Q: If you were forced to compete in the Hunger Games, what do you think your special skill would be?

A: Hiding. I'd be scaling those trees like Katniss and Rue. Since I was trained in sword-fighting, I guess my best hope would be to get hold of a rapier if there was one available. But the truth is I'd probably get about a four in Training.

Q: You weave action, adventure, mythology, sci-fi, romance, and philosophy throughout The Hunger Games. What influenced the creation of The Hunger Games?

A: A significant influence would have to be the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The myth tells how in punishment for past deeds, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete, where they were thrown in the Labyrinth and devoured by the monstrous Minotaur.

The world of Panem, particularly the Capitol, is loaded with Roman references. Panem itself comes from the expression "Panem et Circenses" which translates into "Bread and Circuses."

Q: In The Hunger Games, Katniss and Gale have an extensive knowledge of hunting, foraging, wildlife, and survival techniques. What kinds of research did you do, if any?
A: Some things I knew from listening to my dad talking about his childhood. He grew up during the Depression. For his family, hunting was not a sport but a way to put meat on the table. He also knew a certain amount about edible plants. He'd go into the woods and gather all these wild mushrooms and bring them home and sauté them. My mom wouldn't let any of us go near them! But he'd eat them up and they never harmed him, so I guess he knew which ones were safe, because wild mushrooms can be very deadly.

I also read a big stack of wilderness survival guidebooks. And here's what I learned: you've got to be really good to survive out there for more than a few days.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2011/10/21/what-if-anything-does-the-hunger-games-series-teach-us-about-strategy/

Micro-Level Strategy: the Arena: every move involves strategy in the Arena: your allies, the first bloodbath, your weapons, and your interaction with the sponsors. Here’s a few things we learn:

• Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses – Katniss succeeds in the Games because she knows her weakness — her lack of physical strength and brutality. Head-to-head confrontation wouldn’t turn her way. Instead, she evades stronger opponents until she figures out how to gain an advantage. She exploits her strengths — her bow skills, cunning, and resourcefulness — to gain competitive advantage while minimizing her weaknesses. Other late-survivors use the same strategy (Cato, Brutus, Chaff, Peeta, Finnick, and Foxface).
• Hit Your Enemy Where it Hurts – Katniss realizes that the Careers depend on Games-provided food for their strength and endurance. Once Katniss destroys the Careers’ food source, she has the upper hand. After all, the Careers don’t know how to be as resourceful and hungry. This requires high-level strategic thinking.
• Pick Appropriate Allies – just having powerful allies won’t do. In Hunger Games, Katniss chooses Rue, a tiny wisp of a girl; in Catching Fire, Katniss chooses Mags, Betee and Wiress, all relative weaklings. All these choices are individuals with non-strength-based talents. A perfect match for Katniss’ own strengths. Like attracts like.
• Know Who Holds the Power – in both Hunger Games and Catching Fire, Katniss escapes the Arena by attacking the true power source — the Capitol. Katniss’ defiance at the end of the 74th Games capitalized on the Capitol’s need to have a victor. Katniss had the same realization in Catching Fire as she destroyed the force field. The Hunger Games may be rigged, but you can still undermine the Gamemakers.

Intermediate-Level Strategy: Television – the Hunger Games series is a PR strategy playbook for television appearances. Peeta was the master of this strategic game. A few lessons:

• Build Your Brand – throughout the series, we see how tributes paint themselves a certain way. Peeta is the gentle, affable lover-boy. Cato is the vicious brute. Katniss is a courageous, semi-innocent, and committed sister. Brand-building endears you to your audience because you represent something beyond yourself. Katniss, by her “bravery brand”, was a natural fit for the rebellion. The trick is to keep the brand consistent.
• Use Television as a Weapon- the Capitol uses television as a propoaganda and a palliative machine. By making the Games required watching, the Capitol showcases its brutal power over the Districts. Peeta and the rbels twist the Capitol’s own weapon — televisin — against it. Peeta uses television to engender sympathy among the Districts and the Capitol population. The Rebels disseminate stories of Snow’s misdeeds, sowing deeper resentment in Panem. Of course, television can be an offensive or defensive weapon, choose carefully. Whoever controls television, controls information.

Macro-Level Strategy: the Rebellion – Collins provides an interesting playbook for wannabe revolutionaries. I’m not sure if all of her strategic moves lead to the best results, but here’s a few lessons we can draw:

• Capitalize on Unrest – District 13 remained hidden until disquiet rose to critical levels in the remaining Districts. If District 13 had emerged before the critical unrest point, it would not have been able to gain a leadership position. The remaning districts would have been too apathetic or dubious to follow a rebellion.
• Have a Rallying Point – revolutions need a clear message, a rallying point. Katniss provides one with her coup d’etat of the Gamemaker’s power during the 74th and 75th Games. Katniss’ rebellion focuses the widespread discontent towards a particular evil — the Games. History bears out the rallying point strategy. Look at the Bread Riots and the Boston Tea Party for the French and American Revolutions, respectively.
• Brutalize the Enemy – Coin uses this strategy successfully. ThroughoutMockinjay, the rebels unveil Snow’s barbaric methods of preserving leadership. By posing Snow as the villain, it’s much easier for rebels to justify the great bloodshed and dangers of the revolution.

Interestingly, many of these strategies are morally ambiguous. Coin’s strategy of vilifying Snow, while successful, leads to her own brutality.[1] The brand-building PR strategy results in an one-dimensional, and sometimes false, display of many characters. Makes you wonder how realistic our “reality television” truly is.

There’s a price for any strategy, and the characters usually pay it. The moral complexity of it all gives Hunger Games deal depth.

• How long should you wait before letting your children read The Hunger Games?
• What parallels, if any, exist between Panem and the American government?
• What can we learn about violence and culpability from The Hunger Games?

The trilogy's theme of power and downfall, similar to that of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, was pointed out by its publisher Scholastic.

http://www.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/h/HungerGamesTrilogyDiscussionGuide.pdf

Discussion Questions for The Hunger Games

1. How does Katniss feel about the country of Panem? Why does she need to make her face “an indifferent mask” and be careful what she says in public?

2. Describe Katniss’s relationships with Gale, with Prim, and with her mother. How do those relationships define her personality? Why does she say about Peeta, “I feel like I owe him something, and I hate owing people”? How does her early encounter with Peeta affect their relationship after they are chosen as tributes?

3. How does the fact that the tributes are always on camera affect their behavior from the time they are chosen? Does it make it easier or harder for them to accept their fate? How are the “career tributes” different from the others?

4. Why are the “tributes” given stylists and dressed so elaborately for the opening ceremony? Does this ceremony remind you of events in our world, either past or present? Compare those ceremonies in real life to the one in the story.

5. When Peeta declares his love for Katniss in the interview, does he really mean it or did Haymitch create the “star-crossed lovers” story? What does Haymitch mean when he says, “It’s all a big show. It’s all how you’re perceived”? Why do they need to impress sponsors and what are those sponsors looking for when they are watching the Games?

6. Before the Games start, Peeta tells Katniss, “. . . I want to die as myself . . . I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.” What does this tell you about Peeta? What does he fear more than death? Is he able to stay true to himself during the Games?

7. Why does Katniss ignore Haymitch’s advice to head directly away from the Cornucopia? Did she do the right thing to fight for equipment? What are the most important skills she has for staying alive? Her knowledge of nature? Her skill with a bow and arrow? Her trapping ability? What qualities of her personality keep her going? Her capacity for love? Her intelligence? Her self-control?

8. Why does Peeta join with the Career Tributes in the beginning of the Games? What does he hope to gain? Why do they accept him when they start hunting as a group? Why do groups form in the beginning when they know only one of them will be able to survive?

9. What makes Katniss and Rue trust each other to become partners? What does Katniss gain from this friendship besides companionship? Is Katniss and Rue’s partnership formed for different reasons than the other groups’?

10. Discuss the ways in which the Gamemakers control the environment and “entertainment” value of the Games. How does it affect the tributes to know they are being manipulated to make the Games more exciting for the gamblers and viewers? Does knowing that she is on live TV make Katniss behave differently than she would otherwise?

11. When does Katniss first realize that Peeta does care for her and is trying to keep her alive? When does she realize her own feelings for him? Did Haymitch think all along that he could keep them both alive by stressing the love story? Are they actually in love?

12. What do you think is the cruelest part of the Hunger Games? What kind of people would devise this spectacle for the entertainment of their populace? Can you see parallels between these Games and the society that condones them, and other related events and cultures in the history of the world?

13. In 1848, Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Discuss this statement as it applies to the society and government of Panem. Do you believe there is any chance to eradicate class struggles in the future?

14. Reality TV has been a part of the entertainment world since the early days of television (with shows such as Candid Camera and the Miss America Pageant), but in the 21st century there has been a tremendous growth of competitive shows and survival shows. Discuss this phenomenon with respect to The Hunger Games. What other aspects of our popular culture do you see reflected in this story?

Discussion Questions for Catching Fire

1. How did Katniss’s participation in the Games change her relationship with Gale? Why does she say, “The Games have spoiled even that . . . There’s no going back”?

2. What emotions does Peeta stir in Katniss? Though she is stiff and formal with him, what are her true feelings? How did the events in the first Games affect their relationship?

7. Why does Gale refuse Katniss’s offer to try to escape into the wild? What does he mean when he says, “It can’t be about just saving us anymore”? How does Gale’s whipping change Katniss’s thinking about escape and her feelings for Gale?

8. What makes Katniss say, “No wonder I won the Games. No decent person ever does”? Is she being too hard on herself? What makes her realize that fighting the Capitol is more important than running away? What is the importance of her meeting with Bonnie and Twill in the forest?

9. Why does the Capitol push plans for the wedding of Katniss and Peeta if they know that they will be returning to the Games in the Quarter Quell? What does the Capitol hope to gain by sending previous victors back to the Games? Is it really, as Katniss says, a way to show “that hope was an illusion”?

10. What do Katniss and Peeta learn when they watch the video of Haymitch’s Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell? How does it affect their understanding of Haymitch and the mockingjay symbol? How did Haymitch trick the Capitol?

11. How do both Peeta and Katniss mock the Gamemakers during the “talent show” portion of the training? Why do they each take the chance of offending those who will control the Games? How does this change their feelings for each other?

12. Discuss the effect on Katniss of what happens to Darius and Cinna. Why are the Capitol officials attacking those who have befriended her? Why is Cinna attacked just before Katniss is placed in the arena?

13. Why is Katniss determined to keep Peeta alive during the Games, even at the expense of her own life? When does she realize the importance of forming alliances with the other tributes? Why does Finnick save Peeta’s life? When does Katniss realize that her first impression of Finnick was wrong?

14. Describe the relationship between Katniss and Johanna. What made Katniss realize that Wiress and Beetee would be helpful allies in the arena? What important contribution does each one of the allies make to keep the group alive? What is the role of the unseen “sponsors”?

15. What is more harmful to the players in this Game—the physical traumas like the fog and rain of fire, or the emotional trauma of hearing the jabberjays?

16. What does Haymitch mean when he tells Katniss before the Games begin, “You just remember who the enemy is—that’s all”? Who is the enemy? Have the other tributes been trying to keep Peeta or Katniss alive? Which of them is most important to the rebellion?

 17. Why were Katniss and Peeta not aware of the plans for the rebellion? Why were they kept in the dark when other tributes knew about it?

18. What is the meaning of the title? How many different ways can you identify the theme of “catching fire” in this volume?

Discussion Questions for MockingJay

1. What is Katniss’s greatest challenge when she returns to see the ruins of her home? What is the meaning of the rose she finds on her dresser? Why does she keep repeating facts about herself?

2. Why does Katniss take the cat Buttercup back to District 13? What role does Buttercup play in the story in later chapters?

3. What is the first reaction Katniss has to the people of District 13? What makes her say, “In some ways District 13 is even more controlling than the Capitol”?

4. What influences her decision to become the Mockingjay? Why does Katniss have to ask for conditions once she agrees to take on the role of Mockingjay?

5. Discuss the feelings between Katniss and Coin. Why do they distrust each other from the beginning? How does Coin treat the conditions that Katniss demands for being the Mockingjay? Is Katniss really a threat to Coin’s power?

6. Compare the reactions of Katniss and Gale to the imprisonment and treatment of Katniss’s prep team, Venia, Octavia, and Flavius. How does this reflect on both of them? What is the difference between the prep team and the filming crew—Cressida, Mesalla, Castor, and Pollux—who are also from the Capitol?

7. What was necessary for Katniss to create a truly effective “propo” for the rebellion? Why didn’t the first idea work? Why does Haymitch say, “That is how a revolution dies”? After the taping in District 8, what does Katniss mean when she says, “I have a kind of power I never knew I possessed”?8. Discuss the role of television “propaganda” in today’s society and the techniques that are used to influence our thinking. How do these techniques compare to those used by the Capitol and the rebels in Mockingjay?

9. Why did Plutarch cover up Katniss and Gale’s insubordination in District 8 during the taping? What is the effect of the “propo” on the rebellion in other districts? Why are the “propos” so vital to the rebellion? What effect do Katniss and the Mockingjay symbolism have on those fighting against the Capitol and those in the Capitol?

10. Discuss the role of music in this book. What is the significance of the “Hanging Tree” song? How many ways does the song play a part in the story? How does it connect Katniss and Peeta to their past and their future? Research the song “Strange Fruit” sung by Billie Holiday and discuss its similarities and differences to Katniss’s song.

11. Discuss the changing nature of the relationship between Katniss and Gale. What does Gale say is the “only way I get your attention”? Did Katniss ever love Gale the way he wants her to love him? Does he truly love her?

12. Discuss the changing nature of Prim’s role in the story, as she grows older. Identify times when Prim helps Katniss when no one else can.

13. Why do the rebels decide to rescue Peeta? Discuss the effects of the “hijacking” of Peeta’s brain. Discuss Katniss’s comment, “It’s only now that he’s been corrupted that I can fully appreciate the real Peeta.” What is the significance of the pearl she keeps?

14. Why are Finnick and Johanna important to Katniss? Discuss her relationship to each of them and how they help her prepare for the final fight. What is the effect of Finnick’s “propo” about his treatment by President Snow?

15. When Katniss learns of the work Gale is doing with Beetee, using the psychology of trapping as much as the mechanics, she says to Gale, “Seems to be crossing some kind of line.” Gale’s reply is that they are “following the same rule book President Snow used.” Do the ends in this battle justify the means, as Gale seems to imply?

16. Why is it so hard for Katniss to accept Gale’s idea for trapping the workers inside the Nut (“I can’t condemn someone to the death he’s suggesting”)? What does she mean when she says to the wounded man in the square, “I’m tired of being a piece in their Games”? How many ways does the invasion of the Capitol remind Katniss of the Games?

17. Discuss Katniss’s feelings of guilt and insecurity when confronting Peeta. What makes her say, “Finally, he can see me for who I really am. Violent. Distrustful. Manipulative. Deadly”? What makes her think the worst of herself?

18. What are Coin’s motives in ordering Peeta to join Katniss’s squad in the Capitol? What are the advantages and disadvantages of having him on the squad? When Boggs transfers the holo to Katniss, why does he say, “Don’t trust them”? Whom does he mean?

19. Do you believe it was the rebels who killed the children with the exploding parachutes? If so, how does that make you feel about whether this was justified as a means of winning the war?

20. Why does Paylor allow Katniss to enter the rooms where Snow is being held? Does she know that Snow will reveal to Katniss the role of the rebels in Prim’s death? Did Snow tell Katniss the truth?

21. Why did Katniss vote for another Hunger Games? To save the lives of more people? Or did she secretly anticipate sabotaging the plan?

22. Why does Katniss assassinate Coin? Does she do it to avenge Prim, or because she believes it is for the greater good of the country, or both? How does Katniss escape retribution for Coin’s death?

23. Gale tells Peeta, when they are hiding out in the Capitol, that Katniss will pick whichever one of them she can’t survive without. In the end, why is that one Peeta and not Gale?

The Hunger Games trilogy provides many interesting analogies to historical events and literary classics through the ages.

Greek Legend

Suzanne Collins was inspired by the Greek legend of King Minos of Crete who demanded that seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls be sacrificed periodically in the Labyrinth of the Minotaur—until the hero Theseus volunteered to go in place of one of the youths and was able to slay the monster. The story can be studied in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. A fictionalized version is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die.

The Roman Empire

Study of the Roman Empire will yield many connections to The Hunger Games trilogy—the autocratic rule of the Capitol, the political machinations of President Snow, training of youth for a fight to the death to amuse the Capitol’s citizens, and the politics of the rebellion. Even the name of the country, Panem, comes from the Roman phrase, “panem et circenses”—the bread and circuses which the Romans provided to control the population by keeping them contented and entertained. Classic novels such as Howard Fast’s Spartacus and Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God will enhance those connections.

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc is an historical figure brought to mind by Katniss and the way she is manipulated for political and tactical reasons. Compare Joan’s peasant upbringing, determination, and sheer grit in the face of her enemies in the 15th century to the role Katniss takes on for the rebellion in Mockingjay.

Shakespeare

There are a number of themes in Shakespeare’s plays that can be compared with The Hunger Games trilogy. Read Julius Caesar for the Roman connection and the theme of the downfall of the powerful. Compare Snow’s hold on the presidency to the tragic results of ambition and thirst for power in Macbeth. The star-crossed lover theme can be compared to Romeo and Juliet, and the effort involved in bringing down a despotic ruler plays out in Richard the III. For another view of Richard III, see Josephine Tey’s compelling mystery The Daughter of Time (Touchstone, 1995), exploring the idea that history is written by the victors in any conflict.

Modern Literary Connections

In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, set during the Dust Bowl years in the United States, ordinary people struggle to stay alive in the Great Depression. Steinbeck vividly depicts the conflicts between poor farmers, bankers, and property owners.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~tan/Britten/britwar.html

The War Requiem was written for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral (the old cathedral is pictured at left), and was first performed there 30 May 1962. Coventry Cathedral had been destroyed during the Battle of Britain in World War II. Britten was commissioned to write a piece for the ceremony marking the completion of a new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence, built along side the the ruins of the original millenium-old structure. Since the work was to be performed inside the new cathedral, it was a good acoustic challenge for Britten. The ceremony was comprised of several works, including Tippett's opera King Priam.

The War Requiem was not meant to be a pro-British piece or a glorification of British soldiers, but a public statement of Britten's anti-war convictions. It was a denunciation of the wickedness of war, not of other men. The fact that Britten wrote the piece for three specific soloists -- a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya), and a British tenor (Peter Pears) -- demonstrated that he had more than the losses of his own country in mind, and symbolized the importance of reconciliation. (Unfortunately Vishnevskaya was not available for the first performance, and had to be replaced by Heather Harper). The piece was also meant to be a warning to future generations of the senselessness of taking up arms against fellow men.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/06/14/fresh-hell-2?currentPage=2

Collins’s trilogy is only the most visible example of a recent boom in dystopian fiction for young people. Many of these books come in series, spinning out extended narratives in intricately imagined worlds. In Scott Westerfeld’s popular “Uglies” series, for example, all sixteen-year-olds undergo surgery to conform to a universal standard of prettiness determined by evolutionary biology; in James Dashner’s “The Maze Runner,” teen-age boys awaken, all memories of their previous lives wiped clean, in a walled compound surrounded by a monster-filled labyrinth. The books tend to end in cliff-hangers that provoke their readers to post half-mocking protestations of agony (“SUZANNE, ARE YOU PURPOSELY TOURTURING YOUR FANS!?!?!?”) on Internet discussion boards.

Publishers have signed up dozens of similar titles in the past year or two, and, as with any thriving genre, themes and motifs get swapped around from other genres and forms. There are, or will soon be, books about teen-agers slotted into governmentally arranged professions and marriages or harvested for spare parts or genetically engineered for particular skills or brainwashed by subliminal messages embedded in music or outfitted with Internet connections in their brains. Then, there are the post-apocalyptic scenarios in which humanity is reduced to subsistence farming or neo-feudalism, stuck in villages ruled by religious fanatics or surrounded by toxic wastelands, predatory warlords, or flesh-eating zombie hordes. An advantage to having young readers is that most of this stuff is fresh to them. They aren’t going to sniff at a premise repurposed from an old “Twilight Zone” episode or mutter that the villain is an awful lot like the deranged preacher Robert Mitchum plays in “The Night of the Hunter.” To thrill them, a story doesn’t have to be unprecedented. It just has to be harrowing.

Dystopian novels for middle-grade and young-adult readers (M.G. and Y.A., respectively, in publishing-industry lingo) have been around for decades. Readers of a certain age may remember having their young minds blown by William Sleator’s “House of Stairs,” the story of five teen-agers imprisoned in a seemingly infinite M. C. Escher-style network of staircases that ultimately turns out to be a gigantic Skinner box designed to condition their behavior. John Christopher’s “The White Mountains,” in which alien overlords install mind-control caps on the heads of all those over the age of thirteen, tore through my own sixth-grade classroom like a wicked strain of the flu. Depending on the anxieties and preoccupations of its time, a dystopian Y.A. novel might speculate about the aftermath of nuclear war (Robert C. O’Brien’s “Z for Zachariah”) or the drawbacks of engineering a too harmonious social order (Lois Lowry’s “The Giver”) or the consequences of resource exhaustion (Saci Lloyd’s “The Carbon Diaries 2015”). And, of course, most American schoolchildren are at some point also assigned to read one of the twentieth century’s dystopian classics for adults, such as “Brave New World” or “1984.”

The youth-centered versions of dystopia part company with their adult predecessors in some important respects. For one thing, the grownup ones are grimmer. In an essay for the 2003 collection “Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults,” the British academic Kay Sambell argues that “the narrative closure of the protagonist’s final defeat and failure is absolutely crucial to the admonitory impulse of the classic adult dystopia.” The adult dystopia extrapolates from aspects of the present to show readers how terrible things will become if our deplorable behavior continues unchecked. The more utterly the protagonist is crushed, the more urgent and forceful the message. Because authors of children’s fiction are “reluctant to depict the extinction of hope within their stories,” Sambell writes, they equivocate when it comes to delivering a moral. Yes, our errors and delusions may lead to catastrophe, but if—as usually happens in dystopian novels for children—a new, better way of life can be assembled from the ruins would the apocalypse really be such a bad thing?

Sambell’s observation implies that dystopian stories for adults and children have essentially the same purpose—to warn us about the dangers of some current trend. That’s certainly true of books like “1984” and “Brave New World”; they detail the consequences of political authoritarianism and feckless hedonism. This is what will happen if we don’t turn back now, they scold, and scolding makes sense when your readers have a shot at getting their hands on the wheel.

Children, however, don’t run the world, and teen-agers, especially, feel the sting of this. “The Hunger Games” could be taken as an indictment of reality TV, but only someone insensitive to the emotional tenor of the story could regard social criticism as the real point of Collins’s novel. “The Hunger Games” is not an argument. It operates like a fable or a myth, a story in which outlandish and extravagant figures and events serve as conduits for universal experiences. Dystopian fiction may be the only genre written for children that’s routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader. “The success of ‘Uglies,’ ” Westerfeld once wrote in his blog, “is partly thanks to high school being a dystopia.”

Take the Hunger Games themselves. In the first book of Collins’s trilogy, Katniss explains that the games are a “punishment” for a failed uprising against the Capitol many years earlier, and they’re meant to be “humiliating as well as torturous.” The twenty-four child contestants, called tributes, are compelled to participate, and the people of their districts must watch the televised bloodbath. Yet residents of the richer districts (District 12, Katniss’s home, is a hardscrabble mining province) regard competing as “a huge honor,” and some young people, called Career Tributes, train all their lives for the games. When Katniss herself becomes a tribute (she volunteers, in order to save her younger sister), she’s taken to the Capitol and given a glamorous makeover and a wardrobe custom-designed for her by her own personal fashion maestro. She’s cheered by crowds, fêted at galas, interviewed on national television, fed sumptuous meals, and housed in a suite filled with wondrous devices. She’s forced to live every teen-age girl’s dream. (Her professed claim to hate it all is undermined by the loving detail with which she describes every last goody.)

As a tool of practical propaganda, the games don’t make much sense. They lack that essential quality of the totalitarian spectacle: ideological coherence. You don’t demoralize and dehumanize a subject people by turning them into celebrities and coaching them on how to craft an appealing persona for a mass audience. (“Think of yourself among friends,” Katniss’s media handler urges.) Are the games a disciplinary measure or an extreme sporting event? A beauty pageant or an exercise in despotic terror? Given that the winning tribute’s district is “showered with prizes, largely consisting of food,” why isn’t it the poorer, hungrier districts that pool their resources to train Career Tributes, instead of the wealthier ones? And the practice of carrying off a population’s innocent children and commanding their parents to watch them be slaughtered for entertainment—wouldn’t that do more to provoke a rebellion than to head one off?

If, on the other hand, you consider the games as a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience, they become perfectly intelligible. Adults dump teen-agers into the viper pit of high school, spouting a lot of sentimental drivel about what a wonderful stage of life it’s supposed to be. The rules are arbitrary, unfathomable, and subject to sudden change. A brutal social hierarchy prevails, with the rich, the good-looking, and the athletic lording their advantages over everyone else. To survive you have to be totally fake. Adults don’t seem to understand how high the stakes are; your whole life could be over, and they act like it’s just some “phase”! Everyone’s always watching you, scrutinizing your clothes or your friends and obsessing over whether you’re having sex or taking drugs or getting good enough grades, but no one cares who you really are or how you really feel about anything.

The typical arc of the dystopian narrative mirrors the course of adolescent disaffection. First, the fictional world is laid out. It may seem pleasant enough. Tally, the heroine of “Uglies” (and its two sequels), looks forward to the surgery that will transform her into a Pretty and allow her to move to the party enclave of New Pretty Town. Eleven-year-old Jonas, in “The Giver,” has no problem with the blandly tranquil community where he grows up. Then somebody new, a misfit, turns up, or the hero stumbles on an incongruity. A crack opens in the façade. If the society is a false utopia, the hero discovers the lie at its very foundation: the Pretties are lobotomized when they receive their plastic surgery; the residents of Jonas’s community have been drained of all passion. If the society is frankly miserable or oppressive, the hero will learn that, contrary to what he’s been told, there may be an alternative out there, somewhere. Conditions at home become more and more unbearable until finally the hero, alone or with a companion, decides to make a break for it, heading out across dangerous terrain.

Because these new dystopias follow a logic more archetypal than rational, many of them don’t even attempt to abide by the strictures of science fiction. Or perhaps they care only about the third of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous three rules of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In her rooms in the Capitol, Katniss, who has previously spent her days poaching in the woods with a bow and arrow, finds she can “program the closet for an outfit to my taste. The windows zoom in and out on parts of the city at my command. You only need to whisper a type of food from a gigantic menu into a mouthpiece and it appears, hot and steamy, before you in less than a minute.” She might as well be living in a fairy-tale castle, dining off enchanted golden plates that refill themselves every evening.

The snow-globe timelessness of these novels doesn’t prevent them from incorporating the particular flavor of contemporary kid culture. Waking up in a hostile, confined place without an identity or any notion of what you’re supposed to do or how you can get out—as Thomas, the hero of “The Maze Runner,” does—is a scenario often found in video games. So are the rings that give their possessors more lives in Catherine Fisher’s “Incarceron,” where the characters are confined to a prison as big as a small country, complete with cities and metal forests. Like “The Maze Runner,” “Catching Fire” features a moment in which the desperate players must picture the geography around them as seen from above, like a game board or puzzle in whose pattern can be found a crucial clue. There’s more hand-to-hand combat in these dystopias than there was in the books of thirty years ago, and it’s more important to the stories, which frequently culminate in a showdown resembling the climax of an action movie. Carrie Ryan’s “The Forest of Hands and Teeth” takes an insular, vaguely medieval community reminiscent of the town in the M. Night Shyamalan film “The Village,” subjects it to George Romero-style zombie attacks, and then throws in a love quadrangle with enough emo angst to rival “Twilight.”

The experience of growing up under nearly continuous adult supervision—the circumstances that made writing about autonomous contemporary sixth-graders so difficult for Rebecca Stead—has tinged these novels as well. The protagonists in the technological dystopias of earlier generations frequently contended with surveilling cameras, hoping to either elude or defy them. Face-offs between the human eye and a soulless lens still occur; the teen hacker who narrates Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother,” a privacy-rights anthem set in near-future San Francisco, provides helpful instructions on how to make a concealed-camera detector out of a toilet-paper tube and a handful of spare L.E.D. lights. Often, however, the attitude is sullen resignation; in “Incarceron,” the hero, Finn, can do no more than note the small red lights of the prison’s ubiquitous “Eyes” staring down at him from the rafters. When Katniss is finally delivered into the Hunger Games arena, a tract of forest, she never even bothers to look around for the cameras; she knows they’re embedded everywhere. “It has probably been difficult for the cameras to get a good shot of me,” she thinks as she climbs down from a tree. “I know they must be tracking me now though. The minute I hit the ground, I’m guaranteed a close-up.” In “The Hunger Games,” surveillance is ambient.

The Internet plays a less important role in these novels than you might expect. One notable exception, M. T. Anderson’s merciless and very clever satire of late-capitalist complacency, “Feed,” has information (mostly advertising) piped right into people’s brains; the novel’s narrator thinks of the laptop era as being “like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.” (“Feed” is one of the few Y.A. dystopias in which adolescence doesn’t confer any special immunity to the Big Lie. It’s a lot closer to “Brave New World” than to “The Hunger Games,” and its ending is notably downbeat.) In perhaps the most impressive of the recent crop, “The Knife of Never Letting Go,” by Patrick Ness, the Internet appears metaphorically, in the form of a virus that causes people’s thoughts to be broadcast into the minds of all those around them. “Information is absolutely everywhere today,” Ness has explained, “texts and emails and messaging—so much it feels like you can’t get away from it.”

Todd, the novel’s narrator, is a post-apocalyptic Huck Finn, the youngest resident of an all-male frontier town (the women have been killed off by the virus), where he’s bombarded by mental “Noise,” a cacophony of impressions and ideas, rendered at one point as a web of overlapping scrawls. Todd prefers to hang out in the nearby swamp, which is also Noisy, because the virus broadcasts animals’ thoughts, too, but less intrusively so: The loud is a different kind of loud, because swamp loud is just curiosity, creachers figuring out who you are and if yer a threat. Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yerself left at all?

The young readers of “The Knife of Never Letting Go” may feel the same way about their overscrutinized, information-flooded lives, or maybe that’s just how Ness thinks he’d feel if he were them. It somehow fits the paranoid spirit of these novels that adults are the ones who write them, publish them, stock them in stores and libraries, assign them in classes, and decide which ones win prizes. (Most of the reader reviews posted online seem to be written by adults as well.) But kids do read the books, and some of them will surely grow up to write dystopian tales of their own, incited by technologies or social trends we have yet to conceive. By then, reality TV and privacy on the Internet may seem like quaint, outdated problems. But the part about the world being broken or intolerable, about the need to sweep away the past to make room for the new? That part never gets old.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Green-t.html?_r=0

Amid this rising sea of dystopias, two books stand apart: “The Dead and the Gone,” by Susan Beth Pfeffer, and “The Hunger Games,” by Suzanne Collins. While some young adult novels are content to read the way bad sci-fi movies look, both these books transcend their prem­ises with terrifyingly well-imagined futures and superb characterization.

Unlike most of the recent dark visionary fictions, “The Dead and the Gone,” a companion to Pfeffer’s acclaimed “Life as We Knew It,” explores an apocalyptic event not of our making: in the near future an asteroid hits the moon, changing tides and weather patterns so profoundly that human life in New York City becomes nearly impossible. Seventeen-year-old Alex Morales must take care of his family, because his mother doesn’t return home from her hospital job in Queens and his father is missing in Puerto Rico. Alex and his sisters attend Catholic school, and they all struggle with the complexity of faith in the wake of an unbearable (and for most, unsurvivable) act of God. What makes “The Dead and the Gone” so riveting is its steadfast resistance to traditional ideas of hope in children’s books — which is to say this is a dark and scary novel.

But it is not without hope. Alex and his sisters receive some assistance from the government: there are weekly, if meager, bags of food for those who stand in line for hours. Most of their help and hope, though, comes from the church, and the tension between faith and disaster keeps the story taut. Pfeffer subtly explores the complex­ity of believing in an omnipotent God in the wake of an event that, if it could have been prevented, surely would have been.

Some of the plot seems more symbolically resonant than realistic — Alex, for instance, takes coats and shoes from dead people to trade for food, and it’s hard to imagine a shoe shortage in a mostly depopulated Manhattan. But the story’s climax and resolution feel achingly right. Pfeffer subverts all our expectations of how redemption works in teenage fiction, as Alex learns to live, and have faith, in a world where radical unfairness is the norm.

«Королевская битва» (роман и фильм); «Повелитель мух» (роман и фильм); «Бегущий в лабиринте» (роман и фильм); «Рыцари сорока островов» (роман); «Длинный путь» (роман).

Голодные игры: И вспыхнет пламя - похожие

Книга Голодные игры - похожие - книги на Имхонете

На волне «Голодных игр» - LiveLib

Вместо заключения: другие проведённые уроки и их краткие особенности

Литература и русский язык

На базе уроков экономики

Литература. «Вишнёвый сад» и модели поведения

Снабжение текста исторической фактической оснасткой.

Попытка сращения отдельных авторов и персонажей в целостное, связанное культурное пространство.

Работа с «ветвящимся» сценарием.

Пожалуй, саму структуру урока вполне можно назвать поэтической, поскольку он держался на неких отдалённых, «раздвинутых» смысловых рифмах. Тема «моделей поведения» срифмовала не только вереницу литературных персонажей, но и ученические эссе. Тема «материальных обстоятельств» срифмовала пространство пьесы и историческое время действия. Одинаковые эпизоды из двух разделённых тридцатилетием спектаклей срифмовали наши разные «современности» - советскую и сегодняшнюю. В «разыгрывании» чеховской пьесы вдруг высказалось само «вещество» времени. Мы, помня ещё об античной драме, этому вряд ли удивимся – напряжённое усилие игры требует полного присутствия личности и чтимых ею смыслов, сгущённой актуальности. Классическое произведение очищает внимание и речь для схватывания «зла» сегодняшнего дня. Классика жива, поскольку не только делает наше «сегодня» более звонким и внятным – в классическом пространстве собственно и происходит «кристаллизация нашего сегодня» (то есть мы приучаемся замечать это сегодня, помнить о нем, размышлять). Мы, может быть сыро и не всегда точно, попытались продвинуться к подлинному смыслу литературы как предмета – возможности именно через неё понимать нас самих и наше время. Чётко обозначив: литература – не архаика, а самое пекло, кратер современности; это не дисциплина формализованной рутины, а дисциплина интенсивной культурной рефлексии.

Биология и химия

на базе уроков экономики

Биология. Что такое «Здоровье»?

Чрезмерная иллюстративная подробность.

Неподготовленность ряда «ответов» на вопросы (должен быть не режим догадки, а выведения). Это вообще уязвимое место не только почти всех рассматриваемых уроков, но и российского образования как такового. Оно и понятно, – создание пространства натяженного вопрошания, движения от одной мысли к другой – сложнейшая из задач. Мы нередко симулировали это продвижение вместо того, чтобы схватывать смысловое родство идей. Не в качестве оправдания, еще раз скажем – весь позитивистский склад советского и постсоветского образования настроен на выведенные смыслы, а не на выведение смыслов.

Развитие сюжета урока происходит через продвижение сквозь проблемные узлы. Для начала – это работа с языком, этимологическими узлами.Еще в самом начале мы нащупываем три таких узла: понятие «здоровья» (как «целого», «полноты» - пример Мюнхенской Олимпиады в фашистской Германии, кадров из Л.Рифеншталь, статуй А.Брекера показывает опасность представления «здоровья» как чисто физического достатка), понятие «пациента» (ставшего сегодня деятельным субъектом, далеко ушедшим от своей этимологической функции чистого терпения; принадлежащим принципиально изменившейся связке «врач-пациент»), понятие «инвалида» (сегодня все более скользящее – в социально развитом обществе вполне может быть востребован и социально активен, полезен такой человек, который в социально менее диверсифицированном, индустриальном обществе будет «инвалидизирован», обесценен как активный социальный агент).

Анкета. Раздача анкет разных цветов ученикам и учителям должна была обеспечить простой и внятный эффект. Более высокая средняя оценка значимости здоровья как блага (из нескольких предложенных на выбор благ) учителями, по сравнению с учениками, должна была зримо показать особую природу здоровья как блага. Специфика которого состоит в том, что здоровье – латентное, неощутимое при своем избытке, воспринимающееся как само собой разумеющееся благо. По мере же сокращения этого избытка, переходе в разряд дефицитарных ресурсов, его значимость значительно возрастает. Простота анкет позволяла просмотреть их он-лайн, в считанные минуты (что выглядит довольно эффектно). Кстати, сдвоенные интегрированные уроки допускают изучение (в перерыве, в интервале работы другого учителя) и экспресс-анализ такого рода анкет. Это интересное и плодотворное направление.

Визуальный ряд.

Чтение графиков.

Хорошие задачи на нахождение зависимостей, связывание разных параметров, отслеживание динамической составляющей. Жаль, что их было очень немного. На наш взгляд, самостоятельная интерпретация «с нуля» (без предварительного обговаривания) графиков и таблиц – интересное и перспективное задачное направление.

В чем смысл рекламы?

Также весьма любопытная и полезная практика, поскольку рекламный посыл часто ускользает от четкой вербализации (порой даже таковой вербализации противится). «Извлечение» вербального, речевого смысла позволяет лучше понять действие механизма суггестии, вовлечения, смутного воздействия.

Биология. ГМО

Тип: Урок-конференция.

Перерепетированность. Отсутствие дискуссии (то есть петель обратной связи).

Достижение: Прощупывание широкого диапазона форм содержательной настроенности на разговор и дискуссию.

Так вышло, что в ходе разных уроков мы сталкивались с различными «амплитудными» проблемами. Например, в уроке «русский-экономика» это был диапазон комфорта, допустимой меры «обуючивания» пространства. Здесь – диапазон подготовленности, вышколенности. Этот диапазон простирается от импровизационных модальностей до максимально тщательной проработки. Понятно при этом, что хорошее владение предметом делает участника более свободным, то есть более способным к импровизации. Проведение урока в форме конференции предполагает весьма глубокую предварительную подготовку.

Здесь многое зависит от формата. Предположим, вы выбираете состязательный, конкурентный формат (возможно, и с присутствием «присяжных» или экспертов). В этом случае должны актуализироваться задачи особого рода. Востребованным оказывается импровизационный драйв, притом не имитация импровизации, а умение использовать предложенную аргументацию, разворачивать ее, продлевать, умение обнаруживать логические (смысловая несвязанность) или риторические (речевая «сырость») бреши в аргументации оппонента. Здесь можно говорить о развитии аргументированной речи, выявлении «реального времени» собственной речи (то есть умении проговаривать смыслы в условиях дефицита времени и сопротивляющейся среды).

В случае выстраивания более комфортного, риторически предсказуемого, «неопасного» пространства возможен акцент других целей. Например, разработка этоса общения, практика формулирования консенсусных (притом содержательных, а не пустых) смыслов.

В общем случае, чем сильнее и самостоятельнее класс, тем, видимо, уместнее острая, конкурентная модель.

Смысловой ареал этого урока оформился до некоторой степени неожиданно. Им стал возможный обзор современной экономической терминологии в практическом приложении(выяснилось, что ГМО – отличная демонстрационная модель). Этот обзор был осуществлен лишь отчасти в связи с однократностью урока. Существенно, что речь идет не о привычном экономическом глоссарии (который, скажем, имел место в «Путешествии по Англии»), а о несколько необычном проблематическом тезаурусе (то есть словарике не дефиниций, а проблем). Можно предложить, например, обзор трудных и острых проблем физики через литературное пространство (и т.д.).

Химия. Менделеев – современность мысли

Визуальные просчеты.

Рыхлая структура.

Идея – столкновение совершенно различных форматов (их схлеста не произошло, потому что каждая из частей не была доведена до очевидного предела формы).

Первая часть – вполне экспозиционное, срежиссированное представление «биографического» Менделеева. Вторая – «личные» выступления учеников о наиболее, на их взгляд, острых и волнующих проблемах современной России, неожиданно корреспондирующих с мыслями и идеями Менделеева.

«Личные» закавычено по причине предварительной обговоренности (в самых крупных чертах, без деталей) тезисов выступления. Мы постарались не пережимать, не заготавливать эти выступления. И, разумеется, они не были отрепетированы, не проговаривались заранее. Идея, повторю, и состояла в драматургической сшибке двух совершенно разных форматов: декламационного, патетического, заученного и разговорного, пристрастно-субъективного, живого. Во второй части выступали лишь те, кто распознал важную для себя тему. Старшеклассник, интересующийся шоу-бизнесом (даже сам пишущий песни) высказался на тему патентов и авторского права – сегодня чрезвычайно актуальную. Отметим, что сам Менделеев выступал за свободное распространение идей. Автолюбитель говорил о тарифах и заградительных импортных пошлинах, о программах поддержки отечественного производителя. Как раз незадолго до этого были повышены пошлины на японские автомобили (что вызвало во Владивостоке массовое недовольство), затем была запущена интересная программа по обмену подержанных машин на новые. Важность темы тарифов для Менделеева хорошо известна. Выходец из небольшого сибирского городка говорил об инфраструктурной деградации востока России, об «отдалении» различных российских регионов, тем более вопиющем в срастающемся постиндустриальном мире. Тема развития Сибири и Дальнего востока была для Менделеева принципиальной. И так далее.

Как мне кажется, это была свежая и интересная задумка.

Увы, ее реализацию удачной не назовешь.

Первая часть вышла скучноватой и однообразной. При том, что текст в ней был весьма интересен (разве что несколько слащав). В такого рода мероприятиях важно, чтобы визуальный ряд был не только ярок, но и непредсказуем. Дело в том, что картинки здесь становятся визуальной тенью текста. Они как бы просто дублируют его. Поэтому взгляд ничем не останавливается, а ровно скользит. Слух, кстати, не «останавливается» тоже – поскольку сам тон таких выступлений знакомо торжествен, описателен и велеречив. Значит, надо продумывать, что могло бы «остановить» слух и взгляд. В этом случае эффект может быть внушителен уже в силу внезапного нарушения правил формата внутри самого этого формата. Что это может быть? Предложение высказаться кому-нибудь из аудитории? Видеоряд, не следующий за текстом шаг в шаг?

Вторая часть оказалась отчасти собранием частных выступлений, тогда как вокруг каждого из них напрашивалась дискуссия.

Главное же – не возникло ощущения упомянутой драматургической сшибки. Как раз напротив, переход выглядел внутренне не обоснованным (а это – самое главное, что от него требовалось). Возможно, причина в затянутости первой части и накопившейся эмоциональной усталости (в ней не было разрядок, хотя бы, свежо и сочно (а не «как положено») прочитанного стихотворения). Досадную нерешительность проявил и я, предложив было, быстро поменять мизансцену, передвинув столы от интерактивной доски вперед и сев лицом к лицу с аудиторией, но при виде смущенной реакции отказавшись от затеи. А ведь это очень важный момент. Перестановка ломала бы наскучившую геометрию, создавала ощущение перехода, перестройки, смены деятельности, выстраивала бы другую дистанцию с аудиторией (вторгаясь из официального в почти приватное пространство слушателей), наконец, у самих участников создавала бы чувство «отрыва» от предыдущей части (в которую они «влипли» эмоционально, интеллектуально, интонационно).

Пожалуй, наиболее важной проблемой, обнаруженной в ходе этого урока, является практика деятельного сотрудничества участников того или иного проекта. Речь даже не столько об учителях, сколько об учениках. Вот весьма показательный пример. Ощутимым изъяном этого урока было посредственное визуальное решение (так, большая часть презентации к первой части состояла из массивных кусков здесь же произносимого текста). Ученики 11-го класса проделали большую работу, были эмоционально бодры и ответственны. Уровень их настроенности вызывает уважение. Но вот только … Почему они (современные продвинутые люди) не подсказали учителю коррекцию визуального ряда? Ведь это, очевидно, напрашивалось. Вероятно потому, что так и не восприняли себя прямыми соучастниками дела. И еще потому, что современная российская школа очень мало способствует развитию в учениках вкуса к прямой, личностной, а не опосредованной деятельности.

Какого рода «горизонт» можно было бы обозреть в пространстве этого урока? – «Горизонт» главных наших (да и мировых в известной степени) проблем, «горизонт» нашей заботы. Снова оговоримся, что это вовсе не означает, что он и впрямь предстал перед глазами. Разного рода «поломки», дефекты организации не дали это сделать. «Горизонт» же – это то, что можно увидеть лишь из определенной точки, которой должно достичь. Точки, находящейся в пространстве урока и не данной, а заданной. Как бы то ни было, чрезвычайно важным остается старание взойти к той высоте, той круче, за которой пестрые куски смыслов срастаются в захватывающее дух целое.

Что касается того «смыслового ареала», который все-таки смог очертиться в нашем замысле, то им могла бы стать практика «приращения» к нашему времени, нашим проблемам свода мыслей того или иного нашего выдающегося соотечественника (например, в 2010-2011 гг. им мог быть Лев Толстой – 100-летие смерти). То есть «проверка», испытание нашего времени идеями этого человека (но и проверка его забот и смыслов современностью). Разумеется, такие «сближения» должны быть очищены от шелухи формализованных, «желательных», подразумеваемых фраз и мыслей.

Внимание: презентация была радикально переработана (первая и вторая части в ней переплетаются) и расширена (полноценными тематическими врезками). Как и в некоторых других случаях она стала основой для целой серии уроков.

Обществознание, история, МХК

на базе уроков экономики

История. Экономическое пространство Средних веков

Организационные дефекты.

Этот урок показал, как тщательно надо продумывать организационные детали.

Нужно, чтобы у учеников было «правильное» ожидание формата предстоящей работы. «Ожидание» существенно тем более, что современные ученики слишком укоренены в традиционном формате уроке.

Дискуссия сама по себе есть не просто интересная форма усвоения знания, но ФОРМА как таковая, поскольку предполагает негласный дисциплинарный (исключительно свой собственный, а не заданный извне) устав. Или трудное движение к такой ФОРМЕ (поскольку в чистом виде она – этический идеал, а не готовая модель).

То есть она нуждается и в солидарном усилии, и в создании своей «частной» речи (именно в силу того, что требует индивидуальных актов).

Как нам показалось, формат «текста с ошибками» – динамичен и интересен. Поскольку вокруг практически каждого урока вырастало целое облако смыслов, кругооборот смыслов – логичным представляется создание на их основе полноценных учебных циклов. В случае с уроком истории это может быть написание (возможно, совместное с учениками) цикла подобных текстов, охватывающего значительный временной промежуток. Может быть, со сквозным героем (этаким Агасфером).

Двухчастная презентация к этому уроку – наиболее выразительный пример «стволовой» презентации. Обильность охваченных ею тем и культурологическая амплитуда требуют довольно значительных временных издержек для непринужденного использования. Но подобного рода работа вообще является в современных условиях обязательной, поскольку только она обеспечивает определенную интеллектуальную независимость и свободу. «Ядром» презентации является чрезвычайно интересный, во многих отношениях «кризисный» 13-й век, но втянутыми в орбиту обсуждения оказываются и некие ближайшие «окрестности», и Возрождение (поскольку через него с наибольшей отчетливостью видны тектонические сдвиги общества и личности), и наше время. В некоторых случаях происходит «вторжение» визуальных «языков» других (неевропейских) культур. На основе одной этой презентации может быть создан целый ряд серьезных тематических курсов.