ENG208.501 Topics in Early British Literaure: Into The Wild

Summer 2013

SHORT RESPONSE #3

King Lear + As You Like It // Into the Wild

Figure 1. Derek Jacobi as King Lear (National Theater, London)

Please respond to the following 2 prompts with at least one double-spaced, typed page per response, and BE SURE to include in your responses very specific details from the works under discussion [specific scene and plot details, direct quotations, etc.]. There are no right or wrong responses to the prompts below, but whatever your interpretations of the narratives you discuss, you MUST ground that interpretation in a very CLOSE attention to the small details and language of the works under consideration.

1. In both King Lear and As You Like It, characters are exiled and banished to the "outside" [the stormy heath, in one case, and in the other, the forest], where they are apart from "society-as-usual." In the course of these exiles "in the wilderness," characters learn important lessons, about themselves and their friends & family, but also about the larger world, and yet, the overall vision of each play is very different (one very dark/tragic, the other light/comic). Comment in any way you see fit on how the wilderness in each of these two plays is a very different sort of "Outside," and how this contributes to the kind of world the characters live in and how their lives turn out.

2. What do you think Alaska represented for Christopher McCandless: what did he want to prove to himself there, and what do you think he learned that might have been valuable, not just for him, but also for us who have experienced his story?

This Short Response #3 is due to the Instructor by the end of the day [11:59 pm] on Sunday, July 14th; please type your Response as a Microsft Word document, saving it with either a .doc or .docx file extension, and send it to Eileen Joy as an email attachment: eileenajoy@gmail.com. It's a good idea to cut and paste the Exam questions and prompts from here into your Word document and then fill in your own responses after each one. Please save your file as: Response3_YourLastName.