...Comparative Literature 153: “International Cultures: Film and Literature” Dr. Thomas Jay Lynn * Penn State Berks * Fall 2015 * MWF 12:00-12:50 Franco 101 * Office Meeting Period MWF 1:15-2:15 (For an office meeting during this or a different time, please e-mail, phone, or speak to me in advance, if possible.) Office: 117 Franco * Office Phone: (610) 396-6298 * E-mail: TJL7@PSU.EDU Please note: This syllabus and various other course documents (including essay guidelines) will be posted online at our ANGEL course site. “I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore Course Overview Official Penn State description of CMLIT 153: “Comparison of narrative techniques employed by literature and film in portraying different cultures, topics may vary each semester.” This Fall 2015 offering of CMLIT 153, “International Cultures: Film and Literature,” focuses on cultural tensions in varied parts of the world. Among the tensions that these films and novels explore are ones that arise in relation to poverty and wealth (class tensions); changing female and male gender roles; concepts of love and marriage; family dynamics; traditional and modern identities; work and education; and shifting political realities. In your approach to the works considered in this course, moreover, please consider how such tensions...
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...In my view The Kite Runner is an epic story with a personal history of what the people of Afghanistan had and have to endure in an ordinary every day life; a country that is divided between political powers and religiously idealistic views and beliefs which creates poverty, and violence within the people and their terrorist run country. The story line is more personal with the description of Afghanistan's culture and traditions, along with the lives of the people who live in Kabul. The story provides an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political chaos. Of course there are many things that are unsaid and under explained in this tragic novel which, in my observation, is an oversimplification. There is also a heavy use of emotional appeal, and an underlying message. This is a flag for propaganda. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini begins in the 1970s in Kabul, Afghanistan, when the country is in a time of an ending monarchy. The main character, Amir, is the son of wealthy Afghanistan business man, and his playmate, Hassan, the son of his father's houseman, Ali. Hassan is a Hazara and Amir is a Pashtun, which makes them from different social classes. The author has undoubtedly stirred my emotions and I admit that I did cry several times. I think that this was the author's objective; this is an appeal to emotion, one of the fallacies of propaganda. Propaganda is a message or an idea that persuades the audience to change their perspectives in one way or another...
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...The Kite Runner by Khaled Hasseini The Kite Runner by Khaled Hasseini is an intriguing story of life in Afghanistan during a time period. Amir and his father, Baba are Pashtun’s living in a successful home in Kabul, Afghanistan while their servants, Hassan and his father, Ali whom are considered Hazaras lived in a mud hut on the same grounds of Baba’s property. Since being a Hazara was discriminated against in Afghanistan, Amir was bullied by Assef and his friends for hanging out with one. Later, a moment happened when Amir was twelve that changed everything and as he claims made him the man he is today. The discrimination of ethnic minorities in Kabul, Afghanistan shows disastrous events in the lives of two young boys. This story relates to past and present time Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, a Hazara is a persecuted ethnic group whom came from further East Asia. Their features are different from other Afghanistan’s because they have more of an Asian look and flat noses. Pashtuns, are a different ethnic minority and they are accepted. Pashtuns dislike Hazaras and cause many grief to them. Hazaras are sunni Muslim, as Pashtun’s are shia Muslim. They claim different features and speak different languages. Later, in the 1980’s when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, many fled to Pakistan. Later in the 1990’s, a group called Taliban’s began making severe changes in Afghanistan making living their more difficult...
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...In my view The Kite Runner is an epic story with a personal history of what the people of Afghanistan had and have to endure in an ordinary every day life; a country that is divided between political powers and religiously idealistic views and beliefs which creates poverty, and violence within the people and their terrorist run country. The story line is more personal with the description of Afghanistan's culture and traditions, along with the lives of the people who live in Kabul. The story provides an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political chaos. Of course there are many things that are unsaid and under explained in this tragic novel which, in my observation, is an oversimplification. There is also a heavy use of emotional appeal, and an underlying message. This is a flag for propaganda. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini begins in the 1970s in Kabul, Afghanistan, when the country is in a time of an ending monarchy. The main character, Amir, is the son of wealthy Afghanistan business man, and his playmate, Hassan, the son of his father's houseman, Ali. Hassan is a Hazara and Amir is a Pashtun, which makes them from different social classes. The author has undoubtedly stirred my emotions and I admit that I did cry several times. I think that this was the author's objective; this is an appeal to emotion, one of the fallacies of propaganda. Propaganda is a message or an idea that persuades the audience to change their perspectives in one way or another...
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...The Kite Runner: Violence, Guilt, and No Happy Ending Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is an honest yet disturbing, work of historical fiction told from the point of view of the protagonist, Amir. He describes his childhood living in Afghanistan with Hassan, a Hazara boy, who worked as a servant to Amir and his father, Baba. A main conflict of the story is the fact that Amir allows Assef, the antagonist, to do horrible things to Hassan with no attempt to intervene. This scene is very intense and upsetting. Although it could be considered as a representation of “real-world” situations that sadly occur in the Middle Eastern area, the situation is purely troubling. Amir commits an act of dreadful betrayal. Hassan and his father part their ways with Amir and Baba, who go to America to live in California. They live a typical American life, making a good amount of money and living in a safe area, but Amir’s thoughts are filled with guilt and remorse. Amir’s guilt lasts ridiculously long. He says, “That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years”(1). This quote from Amir represents that although he tried to forget his painful past, he could not. He did not have the will power to simply drop what occurred between him and Hassan from his thoughts. The fact that he has not resolved...
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...How betrayal can lead to redemption Betrayal is an issue several people can relate to, either done by a family member or a friend. In the book The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, we witness how betrayal played a vital role in the downfall of the main characters Amir and Hassan’s friendship, and how it influenced Amir’s pursuit to redeem himself in hopes to move on from his mistakes. The novel begins with Amir as an adult, recalling an event that took place in 1975 Kabul, Afghanistan and how this event was what changed the rest of his life and made him who he now is. This event was Amir’s reluctance to help Hassan while he was being raped, and how this impacted his desire to, later on, mature and be “good” again. Khaled Hosseini shows how Amir’s Islamic faith and guilt over abandoning Hassan ultimately led Amir to forgive himself and seek redemption. All in all, this novel demonstrates that even in cases of betrayal, redemption is possible. In The Kite Runner, Hosseini tells a story of the close friendship of two young boys who come from different social classes, Amir, the Pashtun wealthy boy and Hassan, the Hazara servant. Taking place in Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1970s a time where there was a huge...
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...e Runner begins with our thus-far nameless protagonist explaining that the past cannot be forgotten. A single moment in time defined him and has been affecting him for the last twenty-six years. This moment was in 1975 when he was twelve years old and hid near a crumbling alleyway in his hometown of Kabul, Afghanistan. When the protagonist's friend, Rahim Khan, calls him out of the blue, he knows that his past sins are coming back to haunt him even in the new life he has built in San Francisco. He remembers Hassan, whom he calls "the harelipped kite runner," saying "For you, a thousand times over." Rahim's words also echo in his head, "There is a way to be good again." These two phrases will become focal points for the rest of the novel and our protagonist's story. Chapter Two The protagonist remembers sitting in trees with Hassan when they were boys and annoying the neighbors. Any mischief they perpetrated was the protagonist's idea, but even when Hassan's father, Ali, scolded Hassan, he never told on the protagonist. Hassan's father was a servant to the protagonist's father, Baba and lived in a small servant's house on his property. Baba's house was widely considered the most beautiful one in Kabul. There Baba held large dinner parties and entertained friends, including Rahim Khan, in his smoking room. Though the protagonist was often surrounded by adults, he never knew his mother because she died in childbirth. Hassan never knew his mother, either, because she eloped with...
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...IntroductionMany times since his death in 1883, Karl Marx’s ideas have been dismissed as irrelevant. But, many times since, interest in his ideas has resurfaced as each new generation which challenges the unequal, unjust and exploitative nature of the capitalist system looks for ideas and a method to change the world we live in.Marx’s ideas – a body of work collectively described as Marxism – was added to by his closest collaborator Frederick Engels after Marx’s death and subsequently added to and enriched by the writings and living experience of Lenin and Trotsky who led the 1917 October Russian Revolution.For any person looking to change the world in a socialist direction the ideas of Marxism are a vital, even indispensable, tool and weapon to assist the working class in its struggle to change society.Most people who describe themselves as socialists will have at one stage or another looked at Marxist ideas and, unfortunately, some have chosen to ignore the rich experience and understanding that Marxist ideas add to an understanding of the capitalist world and how to change it.However, Marx’s ideas are once again becoming fashionable; even amongst people Marx would have regarded as his political opponents. Having been voted the thinker of the Millennium in a BBC poll in 2000, Marx has now been taken up by university professors and City analysts alike as offering one of the most modern ways to understand globalised capitalism.But, for socialists who wish to permanently remove...
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...Introduction Khaled Hosseini (born march 4, 1965) is an Afghan –born American novelist and physician. After graduating college, he worked as a doctor in California, an occupation that he likens to "an arranged marriage" for him. Hosseini is a relatively new author. He has published three novels in ten years. His first novel The Kite Runner is considered as first novel written in English by Afghan writer. Hosseini's works reflect a wide range of important current events and contemporary issues about ethnic tension, women, family ties, Afghan immigrant, political and social transformation of Afghanistan from 1970s to 2013. Certainly, the war of Afghanistan are encompassing in all three novels. Hosseini had received many awards for his work, all of his novels became bestsellers and the first two novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns had been adapted into movies. In this thesis, I will analyze the abuse of power in Khaled Hosseini's novels. The first novel is The Kite Runner (2003). This novel presents a story of strained family relationships between a father and a son, and between two brothers. How they deal with the guilt and forgiveness. The novel sets the interpersonal drama of the characters against the backdrop of Afghanistan, sketching the political and economical toll of the instability of various regimes in Afghanistan from the end of monarchy to the Soviet –backed government of the 1980s to the fundamentalist Taliban government of the 1990s.it also...
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...The novel “The Kite Runner” is a fantastic book written by Khaled Hosseini and published in May of 2003. The book takes the genres of Bildungsroman, and redemption, and the main character speaks in a first person view. The book was written in Los Angeles, and the publisher was Riverhead Books. The narrator is Amir (the main character) and started telling his story 4 days after many decades of his eventful life events. The plot of the story takes place in 1975 and continues to 2001, first the place of the setting is in Afghanistan but transitions to the United States then to Afghanistan then back. The novel has a relatively small group of characters that remain significant to the story. The Protagonist is Amir, a full blood afghan that has a wealthy family and lives in a large house up in the hills of Kabul. His father, Baba is very known and popular because of his good deeds and donations to the city that they live. His father also has servants that look after the house and cook for Amir and Baba, Rhyam Kahn was the oldest...
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...English A The Kite Runner Ending the Cycle of Violence The movie I chose was The Kite Runner along with the theme “There is a way to be good again.” I will be focusing on the character of Amir and how he uses forgiveness to move on from his past and to end the violence. He shows this through many ways throughout the movie with different people. Amir had a tough childhood in many ways but also was very privileged. He had challenges being friends with Hassan. They were from two different social classes and Amir got teased and ridiculed because of it. When things got tough Amir froze Hassan out. For example when Hassan was physically assaulted. Finally Amir and his dad left altogether when there home got taken over by soldiers after the fall of the Monarchy in Afghanistan. Amir was so guilt tripped for leaving his friend, in the movie he takes us on his journey of how he finds forgiveness and gives forgiveness to move on from his violent past. Amir does not try to contact Hassan when he left, trying to push it behind him but the guilt is too much and he is curious to what happened to his friend. He becomes a successful writer and takes a trip back to his home and finds out Hassan was killed when things got dangerous. Amir sets off to right his wrongs and starts with Hassan’s son. He tracks him down in an orphanage and makes a plan to rescue him from the dangers of Kabul. Seeking to do the right thing and right his wrongs from the past. He tries to forgive himself through...
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...Research Paper on “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini Introduction: The international best-selling novel, The Kite Runner was first published in 2003 by Riverhead Books, written by the Afghan-born American novelist and physician, Khaled Hosseini. He was born into a Shia family in Kabul, and later on in his life when the family moved to Paris because of his father’s occupation, Hosseini’s family was unable to return to Kabul due to the bloody Saur Revolution; hence they had to seek political asylum in the United States. Being as young as he was, roughly 11 years of age, the actions of his home country must have left an impression on him. It is such a great read because among many other themes such as betrayal, redemption, bullying, inhumanities of revolution, discrimination, loyalty, hypocrisy, horrors of rapes etc. the main focus of this story is of a man who is haunted by his past demons. We see in some of the opening lines of the novel, “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975… That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.” These opening lines gets the ball rolling on what is to come and to be expected from the story, of possibly an aged man who is looking back at the past and justifying how it has made him the way that he is to date. The setting vividly takes place in the disorderly country of Kabul, Afghanistan...
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...sacrifices of the two principal characters as they try to survive through anarchy and extremism in what would become a brutalizing culture. I have read the writer, Khaled Hosseini’s last book, The Kite Runner before. I'll try steer away from comparing the two books here. They're both very good reads and worth your time. But I will say that I consider A Thousand Splendid Suns to be the better of the two. The author's narrative style is stronger and less predictable and he stretches himself, very effectively, to look at the events of the last 35 years in Afghanistan from a woman's point of view. Hosseini does an excellent job of referencing the global and regional political issues in the story without making them a main plot point. The large events are a backdrop, a scene setting device that serves as a canvass for the personal tribulations the main characters endure. In doing this, he avoids being overtly preachy and opinionated. The result is a narrative that keeps its focus on the subjects of the story, while exposing the reader to the cultural and moral pitfalls of Afghanistan during this time frame and, more generally, of any authoritarian society. The story itself gives me new respect for the struggle of the Afghan people, particularly the women, and what they have endured over the past four decades. One point the story makes is that nobody in Afghanistan has escaped loss -- loss of family members, loss of friends,...
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...Kite Runner vs. Poetry Key quotes: “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything” – Baba says this to Rahim Khan as a comment on the behaviour of Amir. Through this he identifies Amir’s greatest flaw: cowardice. It is this trait that leaves him desperately craving Baba’s love, and ultimately leads to be letting Assef rape Hassan. It also foreshadows Amir’s return to Kabul in search of Sohrab; the test of Amir’s character also tests whether Baba’s statement is true. “Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended” – This sentence appears towards the start of chapter five and indicates the fall of the monarchy and the descent of Kabul (and indeed Afghanistan) into political instability. The peaceful world Amir knows, made possible by Baba’s wealth, turns into one full of violence and uncertainty. It ultimately leads to Baba and Amir fleeing the country. “There is a way to be good again” – Rahim Khan says this to Amir over the phone when trying to encourage him to come to Pakistan and in the dialogue this appears like an afterthought. It reveals that Rahim Khan knows the truth about what Amir did to Hassan. It also ties into the theme of redemption, allowing the reader to believe that by returning to the Middle East, Amir will be given the opportunity to break the cycle of guilt he is trapped in. “My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but...
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...The role of socioeconomic status play a big role in the story Kite Runner by affecting the lives of many people. Throughout the story many of the characters are affected by the role of socioeconomic status. One of the people who was affected by this was our main character Amir. Amir like many other grows up with the idea that they in ways are better than the Hazara people. Which Amir's best friend and basically brother Hassan is. Since Amir has this view and way of thinking as Hassan as under himself, which ultimately decides what Hassan's life is like. Throughout the story we learn more and more about the close relationship between these two so when the situation between Hassan and Assef happens it is heartbreaking knowing that Amir sat there and did nothing to help his friend. Since Amir didn't do anything to help not only was Hassan affected but Amir is haunted by the fact that he let his friend be raped. This affects Amir so much that when he learns about Hassan's death he goes through many lengths to try and find Hassan's son to adopt. However the reason for a majority of these events happening is because Amir see’s Hassan as unequal to himself....
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