Content Matter Discussion
As a lifelong learner, I am appreciative that the “Democracy and Inequality” seminar is outside of my wheelhouse as it is a political science course and I was an English Education major in college. I felt that it would be an excellent opportunity for me to learn something new and incorporate interdisciplinary teaching and learning into my lesson plans, especially for the AP class.
One of the skills that students need for approaching the AP Literature exam--which would also be beneficial in college-level thinking and analysis--is recognizing the larger context of a fictional text. This can include the historical context, biographical context of the author, political context, social context, etc., and many of these intersect with one another. On the AP Literature exam, students can elevate their writing--hence earning a “sophistication point” on an essay--by exploring the significance of a text within a larger context, and this lesson will provide students the opportunity to practice this kind of thinking while reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
I wanted to use Orwell himself as the lens through which we would connect the fictional text of 1984 with the factual situation of his life experience and the socio-political realities that he observed in the world around him. Exploring these connections also provides an opportunity for students to understand why we study literature in the first place: it speaks truths about both the historical and current issues that influence the human experience.
One example of this in texts that we will study includes Orwell’s description of the Spanish Civil War in his nonfiction novel, Homage to Catalonia: “It was an extraordinary life that we were living--an extraordinary way to be at war, if you could call it war” (8). His acknowledgement of the war that did not seem like a realistic war is reflected in the dropping of rocket bombs in Oceania: faint indications of a war that may or may not be taking place with foreign powers. It appears that his final opinion on the matter, in Spain, is “Now that I had seen the front I was profoundly disgusted. They called this war! And we were hardly even in touch with the enemy!” (9). Attempts to incorporate the revolutionary mindset into a military setting seemed futile, especially when it came to proper training and discipline. “Actually, a newly raised draft ‘of militia was an undisciplined mob not because officers called the private ‘Comrade’ but because raw troops were always an undisciplined mob. In practice the democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army discipline is theoretically voluntary” (10). How could a military force function like that, let alone win a war and later spark a revolution against the government in power?
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