–> Critical Reflection #4 Assignment: Connect to outside sources (article/book/podcast/ted talk/blog/website/etc) [CR4]

This is a Text investigation. Consider your essential question in the context of the 2 outside sources you found and shared (1st one was on April 8th). How do these ideas resonate with or challenge your own beliefs, experiences, or practices? Be sure to give concrete and specific examples. You may want to address: ways the sources answered parts of your Essential Question, what additional questions were raised, or how your essential understanding of your project was altered or confirmed by the readings you did.

Make sure to cite your sources.

5/4

Essential question: How can storytelling help me to examine the world around me?

I’m still struggling to align my essential question and my project. By necessity I designed my essential question to be able to fit to more than one project, but now I regret that. While I’m enjoying my project, despite its challenges, I feel like I have to bend and twist it to serve my question. I can feel it essentially hanging over my head when I work; I’m torn between focusing on my question or on my story. The outside sources I used, including the Thelma and Louise script and academic literature on the causes of violence, don’t really help. The script helps me in my writing, and the literature helps me in building profiles for my characters, but I struggle to relate what I’m doing to the world around me, much less use it to examine. Sometimes I feel that I just don’t have the nuance as a writer to fulfill my essential question. For example, in my piece, a scene in which a character doesn’t set out knives while setting the table indicates mistrust and group bond deterioration. In life, it’s not that deep. I’ve considered reverse-engineering this by taking things from life and putting them in my work to examine them, rather than vice versa, but I found this too to be ineffective. Just because something means something on paper doesn’t mean it means the same in life; just because something means something in life doesn’t mean it means the same on paper. What I’m reading on causes of violence (currently specifically antisocial behavior and personality disorders) can sort of help me examine the world around me, but only literally and on a surface level. With this reading I can ascertain why someone may have done something horrible and apply it to my work, but as I haven’t been party to anything nearly this gruesome, it’s not really answering my essential question. Like paper vs. life analysis, these concepts don’t translate to a smaller scale that I could better quantify.