Final Project – Blog
For my final project, I would like to analyze the psychology of certain characters and relationship dynamics from our readings, and relate these things to either real current events, pop-culture, or history. I would like to talk about the characters actions and the motivations behind these actions or the relationships between characters and the dynamics behind them. My basic purpose would be to point out the realistic traits of exaggerated fictional characters, and go on to compare them to similar people or characters. I think most of my comparisons would be to news articles. For example, how you could compare Bartleby’s rebellion and dissatisfaction with the recent news about the fast food workers protesting to raise minimum wage. Another example would be how you could compare Diary of a Madman, where the person is “crazy” but also has more clear insight in some right to “normal people” to John Nash (subject of A Beautiful Mind).
I would like to compare the psychology and relationship dynamics of fictional characters to real examples of people with parallel motivations and relationships from the news and pop-culture and possibly history. I would be using research on related people as well as on technical psychological and sociological terms for the things I was pointing out. I would also like to tie in outside works of fiction that have similar characters because a lot of the works we read remind me very closely of characters I have read about in the past, which I guess is a consequence of the fact that they are realistic.
I am not sure if this is a specific enough subject for a blog but basically to summarize, I would be pointing out real psychological traits or sociological dynamics between characters and comparing these to parallel figures in the news and also in other fictional stories.
3 responses so far
This is quite an interesting subject, which, I believe, will also look consequently at the evolution of the human psychology. Indeed, themes such as greed, love, happiness, et cetera are pretty universal and timeless. It would be interesting to make a parallel between, for instance, “Tartuffe” and Maddoff’s Ponzi scheme with greed, as well as fake devotion to a religion (christianity in the former case, capitalism and money in the latter).
I look forward to seeing your blog.
Good luck
Comparing characters to other characters, real or fictional, as well as to current news events, is way too broad. The blog will lack a clear narrative linking one post to the next. I see character psychology as a possible theme, but even this is very broad. You can analyze different characters in a lot of different ways. So, think about what psychological profile, for instance, you’re interested in. Is it the alienated individual? The manic depressive? The…? This is one way to begin honing and narrowing. Plan icon bringing in upcoming readings, to keep the blog current with our class discussions. Tis will involve a little leap of faith, since you may not know what characters and issues are to come, but you can make it work.
I like this psychology approach to the blog. It feels like it came be turned into a diary entry type of blog where you input different daily events and relating its psychology to those of the texts that we read. There’s certainly a lot of directions where you can take this. If you feel like the topic so far is too broad (but that depends on how you approach it really) maybe you can try to focus it on a few themes like madness, death or greed. Or maybe you can organize the blog in that in the beginning you would have some external influences on a character’s psychological state, then increasing the tension to internal ones.
Hope this helps in any way.