OUIL504 - Summer Brief 3 - Peer Crit and Evaluation

Overall I think my presentation went quite well, I didn't worry as much this time about writing a script and just tried to let it come naturally to me by bouncing off of images and text that I had included in my presentation

If I were to do the presentation again I would probably want to look around the author and look at things affecting their lives and about their lives in general, for example, funny anecdotes about them, rather than focusing just on their books and essays.

Everyone said that my research was consistent for all three authors and that I was very informed on the political context of Orwell's work.

I had already started making some visual research in response to Animal Farm and 1984, so I just need to continue doing that.

OUIL504 - About the Author - Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami was born January 1949 in Japan during the Post WW2 Baby Boom
His best selling books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into over 50 languages

Haruki is a serious marathon runner and triathlon enthusiast, although he didn't start until he was 33. He discusses his relationship with running in his 2008 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

He began writing fiction when he was 29, before that he ran a jazz club and didn't consider himself to be a creative person.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/09/29/reference/murakami-titan-of-postwar-literature/

"Over a career spanning 30 years, he has illustrated the apathy and ennui enveloping postwar Japan through sometimes wildly fantastic storytelling with surreal twists and turns, sprinkled with elements of Western philosophy and psychology"

Murakami’s stories are characterized by their often humorous dialogue and surreal plot turns, usually involving heavy usage of metaphors and frequent references to aspects of American and European culture.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/harukimurakami

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/13/haruki-murakami-interview-colorless-tsukur-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage
"Murakami has often spoken of the theme of two dimensions, or realities, in his work: a normal, beautifully evoked everyday world, and a weirder supernatural realm, which may be accessed by sitting at the bottom of a well (as does the hero of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), or by taking the wrong emergency staircase off a city expressway (as in 1Q84). Sometimes dreams act as portals between these realities. In Tsukuru Tazaki there is a striking sex dream, at the climax of which the reader is not sure whether Tsukuru is still asleep or awake. Yet Murakami hardly ever remembers his own dreams."

His novels thus far have generally divided into two types. There are the overtly magical-realist romances (A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84), and the works on a smaller canvas, in which hints of the supernatural remain mostly beneath the mournful, mundane surface (South of the Border, West of the Sun; Sputnik Sweetheart). With its unresolved mysteries, tales-within-tales and maybe-dreams,
"

I found this on Pinterest (artist in presentation) I don't particularly like this style, I think it's too simplistic, But I thought it would be nice to include something different.

I like the paper texture in the background of this image and the limited colour palette, the mixture of blues and greys.

Although this is very simple, I like the subtle hint of colour in the girls' cheeks and how that matches with the colour of the text at the bottom.

I like this illustration by Lizzy Stewart, again for the texture especially in the girls; clothes, but also because of the attention to small detail you can see in the hair and face;

OUIL504 - About the Author - George Orwell

He won two scholarships to Winchester and Eton, chose to go to Eton.

He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer.

He felt guilty about the seperation that race had caused between him and the Burmese people so he went and lived with poor people in London and France for a bit.

In the 1930's he began to consider himself a socialist 

In 1936 he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in Northern England

Animal Farm

Captioned 'a fairy story', Animal Farm is anything but that. Sick and tired of maltreatment under their enslavement from man, the animals of Manor Farm revolt. Released from all chains, there is but one key rule: All animals are equal. Yet, as the story progresses we soon see some animals are more equal than others…

Written in an elegantly simple style, Orwell uses the turmoil faced on the farm by the animals as a metaphor for the Russian Revolution itself. It shows how a people's fight for freedom can so quickly morph into a power play as chaos ensues. Orwell cleverly plants lies, illiteracy and even a head hunt throughout the novel to explain the oppression, propaganda and elaborate excuses that led to the rise of the Soviet dictatorship.

1984

1984 is a Dystopian Novel by Orwell which was first published in 1949.

In Orwell's essay 'Why I Write' all his serious work which was written after the Spanish Civil War in 1936 "was written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" 

Therefore 1984 is seen to be a cautionary tale against totalitarianism and in particular the betrayal of a revolution by those claiming to defend it.

Orwell bases many aspects of the society in 1984 upon the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The "Two Minutes Hate" for instance, which was based upon Stalinism's habitual demonisation of its enemies and rivals. Also the description of Big Brother himself has similarities to that of Stalin.

OUIL504 - About the Author - Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag on Art by Wendy Macnoughton

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon the concept of ‘beauty.’ As if art were ‘about’ beauty—as science is ‘about’ truth! 

Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit) 

Susan Sontag was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist.  She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology.

Quotes

Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

On Photography

In 1977, Sontag published a series of essays On Photography.

 being educated

by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal

images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around,

claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since

then just about everything has been photographed

The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic – Germans, Japanese and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Sontag writes in her essay that the convenience of modern photography has created an over abundance of visual material and "just about everything has been photographed" 

If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. … The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

The Paris Review

"I know I was self-publishing when I was about nine; I started a four-page monthly newspaper, which I hectographed (a very primitive method of duplication) in about twenty copies and sold for five cents to the neighbors"

“My subject is war, and anything about any war that does not show the appalling concreteness of destruction and death is a dangerous lie.”