Girl on FireHUM 3285: Postmodern Adolescent Literature

Spring 2012Dr. Perdigao

April 11-13, 2012

Senior Design Ideas?• Muttations (185)

• Katniss

• Tracker jackers—attack

• Hallucinations—reality, illusion (192-3)

• Ways of interpreting the game

• “Destroying things is much easier than making them” (211): Stephens?

• Mockingjays (212-13)

• Katniss and song (234-5), for Rue

• Song, Peeta’s memory (300-1)

• Waiting for Cato, mockingjays: back to Rue (329)

Senior Design Ideas?• New muttations (331)

• Something about them (333)

• “Their eyes are the least of my worries. What about their brains? Have they been given any of the real tributes memories?” (334).

Trauma• Disembodiment

• Screaming (194) (Adam?)

• Rue’s death, making meaning (236-7), remembrance

• Dream of Rue in trees (239)

• Making Rue and herself “unforgettable” (242)

• First kill (243)

• Unreality—the moon as fabricated or real (310)

• “There never will be anything but cold and fear and the agonized sounds of the boy dying in the horn” (339).

• “I try to remember” (341)

Redefining• “No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But then. . . what?” (310)

• Acquisition of food defining Katniss: “Take that away and I’m not really sure who I am, what my identity is” (311)

• Hunting with Peeta, “I feel like I’m eleven again” (316)

• Capitol as new institution, defining the tributes, even the victors (Trites)

• Never leaving the games: “It’s the Capitol’s way of reminding people that the Hunger Games never really go away” (370).

• Adulthood, no real security

Death and the Adolescent• “But in adolescent literature, death is often depicted in terms of maturation when

the protagonist accepts the permanence of mortality, when s/he accepts herself as Being-towards-death” (Trites 119).

• “Adolescents often gain their first knowledge of the pain permanent separation involves when they feel powerless because someone they love dies; the corollary that inevitably follows is adolescents recognition of their own mortality” (119).

•  Narrative structure, ends of chapters

• “But in District 12, where the word tribute is pretty much synonymous with the word corpse, volunteers are all but extinct” (22).

Disempowerment: Empowerment• Weapons—new perspective (197)

• Survival—District 11, sustenance

• Careers “don’t know how to be hungry” (208)

• Jonas—starving

• Playing to audience (248), all construct for Katniss?

• Story as censored for broadcast (270)

• “remarkable memory” vs. “unforgettable” (302)

• With Thresh’s death, “I promise to remember him” (309) {Mockingjay?}

Bicycling into Oblivion• Foxface, Clove—identifying others

• Katniss as “Fire Girl” to Thresh (288)

• Peeta—”boy with the bread” (297)

• Dressing as a girl for the interviews (355)—innocent

• “I begin transforming back into myself. Katniss Everdeen. A girl who lives in the Seam. Hunts in the woods. Trades in the Hob. I stare in the mirror as I try to remember who I am and who I am not” (371).