Revenge Films

Post your responses to your revenge films here. The films to choose from are:

1. Mad Max (1979)
2. The Lion King (1994)
3. Lucky Number Slevin (2006)
4. Taken (2008)
5. True Grit (2010)

Suggestions to get you started:

• How does this revenge narrative play itself out in both your chosen movie and in Titus Andronicus? 
• How does the figure of the "vigilante" work in both of these texts?
• Whose side are you on in both the play and the movie? Why?

William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus

Please post your responses to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus here. You're free to respond in any way that makes sense to you, but, if you're stuck, you might consider:

• What this story says about revenge
• How violence figures into this text
• How these first three acts set up a kind of expected "resolution"--how will this end?
• How Shakespeare's style represent something to you
• Any other kind of reaction barring "this is hard" or "I don't get it"

Post your responses as comments to this post. If you like, you're free to respond to the responses of other students, so long as the are very close to 250 words or more. If I were you, I'd compose my response in a word processing program and then copy & paste it into the comments box so as not to lose your comment if you press the "back" button.

John Donne's The Flea and Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust

Phyllis Wheatley's On Being Brought from Africa to America

Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter

Walt Whitman's Preface from Leaves of Grass

Emily Dickinson's selected poems

Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est

Karel Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots

Langston Hughes' Theme for English B & The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Paul Laurence Dunbar's We Wear the Mask

Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit

Allen Ginsberg's Howl

Wole Soyinka's Telephone Conversation

August Wilson's Fences

Sherman Alexie's Smoke Signals

American Screenplay: American Hustle

Notorious B.I.G., Nas, Kendrick Lamar