Ms. Gokturk Trends in Literature

COMMENTARY JOURNALS

One of your assignments this term will be to write a short story or a short screenplay to serve as a warning to your contemporaries. Your audience will reflect on a current problem in today’s world and realize the vital need to change our current path. Writers of speculative fiction play the “what if” game. They observe or imagine a “what if” scenario and its implications.

YOUR TASK: Write one journal entry per week (or as many as your teacher assigns) that explores a problem that exists today. For each problem, follow the four part model modeled below.

Begin noticing -- as you watch the news, read science magazines (Scientific American, Discovery, etc.), pay attention in your social studies and science classes, notice the tabloids in the supermarkets, watch televisions, see movies – how “things” relate to the topics we discuss. Your mission this semester is to recognize where we are, where we are going, how others see these topics, and overall make connections from outside our class to the literature and discussion we generate. Write down your ides in your notebook to share, cut out articles, etc.

For each journal, address each of the four questions:

1. Description of what I observed that made me think of utopias/dystopias or end of the world.
2. What might be a danger to our future? What is the fear? (Mine, pop culture, author’s, etc.) If I let my mind wander, this makes me think about…
3. What should we do? Can we stop it? Can we prepare for it? Of what might we want to be aware?
4. Description of the future. What if we don’t do anything? What does the future look like? Questions? Is there any evidence in the real world today that this could happen?

A JOURNAL MIGHT LOOK SOMETHING LIKE THIS:

1. The table of contents for Scientific American (June 2006) lists several articles about pollution. “Wading in Waste” graphically shows how unchecked development along our coasts is leading to disease-causing microbes in our coastal waters. A day at the beach becomes a gamble with disease risks.
2. Shell fish and other organisms are becoming infected and thus are inedible. Humans can get sick swimming in the fecal matter. Chemical runoffs are also killing fauna and flora and the impact on humans is surely inevitable. They can die, too. This also makes me think about how deforestation and manmade clearings in regions makes us more vulnerable to storms. In Haiti, lethal mudslides are the result of the eradication of trees. Or how New Orleans’ damage may not have been as extreme if we hadn’t destroyed the wetlands.
3. There needs to be more regulation of coastal building. Humans need to become more sensitive to the world around them. We need to wake up and see that every action and every consumption choice impacts our environment.
4. Will there be any coastal areas without buildings? If humans find their coasts polluted, where will they swim? Could “boat islands” be the future? Wouldn’t those get polluted, too? For example, Arabs are building 'The World' off the coast of Dubai trying to re-create the geography of the globe (made up of 300 man-made islands grouped roughly into continents and countries). Wouldn’t the waters of the world become polluted entirely solely for our water sports/leisure? If coastal areas are so populate, the amount of life lost during storms or tidal waves could be apocalyptic. Everybody could literally have beach front property.