and Gulliver’s Travels. That might be very interesting. Discuss need for words to differentiate between types of genres. (Children’s literature as a genre but also fantasy. Science fiction but also romantic, for Frankenstein.)
–A work that might be useful to peruse in this discussion is
“The Meanings of ‘Purpose'”
Arthur E. Walzer
Rhetoric Review > Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 118-129
Would like to do a paper tying together a whole group of gothic horror works… Yellow Wallpaper, Frankenstein, Tell-Tale Heart… Put a teaching unit together.
“Note that the action hero and the everyman are really just flip sides of the same coin. The one is action, the other responds to it. The one arrives on the scene ready to do business, while the other must slowly learn and accept their fate and responsibility in the tale. In other words, both of them are ways of letting the story take precedence. They are both children of the plot.”
Everyman and the Action Hero… literally, as opposed to metaphorically in this article.
“A return to allegory less disputed is the many films featuring the superhero. Superman, Spiderman, and Batman, for example, are all allegorical representations of the everyman. The evils they fight are the temptations to greed, to violence and to behavior that will in other ways disrupt society. Superheroes stand as both the everyman and the guardian against evil.”
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-an-allegory.htm
Hmm. That seems to be a theme. Let me think on it some more.
Modern allegory… Superman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Wars…
The Allegory of Pop Culture
The Genres of Blogs: News, Diaries, Journals, and so forth
This would actually be rather fun to do with a class as well. Hmm.
An interesting rhetorical study would be of the language of women in this election… Pick a candidate, although Michelle Obama is garnering the most headlines. Is there something specific about the way she says things and not just what she says that is making such a flack?
–Maybe this article would be useful, I remember it being interesting:
“Resistance, Women, and Dismissing the ‘I'”
Kristie S. Fleckenstein
Rhetoric Review > Vol. 17, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 107-125