Life is Beautiful: inner journeys

Some suggested related material suggestions:
These deal with similar historical material. Art Spiegleman’s graphic novel, Maus, deals with similar material to your text but is a very different form.
Shaun Tan’s The Arrival treats the changes of migration as a consequence of some difficulties in the home country but this text is more allegorical. Tan is an Australian children’s book author although this is not specifically for children.
Li Cunxin, Mao’s Last Dancer deals with the life story of a Chinese dancer’s decision to pursue his career and thus leave China. He now lives in Melbourne and the book has been reworked as a children’s book, The Peasant Prince.
Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa is also worth thinking about. It’s an autobiography. Don’t do the film.
Che Guevara’s journal, Motorcycle Diaries charts a journey that changed his life and created the political revolutionary. It’s the background to the movie of the same name.
Lt. Col. Jay Kopelman, From Baghdad With Love deals with the horrors of the Iraqi war through the eyes of an American soldier who finds a dog that becomes very important to his and other troops mental and emotional survival. Don’t dismiss it too lightly. It actually deals with that human need for affection to survive and the lengths people will go to to achieve it that is in your text. It’s also true.

Little Miss sunshine: journeys

These are links on the film and may be useful. There is little of any great depth other than reviews; often the case when something is so relativley new:

• This website is good for getting all the names right: the director, the characters and the actors who play them: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449059/
• Wikipedia has an entry so look for the links at the bottom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Miss_Sunshine
• The official website is comprehensive but I regard them as essentially advertising: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/littlemisssunshine/
• Rotten Tomatoes is a web institution for its reviewing honesty. You might get some ideas or pointers: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/little_miss_sunshine/
• This link contains a collection of reviews from newspapers and magazines and some a quite prestigious http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/littlemisssunshine

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: a physical journey

Resources

• Background on the author, Mark Twain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

• An overview from wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn

• HSC Online material

http://hsc.csu.edu.au/english/area_of_study/physical_journeys/2915/huck_finn.html

• An official home page from the University of Virginia

http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/huchompg.html

• A teacher’s guide to the novel. Useful for approaches to the novel.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/teachers/huck/index.html

• A short article examining racism in the novel

http://www.salwen.com/mtrace.html

• A list of books that were questioned 1990 to 2000. Huckleberry Finn was one of them. Have a look at the others.

http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bbwlinks/100mostfrequently.htm

• An article that looks at Huckleberry Finn a hundred years later. Written by another great American writer, Norman mailer.

http://web.archive.org/web/20001115041000/http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/10/specials/mailer-finn.html

• This site provides links to online literary criticism of the novel.

http://www.ipl.org.ar/cgi-bin/ref/litcrit/litcrit.out.pl?ti=adv-38

Coleridge and related material

I’ve pasted in the suggestions from the website: www.e-rudite.net that has more than the blog. I’m going to colour in blue the ones I might choose but obviously whatever takes your fancy (to use a Coleridge word). There are other more general suggestions on http://www.e-rudite.net/aosresources.htm. Just follow the link at the top of the page to Related Material.
My aim is to answer students questions in a way that is helpful to them so feel free any time.

With Coleridge you’re looking for the creativity of an artist, so either the thinking about it, the process or the creative expression itself. At the end is a link to two ABC websites that have writers taking about their craft.

Suggestions for related material:

Fiction

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones A girl dies violently and looks on the passing years and her family from heaven.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Do the book not the Disney film. Carroll annotated it so you have text, illustration and annotations which makes it an interesting text to impress markers with.

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray This is a journey in time focusing on a man who makes a pact with the devil to stay young and beautiful whilst a portrait increasing reflects his sinning self. It’s Edwardian but it’s a novella and not that long. A Classic.

Non-fiction

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Graphic novel and picture books

Jeannie Baker, The Window This is one of the most beautiful picture books in which the world changes through a single window frame on every page. You ‘read’ the details she selects.

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Raymond Briggs, When the wind Blows

John Marsden and Shaun Tan, The Rabbits This represents the invasion of Australia (rabbits/the Bristish) through the eyes of the original inhabitants and takes us on a journey through time and change. The text and the images are the imaginative side of it.

Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing

Film

Finding Neverland, dir. Marc Forster

A Prairie Home Companion, dir. Robert Altman

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, dir. Spike Jonze This is about memory and it moves through time in a highly unusual manner. The script is on the web. It is excellent but also challenging.

Online resources

Books and Writing, transcripts of writers interviewed on their craft, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/

Writers and Writing, radio programme with podcasts available, http://www.barbarademarcobarrett.com/writersonwriting/index.html

Judy

Inner journeys: choosing related material

Q: I’m doing inner journeys and my prescribed text is the Empire of the Sun, just wondering if you could suggest any texts that could be a suitable related material?

A: Empire of the Sun is essentially a survival story focusing on a boy during the Second World War. It doesn’t have to be a direct link but the issues of hardship and survival can be your linking thread – the inner strength people find in challenging circumstances such as war as well as the friendships. The following three have war themes.

• This is about some Vietnam vets from Australian Story ABC. It’s a two part program. You can access the transcript: http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/behindenemylines/default.htm

• This is a link to a soldier and his life changing experiences in Timor: http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/thepeacemaker/default.htm

• This is about a group of students who went to Gallipoli http://www.abc.net.au/austory/specials/gallipoli/default.htm

If you are into anime, there’s “Grave of the Fireflies”. Brother and sister in the period after Hiroshima. Probably a good text for similarities and differences. The Japanese perspective makes it an interesting choice as well.

Q: Andrew Denton interviews are great to analyse but I am having trouble finding other texts that I could draw more links to my prescribed text.

I was thinking of doing a poem and a picture book. For a film, i’m considering About Schmidt- directed by Alexander Payne or Schindler’s List directed by Spilberg, do you think they are appropriate supplementary texts?  I was thinking of doing a poem and a picture book. For a film, i’m considering About Schmidt- directed by Alexander Payne or Schindler’s List directed by Spilberg, do you think they are appropriate supplementary texts?

A:  About Schmidt is about a search for self. A rumpled Jack Nicholson. I don’t remember Schindler’s List being so strong, unless you’re looking at the persecution question and solutions to it. I like Nowhere In Africa, a film that has three people find different solutions to the problems of the WW2 and being forced to leave Germany: mother, father and daughter. It is German with subtitles. And there is Motorcycles Diaries about the revolutionary, Che Guevara, before he became a revolutionary and the events that changed his life.
A picture book? Mao’s Last Dancer has just come out as a picture book for children:Chinese boy escapes Mao’s China to fulfill his ambitions as a dancer. True story. Lives in Melbourne. In his 40s. The autobiography was on the bestseller lists for 12 months. It would be suitable. I think it’s called the Peasant Prince. There’s Shaun Tan’s The Red Leaf in which a girl searches for a solution to her sadness. It’s a beautiful book. Aussie too.

Belonging: Little Miss Sunshine

This film has as its basis a physical journey (  from home across the United States) to a beauty contest which Olive has entered, trained by her grandfather. On the journey everyone developes a changed sense of belonging:

• Olive is happy and focussed on her fantasy and lives out her fathers principles of success
• Richard finds what he really values in his father and Sheryl, Dwayne and Olive after career failures
• Granpa has a home and a mission through Olive after being rejected by his retirement village for his unacceptable behaviour
• Dwayne comes to terms with his family and his ambitions, becoming a willing participant in his family
• Sheryl has re-established her family by making her family take this journey
• Frank finds meaning to his life after his abortive suicide attempt through a newfound sense of belonging.

It’s an image of a dysfunctional family whose members rediscover what it means to belong:

• the bus that slowly falls apart but brings the family together
• the training of Olive, not fully revealed until the end
• the mishandling of the grandfather’s body that occurs because of the need to respect a father by a son
• the satire on beauty contest: Olive is the real beauty in pageant of plastic Barbi dolls
• the humour that permeates the film.

Journeys: Little Miss Sunshine

This is also a film about Belonging: 2009 – 2012 . More on that later.

This film has as its basis a physical journey ( road from home across the United States to a beauty contest which Olive has entered, trained by her grandfather. On the journey everyone goes on an inner journey:

• Olive lives out her fathers principle of success
• Richard finds what he really values after career failures
• Dwayne comes to terms with his family and his ambitions
• Sheryl has re-established her family by making her family take this journey
• Frank finds meaning to his life after his abortive suicide attempt.

It’s also an imaginative journey in it’s conception:

• the bus that slowly falls apart but brings the family together
• the training of Olive, not fully revealed until the end
• the mishandling of the grandfather’s body that occurs because of the need to respect a father by a son
• the satire on beauty contest: Olive is the real beauty in pageant of plastic Barbi dolls
• the humour that permeates the film.