When first beginning to explore ideas for this paper, I toyed with writing about love and its effects and role throughout Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Giver. The more I looked, though, the more I came to realize that there is a common theme between the two that is deeper than love: memory. Based on a conversation over our class' group chat on Slack and other research I have done, I think it would be really interesting to write about how emotions like pain, sorrow, grief, and love, and experiences like war and peace, affect and influence memory, and vise versa. In my research and writing for this paper, I am not sure if I will only stick with A Midsummer Night's Dream, or if I will also include other plays. I have looked into King Lear and Hamlet also for examples of this memory and emotion phenomenon. While I am still working on narrowing the topic down from these thoughts, I am interested to see where this goes.
The Giver is one of my favorite books, and memory is at the center of the story line, with Jonas becoming the Receiver of Memory. Memories were taken away from the Community, and it is through Jonas they are restored - just like how tragic events in Hamlet or weird ones in A Midsummer Night's Dream are also affected by memory. While I have researched, I have found a few articles that I think will be helpful in looking into this theme, including one on The Giver discussing Utopian societies, and some articles discussing Shakespeare's plays, like King Lear and Hamlet, and memory.
I think that you could even bring in some psychological studies into this. Like, you could look up some sources about how memories can alter our perception of reality, or the emotions we associate with things, ideas or people, etc. It's a cool topic with a lot of room to grow!
ReplyDeleteThe Giver is a book that so many people talk about that I feel like at some point I need to read it. But it is about memory? I didn't know that.
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