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/lit/ - Literature

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5841224 No.5841224 [Reply] [Original]

My prof is having us write an essay on the Crucible and I'm having a hard time coming up with examples. The prompt is "why is Salem, Massachusetts an appropriate setting for the play by analyzing how the setting serves Miller's dramatic and thematic goals"

>talk about how miller wanted to show similarities between the salem witch hunt and the McCarthy trials

I would but the prompt also states that "miller had plenty of historical periods to choose as a basis of his play: trials for sorcery, heresy, and witchcraft had been going on for centuries in other countries, and the judicial methods used were not far different from those in the Crucible, so why did he choose salem specifically?"

>> No.5841228

>>5841224
Fuck professors who give a prompt. Fucking bureaucrats.

>> No.5841244
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5841244

>>5841224
lmao get the fuck out of here you stupid high school cuck, I'm a high school teacher and I give my retarded 9th grade students prompts like this.

>> No.5841248

Prof? Are you not taking poetic license and calling your high school teacher by professor?

Or do you go to a community college? This assignment is verbatim something I did in junior high.

>> No.5841249

>>5841224
The thing you need to understand about the Salem witch trials was that it was a complete black swan. It came out of the blue; it should not have happened.

What I mean by that is the heyday of the witch fever happened in the 1600s and early 1700s. Salem, by contrast, happened in 1878, long long after the entire world realized there was no such thing as a god damned witch.

It defies historical interpretation, it defies logic. Historians have no choice but to read the Salem trials as a complete historical anomaly where people threw away the past 200 years of progress and went batshit crazy

>> No.5841251

>>5841248
I go to UNC and I legitimately got a prompt stating: "How does Hemingway depict the female character". Absolute rubbish. Some professors are retarded.

>> No.5841257

>>5841249
>The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693.

>For the 1878 lawsuit, see Salem witchcraft trial (1878)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials

>> No.5841258

>>5841251
>How does Hemingway depict the female character
>wit dem titties ayyylmao

>> No.5841260

He probably had little understanding of the Inquisition and the religious pogroms of Europe and the Mediterranean world, so he wouldn't have been able to tackle it anywhere near accurately. But more importantly portraying a non-white people as spook-worshiping religious fanatics would have garnished so many people shitting on his career that we wouldn't still be reading him today.

>> No.5841265

>>5841228
Op is clearly in some 101 course, and instructors of them have to give prompts, or they have 30 mouthbreathers whining about how they couldn't think of anything to write about.

You have to know if the "prof" didn't give this prompt, this thread would be, "gimme ideas /lit/. I dunno what to write."

Same difference, really. Both obnoxious threads.

>> No.5841268

>>5841249
Wrong trials, buddy

The setting is relatable to modern Americans concerned with McCarthyism because the trials were motivated specifically by political goals disguised as american Protestant moralism.

>> No.5841269

>>5841251
You say UNC like it will impress someone.

Baffling.

>> No.5841279

>>5841269
Duke fag pls go

>> No.5841281

"In setting The Crucible in a socially incipient America, Miller is critiquing a uniquely American reactionary hysteria, reminding us that history is dialectical and linear rather than encapsulated in time."

I never read The Crucible, but your professor sounds like a commie.

>> No.5841310

>>5841281
Also I just want to point out that it's pretty disingenuous of your 'professor' to be using prompts to pigeon-hole you into Marxist literary critique.

>> No.5841394

>>5841224
american, recognizable, could shoehorn in race issues with tituba

>> No.5841430

>>5841281

> reminding us that history is dialectical and linear rather than encapsulated in time."

ugh this is such fucking horrible writing it makes my throat close