the mark literature essay pdf

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Saturday, March 2, 2019

Review: the mark by edyth bulbring.

View onAmazon UPDATE: I have turned off comments for this review. This is a set book for a class in South Africa and I'm starting to get comments asking me to answer assigned question. Also, people have ignored my request that they not ask such questions. If you would like some guidance reading this book, there are a number of youtube videos on The Mark. Link to youtube videos on The Mark .

"There tends to be a common teen-angst thing, like: 'Oh the whole world is against me, the whole world is so screwed up,' " Will explains. Teenagers are cynical, adds Aaron Yost, 16. And they should be: "To be fair, they were born into a world that their parents kind of really messed up." Everyone here agrees: The plots in dystopia feel super familiar. That's kind of what makes the books scary — and really good. Think of it like this: Teen readers themselves are characters in a strange land. Rules don't make sense. School doesn't always make sense. And they don't have a ton of power. The fact that these books offer a safety net, a place where kids can "flirt with those questions without getting into trouble," that's reason enough to keep teachers and parents buying them off the shelf.

Comments are turned off for this post. If The Mark is a set book for your school project, you might find it helpful to look at these youtube videos about the book. Link to list of youtube videos about The Mark. 

16 comments:

I agree with you, Mack, that there's some great YA literature out there. And this one sounds like a taut, interesting story as well as some solid character exploration. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

So can this be a literacy essay on the mark as well

Can you write an essay that tells us when Ettie is devious and appealing throughout the book

Sorry, I read the book a while ago and don't wish to reread it at this time.

Critically explain contrast between etties world and the mythical world Why does the author use certain fairytale to refer to ettie

This comment has been removed by the author.

I want to ask the same question because I'm writing an exam about it

Sorry, I honestly don't have a detailed memory of this detail and I don't wish to reread the book at this time.

Explain ettie's learning experiences both in and out of school

Sorry, this is outside the scope of this blog and in any case it's been a while since I read the book and don't widh to reread it at this time.

Explain etties world and the mythical world

I also need the same answers

Can I please get the main characters essay please

How do we determine Etties mythical 3

New comments are not allowed.

Edyth Bulbring

The Mark is the award-winning book of the English Academy’s 2016 Percy FitzPatrick Prize for Youth Literature.

In the future, the world has flipped. Ravaged by the Conflagration, this is a harsh place where the sun beats down, people’s lives are run by a heartless elite and law is brutally enforced. A mark at the base of the spine controls each person’s destiny. The Machine decides what work you will do and who your life partner will be. Juliet Seven – “Ettie” – will soon turn 15 and her life as a drudge will begin, her fate-mate mate will be chosen. Like everyone else, her future is marked by the numbers on her spine. But Ettie decides to challenge her destiny. And in so doing, she fulfils the prophecy that was spoken of before she even existed.

The Mark was published by Tafelberg in September 2014.

The Mark is a fast-paced, gritty and uncomfortable read and Bulbring maintains a cracking pace, blending elements of SF  dystopia with nuances of magical realism. Pick this one up if you’re looking for something slightly different –  Nerine Dorman, Pretoria News

Darker than The Hunger Games and more thrilling than Divergent, Edyth Bulbring’s new dystopian novel will fascinate teen readers – Fiona Snyckers, The Sunday Times

This is the South African fiction we have all been waiting for –  Nikki McDiarmid, Puku

A dystopian, futuristic, mystical dark novel with twists and turns that keeps its reader enthralled to the last page. With its examination of a futuristic political system, it would make a great setwork for teenage pupils – Stephanie Saville, The Witness

Bulbring paints a believable society in which steampunk is married to advanced technology. Although there is action and excitement, the focus is on the characters and their emotions, so this is never just another post-apocalyptic adventure story but something deeper and more serious – Aubrey Paton, The Herald

Edyth Bulbring is South Africa’s premier story-teller for young adults – Library Thing

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The Mark resource pack

R 170.00

‘The Mark’ by Edyth Bulbring is an inspired choice for Grade 10 HL by the DBE. The story takes place in a fictional, dystopian world along the lines of ‘The Hunger Games’ and ‘Divergent’ but don’t be fooled, it is not just a cracking story that has been written in a way that is accessible to most young adults, the novel also touches on issues relevant to South African learners and provides a safe, fictional world to explore themes pertinent to us all.

Macrat’s resource pack offers an imaginative approach to the novel while keeping within CAPS guidelines. The pack includes a variety of questions and activities designed to explore key elements of the novel and to consolidate understanding of characters and themes. It also includes formal and informal assessment opportunities. Apart from the pre-reading activity, sections can be taught in any order to suit individual requirements. Suggested answers are also provided.

No of pages: 31

Author: L. Richards

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2024 Theses Doctoral

Futurity after the End of History: Chronotopes of Contemporary German Literature, Film, and Music

Wagner, Nathaniel Ross

This dissertation deploys theories of spatiotemporal experience and organization, most prominently Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope,” to set contemporary literature, film, and music into dialogue with theories of post-Wende social and political experiences and possibility that speak, with Francis Fukuyama, as the contemporary as the “End of History.” Where these interlocutors of Fukuyama generally affirm or intensify his view of the contemporary as a time where historical progress slows to a halt, historical memory recedes from view, and the conditions of subjecthood are rephrased from participation in a struggle for progress to mindless consumption and technocratic tinkering, I engage contemporary artwork to flesh out and ultimately peer beyond the boundaries of the real and the possible these social theories articulate. Through a series of close readings of German films, music albums, and novels published between 1995 and 2021, I examine how German authors, filmmakers, and musicians pursue depictions of the malaises of the End of History while also resolutely pointing to the fissures in liberal capitalist hegemony where history—its past and its future—again becomes visible. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, a text’s unified expression of space and time, is central to my method of analysis. In tracing the chronotopic contours of contemporary works of music, film, and literature, I argue, we—as readers, viewers, and listeners—are engaged to think and act alongside the forms and figures that populate the worlds their authors create. In doing so, we ultimately uncover forceful accusations, resolute alternatives, and even hopeful antidotes to the deficiencies of our present that help us both to soberly contemplate the implications the pessimistic formulations of contemporary theory have on our lives, communities, and futures but also to formulate possibilities for them that lie beyond their analytical purview.In a series of close readings of my literary, filmic, and musical primary texts, I engage theorists of the post-Cold War, post-Wende contemporary who write about the political order and social conditions emerging out of the triumph of neoliberalism and market capitalism over socialist, communist, and fascist alternatives. The dissertation begins by establishing a wide view of the contemporary, tracing in its first chapter chronotopic resonances of Hartmut Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis—which locates the aimlessness and alienation of contemporary society within the accelerationist logic of market capitalist modes of production—across the full temporal arc of the contemporary. Pairing Christian Kracht’s Faserland (1995) with Fatma Aydemir's Ellbogen (2017), I argue that the futilities and frustrations of the modern subject, as foretold in Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay and fleshed out in Rosa’s writings on social acceleration, find resonance not only in the wealthy, educated, white protagonist of Faserland’s 1990s, but also in the impoverished, undereducated, Turkish-Kurdish protagonist of Ellbogen some twenty years later. What connects these two accounts across decades and differences in identities, I demonstrate, is not merely a shared sense of alienation and despair, but a shared, underlying chronotopic characterization of the contemporary. These commonalities appear, I demonstrate, when we connect Rosa’s “social acceleration” thesis to diegetic chronotopes of perpetual motion that depict modern subjects’ inability to avail themselves of the ostensibly liberatory potential of liberal capitalism’s accelerated lifeworld. Chapter 2 then considers Byung-Chul Han’s theory of auto-exploitation and the dilemma of the music novel at a time where the rebellion of punk against social integration has been thoroughly incorporated into capitalism. Reading Marc Degens’ Fuckin Sushi (2015), I examine the novel’s concept of “Abrentnern” as a model for personal and communal fulfillment for those who turn to art as a means self-determination in the age of auto-exploitation. Unlike Kracht and Aydemir, however, Degens sees the closing off of historical possibilities for the good life enjoyed by his punk forbears—here, self-determination through transgressive artistic praxis—not as the contemporary subject’s damnation to cyclical patterns of despair but as a challenge to conceive of the good life anew. Working humorously through its hapless protagonist Niels’ repeated attempts to escape the seemingly inevitable for-profit co-option of his sincere artistic efforts, the novel serves to unveil the persistence of blind spots in this regime of totalizing exploitation. What results is an account of the double-edged logic of capitalist productivity’s ostensible totalization of labor-time. Capitalism, Niels unwittingly discovers, is a logic of production so overwhelming that it continuously drives subjects towards the discovery of new alterities that, for a brief time at least, allow subjects once again to slip between the cracks. The third chapter explores a similar phenomenon of halting resistance to the conditions of the capitalist present through the lens of futurity. Here, I push back against Mark Fisher’s theory of the dominance of “Capitalist Realism” in the contemporary aesthetic imagination, identifying and developing the notion of “subtle futurity”—the modest, yet resolute rephrasing of future possibility beyond the “way things are” of the present—in Leif Randt’s Schimmernder Dunst über CobyCounty (2011) In this light, I argue, Randt’s gestures towards a different future, however halting, mark a significant effort to imagine a benevolent form of future possibility within the context of an era often suspected to have been exhausted of its utopian sentiment. The final two chapters turn to past-minded works that more forcefully repudiate notions of the present as static or closed off from the movement of history. Chapter Four considers W.G. Sebald’s 1995 novel, Die Ringe des Saturn, and The Caretaker’s 2012 album, Patience (After Sebald), developing an account of the chronotopic means by which these works revisit materials of the past within the present. Chronotopic motifs of paraphrase—techniques of sampling in The Caretaker and narrative polyphony in Sebald—come together within macro-level chronotopic frameworks of peripatetic movement—looping repetition in The Caretaker and the retracing of bygone journeys in Sebald—to testify to the unanswered questions and unfinished work of history over and against notions of the present as a time where the past has been relegated to mere museum content or nostalgia for bygone ways of living. Where Chapter Four speaks primarily to the formal mechanisms by which the present rediscovers the past, Chapter Five examines two specific chronotopic innovations for thematically engaging constellations of past-present inter-temporality. Both Sharon Dodua Otoo’s 2021 novel, Adas Raum, and Christian Petzold’s 2018 film, Transit, develop chronotopes wherein past and present are intermingled in increasingly inseparable ways. Adas Raum, I demonstrate, is organized spatiotemporally as a nexus of coiled loops—pasts and presents intertwine, heaven and earth are tangled together, and the fates of human beings and even non-human objects follow spatial and temporal trajectories that weave in and out of conventional linear understandings of space and time. In similar fashion, past and present become inseparable in Petzold’s film, an adaptation of the Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel of the same name, through thematic and formal approaches of blurring that blend the plight of refugees of Seghers’ era with those of Petzold’s present day. History, then, appears remarkably robust in these texts, unfolding accounts of how human beings living through their present might take guidance from the generations that preceded them in the struggle for a better world.

• Motion pictures, German
• Germans--Music
• Capitalism in literature
• Social integration
• Neoliberalism
• Twenty-first century
• Future, The, in literature
• Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg), 1944-2001
• Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich), 1895-1975
• Petzold, Christian, 1960-
• Fukuyama, Francis
• Kracht, Christian, 1966-
• Rosa, Hartmut, 1965-
• Ringe des Saturn (Sebald, W. G.)
• End of history and the last man (Fukuyama, Francis)

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