Ideas for Research Paper

I am excited about the opportunity to be creative in our research and presentations. At first I had a hard time with choosing a topic, so I thought about what most captivated my attention through our readings, positively or negatively. I realized a theme that continually has me outraged while reading these, and that is the topic of child abuse. We see it with Pecola in "The Bluest Eye", the poem "My Papa's Waltz", with the babysitter in "Blankets", and I'm sure there will be plenty of inhumane treatment within the holocaust stories we will be reading. I have children whom I adore, and was abused myself; this subject makes my blood boil, and I think that this project has the power to be cathartic for me.
I have no way to convey the true power of this message in a traditional paper, so that's most certainly out. I love photography, and would love to incorporate some pictures that way. The media is littered with heartbreaking stories every day about children who have been mistreated and even killed. There is music about the love of children and probably quite a few older songs about abuse. I can't think of exactly how the layout will be. I'd love to do something high tech, but I'm going to have to learn a program, which I'm up for.

Craig's Relationships...

Craig's relationships are all very different. Up to page 224 his relationship with Raina can be summed up on page 172. Not a word is said in this panel, but you can feel the mutual love, trust and comfort between the two.
His relationship with his parents are a bit more complex. It seems on page 157 that he and his parents are at least comfortable with each other. They occupy the same room without confrontation. Up to this point I wasn't terribly clear about that. His father appears to be little more than an authority figure, where there seems to be more dialogue with his mother.
His relationship with God isn't clear for me. He makes it a point to read his bible every night, but seems to be uncomfortable every time he thinks about his faith.

Blankets Close Read...

Reading Craig Thompson's "Blankets" I was visually struck by two panels in particular. The first was on page 32. I would call it a "Splash Page". The picture takes up the whole page but holds multiple ideas; the incidents with the babysitter, the tension between Craig and the teacher, the tension between Craig and his fellow students, Craig's shame about the memory as well as his shame in school, and the bell ringing the end of class. It is a particularly painful page with all of its heavy subjects, but impressive in that it can fit so much meaning together. The black around his "thought bubble" sets a depressed tone for the memory and separates it from the buzz of what is going on around him.
The most interesting panel for me is another full page picture on page 158. The story progresses through where he meets Raina, goes to church camp, visits more memories, struggles with his faith, school, and authority figures until your head is swirling with all of these troubles and events and then this panel lands in front of you and everything stops while you take in this heavy piece of information; Raina's parents are getting a divorce. There are times in life that that really happens, time sort of seems to stand still. Craig Thompson effectively illustrates that moment in this story. The empty space around Raina helps clear your mind of all the distractions and focus on the "stunned" feeling one gets with such news.

A particularly poignant sentence that caught my eye from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson is on page 132 when she says "I lay for a long time watching the oranges. They were pretty, but not much help. I was going to need more than an icon to get me through this one." For some reason that sentence struck me instantly. I couldn't help but wonder if she wasn't talking about oranges at all at that point, but rather Jesus Christ and the fact that He is the icon for her faith and religious beliefs. She seemed to be saying that she used to lay all her faith in His taking care of the situation, but that it was different this time; that she was going to have to handle things differently, that she was seeing things differently. My suspicions seemed to be confirmed as she slowly comes away from her church through the rest of the book. I don't really have much more to say about it, just that it was particulary jarring for me. I don't usually take to reading into words too much, and symbology interpretation isn't my strong point, so it was odd that it stuck out like it did.