Solitary confinement Margaret Atwood Essay Need To Use and Read the Book: Dave Eggers, the Circle to Write the Essay
As before, you’ll want to consider this a thinking problem before you consider it a writing problem. Brainstorm, outline, re-read, take notes, talk to friends and classmates: consider your subject matter and what you’d like to investigate or to say about it. Please remember to introduce author and novel title in your essay introduction, and also please as part of your thesis address the ìSo What? I question why is what you’re writing and telling your readers about important? Whatís at stake in this subject matter and by extension, in your paper? (Doing this will help you avoid writing an essay that sounds like a book report).
Solitary confinement Margaret Atwood Essay
Also towards the ends above, strive consciously to craft topic sentences of sufficient heft that they will lead immediately to evidence quotes, events, paraphrases of texts which you will then go on to discuss. (Ideas swiftly exemplified by evidence constitutes a kind of evidentiary rule of academic writing).
Your thesis, which need not be limited to one sentence but which must stand out as your main point, will reflect your governing angle or focus, your ìway inî to the story, and normally should express a focused generalization about the major meaning you feel the story offers (with respect to the topic you choose below). But donít expect to know what that thesis is right away; be alert to possibilities for ëgrowingí it, for shaping, slicing and dicing, as necessary, as you refine your thoughts about the text(s).
Solitary confinement Margaret Atwood Essay
Finally, remember your audience: someone who has a passing familiarity with your texts but needs to be reminded of the key events and details even as you make your analysis. You want to reach the general reader.
Topics: choose one of the below:
- Examine in depth one or more (up to four) significant trends, practices, ideas, and/or values in our current world that the novel asks us to consider by exaggerating them or extending them to a logical (or illogical) conclusion. Your subject(s) should be significant enough to develop an essay about. If you write about two or more of them, youíll need to offer some unifying idea which brings them into the same frame of reference in your introduction
- ìUtopia [the Circle] is a lot like high school, but with even more homeworkî (Atwood). Brainstorm some features of the high school experience, and of teenage experience generally, and illustrate these ideas with examples from the Circle. What light does this comparison shed upon the Circle and the world in which we live? How does the modern internet make adults act like kids, in ways that arenít desirable? What are the implications (and primarily negative effects!) of the worldís most cutting edge and influential company endorsing and modeling, in some sense or another, ìteenage valuesî?
- Thanks to computers, we are now able to count with unprecedented speed and thoroughness (e.g., # of likes/dislikes, and the ability to supposedly measure or evaluate everything by numerical or statistical means). According to writer Caleb Crain, this has three important implications for our thinking:
Solitary confinement Margaret Atwood Essay
— We mistakenly imagine that instances of any one thing are interchangeable, of equal value. And related to this, we imagine that any single thing or any aspect of it that canít be counted doesnít matter.
— We may mistakenly imagine that in a counted world that even for things that can be counted, no single instance matters. ìBy contrast, it was possible to believe that a work of literature [or art, or music, or a person] succeeded if it reached just one [other] person for whom it was a key.
— The third, and perhaps most crucial, the temptation is to imagine the popularity of it defines its value. You may like a singer, but if he were really a genius, wouldnít more people be downloading his song?
Applying these three principles in detail and depth, analyze the world of the Circle. And be sure to identify things that canít be counted, things that are unique unto themselves, and value that isnít dependent on popularity.
- ì All that happens must be known,î “Privacy is Theft”, “Sharing is Caring”, and “Secrets are Lies”: analyze, evaluate, critique, examine with plenty of specifics the implications in the novel of these idealistic-sounding slogans/ideas.
- Analyze the Circle and the world of the novel outside the company with reference to the metaphor of the Cult: what are Cults, their essential features, and how does the Circle fit that description? To do this topic, you must research characteristics or criteria of cults, and apply each of the most applicable ones, one to a body paragraph, to evidence from the Circle.
Further: what does it mean that the worldís most powerful company is like a cultówhat are the implications of this?
- ìTo live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinementî (Margaret Atwood). Explore this metaphor in an essay about the novel. You first need to brainstorm an outline of the things that characterize *real* solitary confinementóin prisonóand then connect them, one a time, in a systematic way, to the sense and feeling of Atwoodís comparison to working at the Circle (or perhaps just being in the Circle as a compulsive internet user who lives a virtual life almost entirely).
- Mae had the feeling, which she was used to by now at the Circle, that they alone were able to think aboutóor were simply alone in being able to enactóreforms that seemed beyond debate in their necessity and urgencyî (153). Write an essay in which you examine the reforms/goods that are supposedly ìBeyond Debate,î and explain they appear to be so, in whose interest it is that they do, but also why these ends and/or means are in fact debatable, and why they may mix ìobvious benefits with subtle (and not-so-subtle) harms in one seamless packageî (Francis Fukuyama). What values or principles or ethics are violated by these supposed slam-dunk goods, or by the means to obtain them?
- Whatís dystopian about ëutopiaí? Analyze the novel with respect to appearances and reality, the ideal vs. the real. What are the utopian premises of the Circle; whatís are the dystopian realities? Examine The Circle for expressions of idealism and of the utopian impulseóthe striving for perfection, the hoped-for the dream of specific cure-alls and other outcomes being realized, perhaps the belief that itís possible to transcend the human condition (i.e., the condition that involves struggle, hardship, fear of rejection, illness, death). What summary statement can you offer (thesis) about the way the utopian and dystopian co-existóthe hoped for heaven and nightmare horrorsóand are so closely aligned?
- Dogma always sanctions (permits, looks the other way at) ignorance: what are the Circlers ignorant of? What dogmatic beliefs do they hold? And what does their dogma blind them to? (In the sense in which weíre using it here, ìDogmaî = a set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted).
- In the historical company store, the workers were sold basic goods ñ in what was otherwise a setting of scarcity (mining town, a lumber town in remote areas) — at inflated prices by their employer, thus cycling their wages right back to the company.
- After acknowledging the differences in setting and the availability of goods both essential and preferential, explore this metaphor to include not just the Circlers but also the entire world of Internet users (and to what extent do they become workers for the Circle, too?)
- ìAs far back as 1835, Tocquevilleís Democracy in America predicted the tyranny of public opinion, a tyranny that can be amplified immeasurably by the Internetî (Margaret Atwood). Write an essay on the problems of mob rule in the novel, and implicitly, in our present or future real world.
- The Circle exemplifies how ìwe can be led down the primrose path (to evil) much more blindly by our good intentions than our bad onesî (Atwood). Write an essay about unintended consequences of good intentions.
- Write an essay about the implications for politics and democracy of transparency, of politicians ìgoing clear.î (This paper needs to reference events, people, and quotes from the Circle in detail and in every body paragraph).
- Technocracies suppose that ìthe vital needs of man are (contrary to everything the great souls of history have taught us) are purely technical in character [Ö.] If a problem does not have such a technical solution, then it must not be a real problemî (p. 10, Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture). Write an essay in which you argue that human needs and ends are not adequately accounted for in the company of the novel, and in the world outside the company.
- ìA culture which is so strongly influenced by scientific concepts and technocratic illusions is constantly tempted to annul or to obscure the unique individual. Schemes for the management of human nature involve denials of the dignity of man by their neglect of the chief source of manís dignity, namely his essential freedom and capacity for self-determinationî (8, Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History). Examine how the marketing apparatus that is the Circle, through its power and reach, denies human dignity, and undermines human freedom (while often appearing to do just the opposite).
- Write an essay in which you offer your own values, your normative sense of right v. wrong, and contrast them to the values suggested in this novel. Make sure your reader can see the outrageous contrasts between what you consider good, right, true, and/or decent, and the values implicit in the world of this novel. Make what’s implicit, explicit–what might we fail to fully appreciate about the “values-shortage” in this world as we’re reading and perhaps enjoying the exotic bizarreness of it all? Consider one main value contrast per paragraph; introduce all your relevant values in the introduction bring them into some common frame of reference.
- Sense and Sensibility: examine the novel in terms of Mae’s sensibility, ìtasteî, affective (emotional response) to things, as well as in terms of Mae’s ìSenseî, namely her valuesóher sense of the good, the right (and wrong), and trueówhich are probably informed by her sensibility. How does her taste end up influencing her opinions to her detriment in the novel; that is, make the case for her Sensibility influencing her Senseóhow in this story of a sensitive young woman is her sense of values influenced by her esthetics/taste? What are the dangers of too much ìtasteî? What kind of statement can you offer (thesis) about how our taste influences our opinions?
- If itís likely that propaganda seeks to complicate (obscure) the
simple and simplify the complicated (the ambiguous), write an essay in
which you link the world of this novel to this premise. Conversely, if
itís true that art seeks to respect the ambiguous ñ to acknowledge and
represent complexity — while exposing untruths obvious to the discerning
eye, trace this motif in the novel also
