Ms. Dominico’s Year 12 VCE English Class

Granted that Ian McEwan is not a Year 12 VCE student, play along with me for the purposes of this activity.

Let’s Pretend:
* Ian is a Year 12 VCE student
* that he was given the same prompt as you for Post #6 (memory and lives shaping…)
* you are his VCE assessor

TASK: Follow the instruction in today’s Word document (Sample Written Explanation and Student Piece of writing) to highlight and assess McEwan’s writing. Post your edits onto your blog so we can all learn from you!

Here is the file: sample-written-explanation-for-atonement1

Emotional reality versus literal reality
Two realities are presented in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The tangible and objective reality of the ‘real’ world of the text is contrasted with the realm of memory, emotions and subjectivity as revealed through Joel’s subconscious mind. The emotional reality recounted through memory is concerned with what is felt, with those things that cannot be proven to exist but are experienced as real. Here, the feelings associated with an event make it real, even if it only exists in dreams, observations or intuition.
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Tonight’s HW task:

TASK: Analyse the types reality as presented in some of the reality TV shows that you watch. Use Week 5’s Handout (from the Insight CD) to help you “name” these types of realities.
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Eloisa to Abelard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abelard and his pupil, Heloise by Edmund Leighton.

Published in 1717, Eloisa to Abelard is a poem by Alexander Pope (1688–1744). It is an Ovidian heroic epistle inspired by the 12th-century story of Eloisa’s (age 19) (Heloise’s) illicit love for, and secret marriage to, her teacher Pierre Abélard (age 51), perhaps the most popular teacher and philosopher in Paris, and the brutal vengeance her family exacts when they castrate him, not realizing that the lovers had married.
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ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004)
starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Kirsten Dunst
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Michel Gondry

Here is an insightful film review from:

http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/eternalsunshine.htm

“…But it’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that completes Kaufman’s emergence into an emotional world with what is essentially an ode to one of my favourite ideas and phrases: the madness of love in a temporary world.

…. The film is told as a montage of Joel’s reflections of love at the moment of their erasure, and it’s every bit as melancholy and romantic as the conceit would imply.

… the picture is a cascade of thoughts that rejects traditional narratives while holding fast to recognizable strictures of storytelling. Joel is the hero, attempting to rescue his damsel from the dungeon of his mind and bad decisions.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind revolves around two quotes.
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Some questions to consider:

1. What is reality?
2. Is there such a thing as objective reality, or does every individual’s perceptions of reality differ – a subjective reality?
3. How might we become aware that our perception of reality is not the same as another person’s?
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