Final Narrative: Dystopian Literature in High Schools in Lebanon Across Time

During our final group meeting, phase 4 for our group’s digital project, we reviewed our refined spreadsheet from our previous map (the link for this map is found in my previous blog) which focused on dystopian literature read throughout time in high schools in Lebanon, and we noticed that George Orwell’s 1984, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner were repeatedly being read in different high schools over time. We therefore decided to use a close reading approach and stay within the domain of humanities in order to make a new spreadsheet focusing on the two dystopian novels, 1984 and The Kite Runner, and we made a new Carto map locating the schools that these books were read in, as well as the emotions that were felt while reading these books, as shown below:

To see our map for Orwell’s 1984 and Hosseini’s The Kite Runner in high schools in Lebanon across time, you can view it from this link: https://nsn.carto.com/viz/32ebef08-484b-11e6-af4c-0ef24382571b/public_map.

By viewing the map, one can see that students felt different emotions while reading these two dystopian novels throughout time in different high schools in Lebanon. Therefore, since no striking connection could be made based on the emotions that students felt while reading 1984 and The Kite Runner, it caused us to raise the question of why these books were repeatedly being read in high schools in Lebanon over time.

Additionally, we wanted to offer a visual representation of all the dystopian books that are being read in high schools in Lebanon across time, which we were able to do by using a program called Palladio (http://hdlab.stanford.edu/projects/palladio/). Therefore, this Palladio graph highlights that fact that several high schools in Lebanon are using dystopian literature throughout time, as shown below:

My group members and I were extremely interested in the fact that Orwell’s 1984 and Hosseini’s The Kite Runner are repeatedly being used in several schools and we wanted to discover why these dystopian novels are considered important enough to be recurrent in the high school cannon in Lebanon throughout time. Firstly, it is crucial to understand what is meant by dystopian novels. According to the Oxford Dictionary, a dystopia is: “an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The opposite of utopia” (Oxford Dictionaries). Orwell’s 1984 revolves around a character, Winston, who is angry because people are being oppressed by the Party, therefore indicating that this novel is a dystopian novel because there is a totalitarian rule over the people. Similarly, Hosseini’s The Kite Runner also takes place in a totalitarian setting, which is revealed through the main character, Amir’s, description of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Orwell’s 1984 is recurrently taught in high schools across time to serve as a role model for accomplishing mastery in writing styles, as well as the fact that this novel’s message regarding the dangers of a totalitarian government reflects the dangers that will come about if one’s freedom of rights are taken away. According to Irving Howe: “when my students ask. ‘whom shall I read in order to write better,’ I answer, ‘Orwell, the master of the plain style, that style which seems so easy to copy and is yet almost impossible to reach” (qtd. in Rodden 515). Therefore, Orwell’s simplistic style in 1984 serves as an example to students of ways in which writing prose could be done in a style that seems plain but is in reality full of meaning and depth. Moreover, when 1984 was taught in a high school, Orwell’s approach to the dangers of a totalitarian government lead August Franza to realize: “if [students] continue to behave as Orwell, they will mature into adults who will, I hope, not let abstractions lie for them nor erode common decency. They will tell what they themselves know and feel regardless of ideological impact” (Franza 31). In other words, after reading this novel, students are able to further grasp the notion that if one is stripped away of their freedom of rights, they will enter a dystopian universe.

Furthermore, Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is repeatedly read in high schools across time because this Middle Eastern novel serves to highlight the similarities amongst humanity regardless of cultural differences, as well as the fact that the novel causes some students to realize the privileges they are fortunate to have compared to some characters in the novel, such as Hassan, who is poor and raped. According to Ruth Caillouet: “now, more than ever, we need to take students to new worlds of existence, to study other lands and people, to relish the all-encompassing belief that all people share in a common humanity […] perhaps we can begin to show the complexities of war and terror that students must face to live in this world” (Caillouet 28). Therefore, The Kite Runner serves as a dystopian piece of literature that offers the point of view of an Afghani culture ruled by the Taliban regime, and regardless of the cultural differences, students can sympathize and relate with characters’ hardships during a time of war, which is unfortunately a common experience in Lebanon. Additionally, Kiran Qureshi explains that after reading The Kite Runner and other selected novels for the course, one of her students wrote: “‘whenever I think something is unfair or too difficult, I now remind myself how privileged I really am. The characters in these books have become my role models and have taught me a valuable lesson about optimism and resiliency’” (qtd. in Qureshi 38).  (qtd. in Qureshi 38). In other words, novels such as The Kite Runner serve to highlight the fact that some people are more fortunate than they originally believed, because the characters in this book struggle through hardships of war, rape, racism, and many other difficult encounters. It is through this aspect of dystopia and living under a totalitarian regime that causes the characters in The Kite Runner to experience their several hardships, and it is therefore significant for students to read this novel to once again highlight the dangers of a totalitarian state.

In conclusion, it was very interesting to work on our digital project because I was not expecting to see a common repetition of dystopian novels in different high schools across time in Lebanon. Also, the most repeated dystopian novels that are being used are Orwell’s 1984 and Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which serve to expose students to exemplary writing styles, the dangers of a totalitarian government, the importance of one’s freedom of rights, as well as being aware and grateful of one’s privileges. The messages regarding the dangers of a totalitarian government that these two novels convey is highly applicable to high school students because shaping the minds of the students of this day and age will hopefully allow them to take part in a peaceful future. It would be interesting if future digital projects for this course were able to investigate whether students read dystopian novels more during school time or during their free time because a link could be made between the emotions that the students felt while reading dystopian novels and whether these students chose to read these novels in their free time or were required to read these novels during school time.

Works Cited

Caillouet, Ruth R. “The Other Side of Terrorism and the Children of Afghanistan.” The English Journal 96.2 (2006): 28-33. Web.

Dystopia. 2016. In Oxford Dictionaries online. Retrieved from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dystopia

Franza, August. “Growing Up with “1984”” The English Journal 72.6 (1983): 30-31. Web.

Qureshi, Kira Subhani. “Beyond Mirrored Worlds: Teaching World Literature to Challenge Students’ Perception of “Other”” The English Journal 96.2 (2006): 34-40. Web.

Rodden, John. “Reputation, Canon-Formation, Pedagogy: George Orwell in the Classroom.” College English 53.5 (1991): 503-30. Web.

Dystopian Literature Read Throughout Time in Lebanon’s High Schools

For our English 205 digital project, I met with my group members today (phase 3 for our group) and our project surprisingly took on a completely different turn. Rather than following through with our initial idea of separating books by genres (dystopian, poetry, and plays), while we were looking through the master spreadsheet of all the students’ data input, we started to see a pattern emerge. We realised that if we were to focus on one genre, dystopian literature, which is important because it brings awareness of societal issues, we would be able to observe the emotions that have been associated with these books in Lebanon across time and across high schools in Lebanon.

Now it was time to create our CartoDB Map (https://cartodb.com). This was an extremely difficult process for several reasons. While playing around with the tools on CartoDB, after an hour we were able to realise that adding several layers to our map was not working because the layers were simply cancelling each other out. For example, we started with layer 1 including emotions and layer 2 was named schools, but the only layer that would appear on the actual map was the newest layer added (layer 2). We continued to play around with the program and we finally figured out how to use one layer and add multiple sets of information, as shown in the map below:

We still want to figure out how to get the map to show the several dystopian books read in the same school, but the map is only allowing us to view one book per school. Therefore, for International College the map only shows us the book The Kite Runner, which was read in 2013, with the emotion of sadness associated to the book. By getting the map to reveal several books read in the same school, we can portray the different age groups that have read certain books within different schools. We will have to meet our professor in order for her to guide us through this process.

We also had a lot of problems with the spreadsheet itself. After finally spending two hours and completing our map, we realised that some of the coordinates on the spreadsheet were incorrect, as well as a lot of the spelling. We therefore had to go back to our spreadsheet, fix the incorrect information, and remake our map from scratch.

Over all, creating our map was a success. To see our map you can view it from this link: https://nsn.cartodb.com/viz/c81969e2-39ec-11e6-bba6-0ef24382571b/public_map.

Now it’s time to conduct research in order to see the interrelations between the emotions people felt towards certain books, the schools they were read in, and the time in which they were read.

 

 

Focusing on Plays

After meeting with my group members this week (phase two for our group’s digital project), we made a copy of the Master Spreadsheet and filtered the information according to the genres that we want to focus on. While Norma is focusing on Classical Dystopian novels, I am focusing on Plays, and Sylvia is focusing on poems. We decided to each highlight the books that we will be focusing on so far in terms of why these specific books are being included in the cannon in Lebanese high schools. For example, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire have been read in several Lebanese high schools. There are of course several other plays that have been repeatedly used in different high schools in Lebanon and it would be interesting to see why these specific plays by these specific authors have been chosen to be included in the cannon. My interest has already been piqued because I did not expect to see so many of the same plays being used in different high schools in Lebanon, and it will definitely be interesting to find research as to why these plays are repeatedly being used. I believe that it is important to be able to use other students’ findings as well in order to get a clearer picture of the most common plays that are repeatedly being included in the cannon throughout different high schools in Lebanon.

Here is a list of the plays that are commonly used in different schools across Lebanon that I have filtered from the master spreadsheet:

Henrick Isben	A Doll’s house
William Shakespeare	Othello
William Shakespeare	Macbeth
Miller	Death of a Salesman
William Shakespeare	Romeo and Juliette
Edward Albee	Who’s Afriad of Virginia Woolf?
Samuel Beckett	Waiting for Godot
William Shakespeare	Hamlet

The next step will be for our group to decide which emotions we will be focusing on in order to view the common emotions felt amongst high school students in Lebanon, and which books are being associated with these emotions.

Initiating My First Digital Project

       The digital project that we are working on this semester for our English 205 class is based on mapping different books that are used in high schools across Lebanon to specifically see the emotions that are attributed with these books, as well as to observe the common books that schools are using. It will be interesting to observe the emotions that people attribute to certain books in order to see if there are common emotions felt towards specific books across schools in Lebanon. Could this be because of cultural factors or because of personal preferences?          

       Due to the fact that this is my first digital project, I believe that it is the right decision to collaborate with other students because gathering research from several schools is a difficult task to accomplish when one is working alone, as well as the fact that we are all helping each other with the different tasks throughout the process. I just met my group members at the beginning of this semester, but I have come to realize that Sylvia brings forward her skills in technology, while Norma is a good writer, and I have experience in writing research papers due to the many English Literature courses that I have taken during my time at AUB. I believe that our skills balance out perfectly because we are all working together and contributing our skill sets in progressing through this project. Working collaboratively on this project differs from other projects because this project requires extensive fieldwork, in the sense of interviews, and working in groups allows us to acquire more data by interviewing ten people each, resulting in a total of thirty people. So far, we have divided the work in our group in terms of each person being responsible for interviewing ten people. After our first meeting, we have decided that we will each focus on a specific genre that has been read by the people we have interviewed, where Norma will focus on dystopian classical novels, Sylvia will focus on poems, and I will focus on plays. We will therefore inquire more information about these specific genres from the people we have interviewed by asking them whether they found these pieces of literature important and what stood out to them, which can tie back to the reasons that these books are included within the cannon.

          I think that this digital project will reveal the fact that many schools require students to read specific books depending on the curricula of the school, and that the books that are chosen are similar amongst the different schools. The similarity in the choice of books that Lebanese high schools are choosing has started to show through our data collection because interviewees are specifying that they have read these common books during school time. Moreover, this project is relevant to the learning outcomes of the course because this project will highlight the concept of canonicity, where certain books are being used throughout different high schools in Lebanon, and it will be interesting to make connections as to why these books are being included in the cannon. Also, this project allows us to explore digital humanities by creating our own websites on WordPress and being able to continuously blog about our findings. Furthermore, I believe that asking people if they still have a copy of their high school course syllabus would also aid in investigating the common books that are being included in the cannon throughout different Lebanese high schools. During this early phase of data collection, the most surprising finding that I have come upon after interviewing people is that when asked which books they have read whether during school time or free time, the majority of the people that I have interviewed only listed the books they have read during their school time, which leaves space to wonder whether these people are embarrassed to mention their personal literary preferences or maybe they simply do not read in their free time.