Haroun Transparency + Reflection
- juliafurst
- Nov 3, 2017
- 2 min read
My group read Haroun and the Sea of Stories through an allegorical lens. We were able to connect the story allegorically to Salman Rushdie's life. Each member discussed their thoughts and opinions respectfully, with an occasional eye role here or there from another member. Given the task of a visual representation of our lens, we thought hard an long on a method that would show our extensive amount of information in a creative way. We finally decided to create a Prezi. We worked diligently to be able to present our knowledge and connections based on the allegorical lens and I think it paid off. We were able to start our presentation off with a picture of a magnifying lens and we made it so the presentation zoomed into the lens, relating to how our group had to use the allegorical lens to find a deeper meaning in the book.
I thought our process was very effective. We all discussed elements of our lens that needed their own slide. At first we got very little done with our time because we were just putting random pieces of the slide together and we didn't really start with any significant part. Instead we often got sidetracked doing things like looking u facts about Salman Rushdie's love life(which four wives later we were able to come to the conclusion that so far is not very good). After the first few days of just setting up a nice foundation for our presentation, each group member got down to business and started adding key components. We collectively decided which slides we were going to do. My slide was all about the Fatwa that was placed on Salman Rushdie. I saw a very strong connections between the Fatwa and HATSOS so we agreed it was necessary to have a slide dedicated towards it. The other group members gave thoughtful insight and picked up on connections that I probably would not have. One example would be with Maggie, who picked up on the lack of women roles in the book, which may be a result of Rushdie's failed relationships.
I think our lens is gives a great contribution to the question "what is the point of fictional stories?". Our lens shows that their is sometimes a moral or deeper meaning behind a fictional story that can often be applied or related to the "real" world. A good example would be the Allegory of the Cave, which expresses the point of believing shouldn't always be seeing. This is a lesson that could be used in our life.
NOTE: Although we did a good job clearly presenting our information, there was a hand raised at the end of our presentation. The person asked, "you used a very similar definition to the one we used in our group, how are they any different?". This really got me thinking, aren't all of these lenses just a variation of the meaning the author had behind their book. The other lenses that the groups presented on included; mono-mouth, satire, and allusion. Even though they are all very different, it is easy to see connections between them, this interested me.
Allegoric Group Blogs:
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