Here I am supposed to blog about my contribution to this week's group presentation on Peter Shaffer's Equus. Our group posted a group-authored blog here:
http://equus638.blogspot.com/
That chronicles our follies and foibles as we mucked through mountains of literary theory and one small two-act play.
My primary contributions are named in the post's title: the Tagmemic grid being the most significant. Also, props. And I'd like to think a bit of perspective/sanity/direction. Ha! Like being the operative word.
More to say on this after this evening's shenanigans.
OK....the evening's shenanigans long since passed, and here are my reflections.
The tagmemic grid...hmmm... I still like the grid. However, due to my lateness and our group momentum I'm not sure it was adequately explained to the class. In theory it would have helped groups to explore the issues in Equus on an escalating scale of complexity to arrive at certain conclusions. In practice...I'm pretty sure it just served as a decoration-a garnish if you will-augmenting the "presentation" of our presentation. I believe that some found it too complex.
And the horses...well, they were garnishes to begin with. So perhaps I was the set decorator.
In terms of discussion I am happy with what happened. I feel pretty strongly that our group distributed the task of analysis equally. We were each very knowledgeable about the text of Equus and the application of a variety of theoretical approaches to the text. My own analysis applied mostly psychoanalytic theory and poststructural theory to Equus. I especially focused on the play as Dysart's narrative, wherein he arrives at certain conclusions about the erroneous nature of normativity and his role as an enforcer of social norms.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment