Approaches to Life Writing, Fall 2013

The course site for MALS 70900

Plath in Pop Culture

by Olivia-Beate Franzini

16 Pandas who Understand Sylvia Plath 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/clarasternoffb/16-pandas-who-understand-sylvia-plath-snm

The Broadway Play- Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath

http://www.theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/reviews/10-2010/wish-i-had-a-sylvia-plath_31052.html

 The Modern Tattoo Craze-The Bell Jar 

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In Art

Carly Lappas ’13 “The Bell Jar” Photograph and Mixed Media

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Appearance in the Simpsons-High Culture Meets Low Culture

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The Movie-Sylvia 

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Secondary Reading for The Bell Jar

by Olivia-Beate Franzini

“A Ritual for Being Born Twice”: Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ by Marjorie G. Perloff

http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/perloff.html

Perloff analyzes the The Bell Jar while focusing on Plath’s choices for developing the character of Ester Greenwood. She discusses Esther’s struggle for identity as one that struggles between the “inner self” and the “false-self” as termed by R.D Laing in The Divided Self. Perloff discusses how Plath’s protagonist embodies the struggles we face daily in life, the struggle to become one’s own self rather than what others expect.

 

Discussion Questions for The Bell Jar

by Olivia-Beate Franzini

Sylvia_plath

  • The Bell Jar has sold over two million copies in the United States and has been titled the Catcher in the Rye of its time, an archetypal novel on personal experience. However, do you agree with Frances McCullough that it may have never achieved such success throughout the world had Plath not committed suicide? Or is it the subject matter alone that gives it its appeal?
  • Throughout our studies in this course we have discussed the topic of truth and the blurring of lines between fiction and non-fiction. Sylvia Plath herself regarded the text as an “autobiographical apprenctiwork, or a confession, which she told A. Alverz she needed to write in order to free herself from her past. How much does our fixation on truth shape our reading of the text? Does it matter at all?
  • The Bell Jar is often labeled as a feminist text, what aspects of it make it a feminist text and what universalities does Plath present? Besides being classified as a feminist text, it is also one that is sometimes labeled a text about mental illness. Do you find this label to be accurate? Is the novel really about mental illness as much as it is about the effect of society’s expectation of women?
  • Despite the popularity of The Bell Jar and the way it speaks to human nature and the feeling of femal entrapment, critics have often titled it a “flawed first novel.” Do you think these claims can be justified?
  • Being that the novel parallels quite closely with the concept of scriptotherapy, therapeutic writing to facilitate a resolution to distress from trauma, what did Plath gain by leaving the ending ambiguous and up in the air for Esther? How could the novel’s ending be symbolic for Plath?

 

 

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