Course Guidelines Path 1 Calendar Class Discussion Path 2 Groups & Texts Writing Assignments Reference Texts

 


ornamental line

Personal Accidie

"an attempt to impose order and purpose on
the shapelessness of existence" (33).
P. D. James's The Children of Men (1992)


Points for Reflection

The Bible: Psalm 106:24-26

  1. Psalm 106 recounts the Israelites' successful departure from Egypt, despite being chased by Pharoah and his armies, and their subsequent lack of trust in God's provision while wandering the Desert of Paran (on the Sinai Peninsula). What form does their rebellion take?


The Bible: Psalm 91:1-15

  1. To what animal does the psalmist compare humans? To what animal does he compare God?
  2. From what various threats does the psalmist imagine God protecting him? Are they primarily physical in nature?
  3. Do you read this anticipated protection as specific promises or general principles


The Bible: Revelation 3:14-22

  1. What do you imagine it means to be "lukewarm," spiritually speaking?
  2. What conditions appear likely to foster a lukewarm mentality?
  3. Why might Jesus, speaking through the apostle John to the church at Laodicea, encourage the church members there to buy refined gold and white garments, and to anoint their eyes?


Salvador Dalí's The Endless Enigma (1938)

  1. How many object configurations can you identify in this painting?
  2. Do these various images seem thematically interrelated, or random and unconnected?
  3. Does a painting like this make you trust your sight more, or less?


P. D. James' Children of Men, chps. 1-8

  1. Does the narration provide any likely suspects for why humanity loses its sexual fertility?
  2. How does the epistolary, letter-writing form of narration (here, diary entries), shape our understanding of Theo’s character? Why might P. D. James switch back and forth between an omniscient narrator and a first-person narrator?
  3. Julian notes (38) that whereas G. Eliot (Marianne Evans) sympathizes with her heroine, Dorothea (of Middlemarch), H. James despises his own heroine, Isabel Archer (of Portrait of a Lady) What of P. D. James’s attitude towards her own protagonist?  Does our author sympathize with or despise Theo Faron?
  4. Trace those moments when Theo self-consciously refers to: 1) a scenario concocted by his imagination, or 2) notes that he “tells” or “convinces” himself of something.  What is P. D. James doing?
  5. Why does Theo begin a diary on his fiftieth birthday?
  6. Why does Theo not “want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything” (26)?
  7. Can we deduce why Theo became a professor specializing in Victorian history?
  8. What evidence does Theo summon to back up his assertion that he is emotionally stunted?
  9. Do Theo’s many failings make him less or more sympathetic as this novel’s protagonist?
  10. Can we deduce why Theo became a professor specializing in Victorian history?
  11. Do the Arts retain their power in the new world order?
  12. Does religious belief and practice make a resurgence, remain steady, or steadily decline in the face of humanity's extinction?
  13. Do Theo’s comments about Christianity’s changing, post-Omega significance constitute a complete rejection of a disproven superstition, or something else?
  14. What spaces and places have been retasked in this dystopia?
  15. What has happened to Britain’s education system?
  16. As the population slowly dwindles, do the survivors occupy more, or less, domestic space?
  17. Do our survivors consciously gravitate towards isolation or community?
  18. Does the post-Omega world create new interpersonal problems concerning sexual intimacy, or does it merely uncover and/or magnify already existing problems?
  19. Is Theo’s sex life healthy prior to Omega?
  20. Does the text provide an answer as to why the male and female Omegas are beautiful and have difficulty sympathizing with others?
  21. Are physical and intellectual pleasure outmoded artifacts of the distant past, or do our characters still find ways to obtain them?
  22. Which better characterizes society in this novel, chaos or order?
  23. How capable do scientists prove in tackling society’s new problems?
  24. What do the various concerns of the Five Fish—those issues they’d each like raised with the Warden—reveal about their individual characters (57-59)?
  25. Why might the author give Julian (the former student of Theo’s who asks for his help in convincing the Warden to change his policies) a disability, a swollen hand with middle and forefinger fused together (39)?
  26. In a well-written novel, no character is extraneous. What purpose is served by the introduction in chapter seven of Jasper Palmer-Smith? Does this fellow professor mirror Theo in every particular? Do his perspectives on the cataclysm, women, Christianity, and marriage echo or deviate from those of Theo himself?
  27. What mysteries surround Xan’s character, from his cousin’s, Theo’s, perspective?


A landscape with a decrepit old car becomeing part of it. Brown tones with a light blue, cloud-filled sky
On Paranoiac Critical Town (1936)
Salvador Dalí



Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu