Katniss Everdeen Research Articles

Incarnating the Feminine Genius in the Contemporary Catholic Church

As Western society has seemingly become apathetic about faith and religion [1] , many within the Catholic Church have simultaneously become concerned with issues of relevance. The call from Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis has been to examine the fruits of the Second Vatican Council, with a view to evangelisation, emphasising the role of the Church in modern society. Responses to this call on a pastoral level, however, often fail to recognise the specific needs of women in society and in the Church today. The goal of this article is to examine practical movements in the contemporary Church that are instigated by women, addressing the distinct needs of women in our communities in terms of vocation, spiritual motherhood and the ‘feminine genius’ (Edith Stein), with receptivity and empathy for others, including the disenfranchised and excluded. Is the Church on a local level utilising women’s ‘care thinking’ [2] in the practical outpourings of its faith and charity? In answer to this question, this article discusses the emergence of grassroots movements that exemplify the incarnation of the feminine genius in the contemporary Catholic Church. [1] Roy Williams, Post God Nation? How religion fell off the radar in Australia – and what might be done to get it back on, (Sydney, Australia: ABC Books, 2015) 28. [2] Carol Gilligan, In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development , (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.1983). Leonie Westenberg Associate Lecturer, Theology University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus 104 Broadway (P.O. Box 944) Broadway NSW 2007 E: leonie.westenberg@nd.edu.au T: (02) 8204 4175 (School) Degrees: Masters of Theology, Charles Sturt University, Australia. Postgraduate Diploma Theological Studies, Flinders University, Australia. Postgraduate Certificate Theological Studies, Flinders University, Australia. Diploma Teaching, Edith Cowan University, Australia. Biographical information: Leonie Westenberg is an Associate Lecturer in Theology at Notre Dame University Australia, Sydney campus. She lectures in theology in the Logos programme, the university’s core curriculum. She has been the author of and contributor to several books on education and has written for The Conversation on ‘The paradox of work over the summer season’, and “Blessed are the Hunger Games? Katniss Everdeen lives the Beatitudes’. She has presented papers at the Society for the Study of Theology April 2015 conference at the University of Nottingham on ‘Thinking the Church Today: What are the implications of the Second Vatican Council, fifty years, on for women, in light of the discussion of Mary in Lumen Gentium ?’, and at the 2016 Marian Conference at Notre Dame University Australia on Literary Apologetics. Email address: leonie.westenberg@nd.edu.au

A fame que o vento non levou: Paralelismos literarios entre Escarlata O'Hara e Katniss Everdeen

O rol da muller desempeña unha importancia capital na literatura universal. Moitos son os prototipos e os arquetipos que marcaron e influenciaron a narrativa ao longo dos séculos. De entre eles, algúns convertéronse en referentes canónicos que beben do éxito de personaxes icónicos que, dalgunha maneira, conseguiron marcar unha tendencia ao desvincularse das caracterizacións máis ao uso, dando así paso a unha tradición de herdanzas literarias ancoradas no cambio nos patróns de comportamento social como factor distintivo. Son numerosas as investigacións de corte feminista que indagan neses asuntos e penetran na produción de clasificacións e patróns concretos. Utilizando algunhas delas como base de partida, o presente estudo pretende sacar á luz os posibles paralelismos existentes entre dúas figuras literarias distanciadas polo tempo, os xéneros e as voces narrativas, pero que atopan puntos de semellanza comúns que se tecen tanto nos factores internos de desenvolvemento como en factores derivados da trama. Escarlata O’Hara, eixo central de O que o vento levou e Katniss Everdeen, protagonista de Os xogos da fame, configúranse como dúas heroínas literarias atípicas, capaces de producir tanto admiración como receo. A fascinación que foron capaces de espertar nas súas respectivas épocas e que pervive aínda hoxe en día grazas ao auxe do que podemos denominar narrativas transmedia, pódese explicar ao aplicar unha análise das estratexias perfomativas e as circunstancias argumentais que ambas se ven forzadas a adoptar ou padecer. Deste xeito, o conflito bélico, central na trama de ambas as obras, pódese entender como factor aglutinante e pode ser visto como motor produtor dos paralelismos literarios entre os dous caracteres, perfilándose á vez como elemento artífice da ruptura dos estereotipos clásicos de feminidade.

The Heroine and the Meme: Participating in Feminist Discourses Online

800x600 800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This article examines the relationship between feminist participatory culture and online ativism. I argue that Internet users participate in feminist discourses online by creating memes that present popular fictional female heroes such as Katniss Everdeen ( The Hunger Games ), Buffy Summers ( Buffy the Vampire Slayer ), or the Disney Princess Merida ( Brave ). Emphasizing specific characteristics and plot points of the respective stories, memes project, spread, and celebrate feminist ideas such as female empowerment, agency, and equality. Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Girls growing up Gordie: the post-apocalyptic heroine and the Australian girl reader of Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn Chronicles

Australian young adult (YA) fiction has a post-apocalyptic tradition that considerably pre-dates dystopia’s current global popularity. Long before characters like Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior emerged into mainstream popular consciousness, Australian YA fiction gave us several strong heroines struggling for a better life in a postapocalyptic setting. One such was Elspeth Gordie of Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn Chronicles. The Obernewtyn Chronicles are unusual in that they have been published across a considerable span of time. The first book was published in 1987, while the final instalment is not due to be published until the end of 2015. Numerous readers of the series have, in many ways, grown up with it: discovering it as pre-teens or teenagers, and continuing to follow it into adulthood. The first Obernewtyn fan site – obernewtyn.net – was established in 1999, and continues to be active to this day. However, despite the current popularity of texts like The Hunger Games and Divergent, the Obernewtyn Chronicles are not especially well known outside Australia. This article will explore the ways in which fans interact with and respond to the Obernewtyn books, and the ways in which this has evolved and changed. It will investigate two key questions. Why have the Obernewtyn Chronicles appealed so strongly to an Australian audience? And why have they appealed so strongly to a girl audience? I will draw on several different critical theories to unpack this appeal, including postcolonial theory, feminist theory, girlhood studies, and autoethnography. I will also integrate this with reader-response theory, looking closely at the responses of readers who began reading these books as children and who are continuing to engage with them decades later.

Female Focalizers and Masculine Ideals: Gender as Performance in Twilight and The Hunger Games

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–2008) and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series (2008–2010) have been hugely successful and influential texts, both as best-selling literary works and as action movie franchises. (To avoid confusion, Twilight and The Hunger Games in this essay refer to the first volume in the respective series, while Twilight and The Hunger Games refer to each series as a whole.) In their literary form, there are numerous parallels between the value structures of the two narratives, suggesting that they are expressions of certain common cultural value-schemata. One striking aspect of both series is that their young female narrator-focalizers spend much of their time negotiating the predator/prey binary. While the narrative trajectory of Twilight’s main protagonist Isabella Swan propels her from the position of prey at the start of the series to that of powerful predator in Breaking Dawn (2012 [2008]), The Hunger Games’ main protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, is forced to straddle both sides of the binary simultaneously as a contestant in the Capitol’s deadly Hunger Games. Both heroines are busy negotiating their status relative to a traditionally masculine ideal. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performance, this essay examines the performance of gender in the two series relative to both feminist theory and to theories of the masculine, discussing how gender scripts in the two texts interact with generic scripts such as those of romance and the boys’ story.

The Hunger Games, Spartacus , and Other Family Stories: Sentimental Revolution in Contemporary Young-Adult Fiction

The Hunger Games, Spartacus, and Other Family Stories: Sentimental Revolution in Contemporary Young-Adult Fiction David Aitchison It is already commonplace among scholars that Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10) tells a kind of Spartacus story: one influenced by historical accounts of the gladiator, who, in 73 BCE, led a slave revolt against the Roman Empire, and by modern interpretations of his life, primarily Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 big-screen epic Spartacus.1 Interviews with Collins are typically cited to corroborate this connection. In one, from 2011, she made explicit her debt to Spartacus’s life narrative, pointing out how protagonist Katniss Everdeen “follows the same arc from slave to gladiator to rebel” (Dominus n.p.). In another, from 2009, she described having researched “not only the historical Spartacus and the popular media about him, but many of the historical gladiators from pre-Christian times,” which led her to schematize the “three things always present” in what she calls the “gladiator paradigm: (1) a ruthless government that (2) forces people to fight to the death, and (3) uses these fights to the death as a form of popular entertainment” (Blasingame 727). Not insignificantly, this paradigm has long been subject to rival interpretations, perhaps best exemplified in the play between two definitive Spartacus novels of modern times, Arthur Koestler’s indictment of communist idealism, The Gladiators (1939), and Howard Fast’s sympathetic lament for failed communist revolution, Spartacus (1951). Though arguably written for a different audience, the Hunger Games trilogy takes its place in this tradition of fictions contesting the political and ethical virtues of the gladiator. To say that Collins is suspicious of the pleasure afforded by the gladiator paradigm is to acknowledge that there is debate over the allegorical dimensions of the arena as a social space—that is, over the ethics of what individuals, in relation to one another, feel compelled to do in order to [End Page 254] survive. A very different kind of Spartacus story, for instance, has evolved recently in the movement between Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Gladiator (2000) and cable channel Starz’s Spartacus (2010–13), neither of which puts pressure on the differential between self-interest and self-sacrifice as the Hunger Games novels do. While the Starz series echoes a number of plot elements from Gladiator,2 Gladiator paid homage to Douglas’s Spartacus,3 a film in turn based on Fast’s novel. Notably, though tempering the revolutionary optimism of the original, Douglas’s adaptation still tells a leftist story in which the divisiveness of the arena is countered by an unwavering solidarity—brought home in the well-known “I am Spartacus” scene, where the captured rebels would sooner die defying the Romans than betray the cause. Keeping Spartacus (1951) and Spartacus (1960) in mind, we do well to remember that gladiator fictions are sometimes driven by a desire to care for, rather than punish, bodies politic. For some critics, admittedly, works like The Hunger Games are less about probing political reality and more about capturing the universal tumult of adolescence. Laura Miller, for example, finds Collins’s trilogy “intelligible” only when considered “as a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience”: more precisely, “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” (n.p.). The shortcoming of this diagnosis is that it makes little room for any outward turn of the young reader’s imagination. Consider, for example, the moment when teenager Katniss volunteers on behalf of her younger sister to take part in the Hunger Games, a state-enforced fight to the death between twelve- to eighteen-year-old representatives from districts subjugated and exploited by the centralized power of the Capitol. By Miller’s account, Collins’s readers relate to what Katniss feels without grasping the painfully political nature of her feelings. By my account, we do these readers a disservice unless we acknowledge that they are poised more properly to work through the stormy stuff not of psyche, as such, but of political consciousness. Not all of the trilogy’s...

Critiques

Critiques Claudia Nelson Like our spring issue, ChLAQ 40.2 does not have an official theme, but the articles included here nonetheless share an interest in works in which children serve as the vehicles for social critique. The genres they examine range from comic strips to picture books to young adult dystopian novels and beyond, but together, these articles indicate ways in which literature for children and young adults may interrogate particular social constructs and seek to replace them with others. We begin with Lara Saguisag’s “Family Amusements: Buster Brown and the Place of Humor in the Early Twentieth-Century Home.” In contrast to critics who see Buster Brown primarily as a subversive text, Saguisag argues that it instructs readers in using humor to shore up the family, an institution widely perceived as under threat during the strip’s heyday. In doing so, however, Buster Brown supported not the family in general but the companionate family in particular, a model inimical to hierarchy. Buster and his parents thus function simultaneously to critique patriarchy and to support what was increasingly offered as an alternative to it. The main title of Vanessa Joosen’s “Second Childhoods and Intergenerational Dialogues: How Children’s Literature Studies and Age Studies Can Supplement Each Other” speaks to the kind of child-adult exchanges going on both within Buster Brown and in the strip’s crossover appeal, but Joosen’s focus is not on the Progressive Era US but rather on present-day Europe. Using a sample of four award-winning Dutch and British texts, Joosen examines “how old age and intergenerational relationships are constructed” in these works, asking “how insights from age studies can contribute to interpreting and contextualizing these fictional constructs.” Much as Buster Brown, in Saguisag’s reading, privileges both the playful child and the adult who is willing to play along with him, Joosen sees in her selected texts a validating of playful child and playful elder that comes at the expense of authority situated in the (implicitly joyless) middle-aged. Continuing this focus on the potential social power of play, David Aitchison turns to the concept of “puerility” in “Little Saboteurs, Puerile Politics: The [End Page 101] Child, the Childlike, and the Principled Life in Carl Hiaasen’s Ecotage Novels for Young Adults.” Aitchison reads Hiaasen’s Hoot, Flush, and Scat as indicative of how today’s environmentalist discourse offers “a certain political possibility for the child and the childlike: a license to react strongly, respond playfully, and get into trouble in the name of protecting the environment.” Simultaneously, Aitchison suggests, it is important to recognize that this discourse exists in the context of “a deeply politicized fear of childishness,” so that Hiaasen’s novels may productively be understood as “rethink[ing] what it means for children to be responsible.” Although Suzanne Collins’s protagonist Katniss Everdeen is famously involved in events designated “games” by her culture, the Hunger Games do not invite the reader to see them as play. We can, however, readily see the discourse of the Games as enabling social criticism, not least because Collins traces how this discourse contributes to the revolution of which Katniss is the public face. Kathryn Strong Hansen’s contribution, “The Metamorphosis of Katniss Everdeen: The Hunger Games, Myth, and Femininity,” combines an examination of Collins’s use of Greek myth with a gender studies approach. Tracing the presence in the trilogy of two feminine archetypes upon which Katniss is invited to model herself, namely Artemis and Philomela, Hansen argues that ultimately Katniss must reject both in order “to create a form of femininity that allows her to break free from her past and to change her society.” The article section of this issue concludes with a consideration of another contemporary dystopian novel for young adults. Amy Elliot’s “Power in Our Words: Finding Community and Mitigating Trauma in James Dashner’s The Maze Runner” argues that Dashner’s popular novel, the first installment of a trilogy later augmented by a prequel, seeks to school its adolescent readers in a crucial emotional skill by “convey[ing] the nature of trauma and suggest[ing] productive responses to help mitigate grief.” In Elliot’s reading...

The Metamorphosis of Katniss Everdeen: The Hunger Games, Myth, and Femininity

While Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy explicitly includes Greco-Roman references, this essay argues that the trilogy also implicitly invokes the myths of Artemis and of Philomela. In obliquely referencing these mythic women, The Hunger Games provides its protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, with different possible paths of femininity that she can follow. By showing how both of these forms of femininity keep Katniss focused on vengeance, The Hunger Games points to the dangers of reproducing beliefs inherited from the past. Katniss’s ultimate rejection of both of these inherited types of femininity allows her to break free from her past and to change her society.

Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, and Utopia as Process in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games : “It’s the First Gift That’s Always the Hardest to Pay Back”

Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical criticism from multiple sides of the ideological spectrum and drawing on Roberta Seelinger Trites’s argument that this body of work is a postmodern phenomenon, this article interrogates whether young adult literature is a morally compromised genre from the start or whether there is not a morally constructive framework through which young adult novels might be viewed productively. Using the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy as a case study, this paper proposes a heuristic that borrows from the postmodern (or “liquid modern”) ethics of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman, who interprets Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of ethics” as a descriptive, phenomenological, existential exercise, rejects absolutes in favour of process and an emphasis on the urge to “be-for” the Other. Through the lens of Bauman’s ethics, this paper analyzes Katniss Everdeen’s journey as a processual one, toward the end of an active moral urge.

Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, and Utopia as Process in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games: “It’s the First Gift That’s Always the Hardest to Pay Back”

Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical criticism from multiple sides of the ideological spectrum and drawing on Roberta Seelinger Trites’s argument that this body of work is a postmodern phenomenon, this article interrogates whether young adult literature is a morally compromised genre from the start or whether there is not a morally constructive framework through which young adult novels might be viewed productively. Using the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy as a case study, this paper proposes a heuristic that borrows from the postmodern (or “liquid modern”) ethics of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman, who interprets Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of ethics” as a descriptive, phenomenological, existential exercise, rejects absolutes in favour of process and an emphasis on the urge to “be-for” the Other. Through the lens of Bauman’s ethics, this paper analyzes Katniss Everdeen’s journey as a processual one, toward the end of an active moral urge.

Dressed for the Part: An Analysis of Clothing in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games Trilogy

SummarySuzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy presents a dystopia in which young people from less privileged socio-economic districts are sacrificed in murderous “games” in order to reinforce state power. Katniss Everdeen emerges from this context of oppression as the leader of a rebellion against centralised state domination. The series seems to flout well-established conventions of heroic fantasy, in which, traditionally, a male hero develops towards psychological maturity as he combats a social threat, apparently without concern for his appearance. By contrast, the Hunger Games trilogy places great emphasis on clothing, with the central protagonist undergoing several makeovers, each designed to customise her appearance for particular ideological purposes. In this article I explore this theme, which may be interpreted as too frivolous for heroic narrative, via a close gendered reading of the presentation of clothing in the text. I argue that the costumes worn by Katniss Everdeen on various occasions, demonstrating high degrees of glamour, are an index, not of her frivolity, but of the control exerted over her by the state of Panem. Katniss is not, in fact, a heroic rebel who forges her own path against a hostile social order; her choices are constrained by political exigencies, and allow her only a limited degree of agency.

The Girl on Fire: The Hunger Games, Feminist Geopolitics and the Contemporary Female Action Hero

This paper explores the gender politics of the ‘Hunger Games’ film series. It suggests that the lead character of the series, Katniss Everdeen, represents a progressive portrayal of the female action hero, contrary to much Hollywood fare. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper approaches the series through the rubric of ‘popular geopolitics 2.0ʹ and suggests that, within this, opportunities exist for further alignment between feminist geopolitics and popular geopolitics. To support its analysis, the paper offers a critical review of coverage of the series on feminist online media. The paper finishes by assessing the progressive potential of the series, as well as future directions for feminist and popular geopolitics.

Ambiguity, Ambivalence and Extravagance in The Hunger Games

I argue that Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games is an emblem of what Julia Kristeva calls the “extravagant girl” who wants to have it all and to be the best at everything. Katniss has an ambiguous gender identity, both masculine and feminine, paternal and maternal. And she has ambivalent desires. I conclude that this ambiguity and ambivalence open up new possibilities for girls and initiate an aesthetics of ambiguity.

Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers ed. by Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, Carrie Hintz (review)

Reviewed by: Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers ed. by Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, Carrie Hintz Susan Tan (bio) Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, eds. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. New York: Routledge, 2013. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults, edited by Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, is a robust and comprehensive anthology. While the young adult (YA) dystopia is a relatively recent phenomenon, many of the texts covered in this anthology already have been subject to critical discussions centering on similar questions of self, politics, and gender. It is a testament, then, to the rigorous construction of the collection that each chapter offers incisive, fresh insight into this burgeoning field of academic study. In their introduction, the editors set out a comprehensive framework for the essays to follow: defining YA dystopian literature, examining the genre traditions it draws upon, and reviewing the genre’s central themes. Throughout, the editors draw attention to three main discussions that unite the anthology: the dynamic between didacticism and escapism, political radicalism and conservatism, and hope and despair. Acknowledging the many contradictions within the genre of YA dystopia itself, the editors make it clear that they do not seek to achieve consensus or to draw any overarching conclusions. Rather, the “aim” of the collection “is to enable a prismatic understanding of the genre as a political, cultural, and aesthetic phenomenon” (9), opening new forums for academic dialogue and pointing toward possible new readings within this recent spate of texts. The collection is divided into four thematic sections. The first, “Freedom and Constraint: Adolescent Liberty and Self-Determination,” examines the interplay between maturation and dystopia. This section includes some of the strongest essays in the collection; particularly noteworthy is Basu’s “What Faction Are You In? The Pleasure of Being Sorted in Veronica Roth’s Divergent.” Aligning Roth’s novel with the “anti-utopia,” Basu notes Divergent’s ultimate push toward social complacency, an idea that is reinforced in marketing campaigns for the Divergent film, which encourage fans to “sort” themselves into the factions so central to dystopia within Roth’s world. Another striking contribution, Carissa Turner Smith’s “Embodying the Postmetropolis in Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron and Sapphique,” employs Edward Soja’s notion of the postmetropolis in a reading of urban dystopias. Uniting discussions of coming-of-age, embodiment, and spatial theory, Smith suggests an elucidating link between “social anxieties” caused by the “unstable geographies” of the postmetropolis and the cultural anxieties that surround the adolescent body (62). The second section, “Society and Environment: Building a Better World,” focuses on ecological dystopias and post-apocalyptic narratives. Its essays examine the interplay between nature and technology in a wide range of YA dystopian fiction, and effectively question the ways adolescents are often [End Page 234] linked with destructive technologies and dystopian decline. Elaine Ostry’s “The Role of Young Adult Culture in Environmental Degradation” draws together the many strands of this section, exploring whether ambivalent endings might push young readers toward environmental activism. Acknowledging the tension between “somewhat forced and infantilizing” happy endings and the otherwise bleak narratives that precede them, Ostry posits that “despair and inconclusiveness may encourage adolescents to face inconvenient truths,” particularly in a world that is “becoming increasingly urban,” where adolescents no longer “have the luxury of thinking of nature as a utopian escape” (111). The essays grouped under “Radical or Conservative? Polemics of the Future,” explore the kinds of social critique proffered by recent YA dystopias. Broad’s “Utopia as Romance in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy” stands out as a thought-provoking reading of gender and feminism in Collins’s series. Positioning Katniss’s romantic interest, Peeta, as a figure of utopian change, Broad argues that the end of The Hunger Games taps into the more conservative impulses of the romance genre, undercutting protagonist Katniss Everdeen as feminist icon. Kristi McDuffie’s “Technology and Models of Literacy in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction” offers an innovative take on the dynamic between technology, social decline, and adolescence, pointing toward the impulse to associate traditional reading and writing with nostalgia and positive change. McDuffie ultimately argues...

A Feminist Analysis of the Film "The Hunger Games"

The purpose of this paper was to analyze the appearance of feminism throughout The Hunger Games, especially when pertaining to the lead female character of Katniss Everdeen. The thesis of this paper is that, while characteristics of all three “waves” of feminism were present within the motion picture, third-wave feminism prevailed as most apparent.

Katniss Everdeen, Role Model? Morality and Ethics in the Hunger Games Trilogy

Katniss Everdeen, Role Model? Morality and Ethics in the <i>Hunger Games</i> Trilogy

The Games People Play: Information and Media Literacies in the Hunger Games Trilogy

Katniss Everdeen, the narrator and protagonist of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy, survives the grueling ordeal of forced participation in two games to the death through both physical prowess and mental agility. Both within and outside of the Games, she demonstrates information and media literacies. By becoming adept at interpreting and using information and the media, she not only survives, but also outwits the Gamemakers, undermines the power of the Capitol, and sparks a revolution. Collins’ novels thus reflect, model, and critique the information and media practices of the society in which Katniss lives—and, by extension, those of our own society. In addition, the books suggest that information and media literacies can be powerful tools of resistance for people oppressed by totalitarian governments. For Katniss, surviving the Games requires these literacies; at the same time, the Games themselves, and more broadly speaking the oppressive government of the Capitol, facilitate their development.

Survivor on Steroids

The Hunger Games, like Janus, gazes backwards to Juvenal’s cynical encapsulation of the cultural and political poverty of Rome, sated by panem et circenses. staring equally cynically forward, following the cultural trajectory of reality television (Western civilisation itself?) to its logical, if barbaric, end point ... no more than a sadistic voyeurism for an effete elite of consumers, manipulated by an Orwellian power structure for whom power is an end in itself. At each end of the historical spectrum (and in the present), the prevailing social form is Arendt’s animal laborans. Consumer or consumed, Panem’s population is either deprived of the possibility of, or distracted from, political action. Within the Games themselves, Law is abandoned or ‘de-realised’, becoming Law: an elided Other in the pseudo-Hobbesian nightmare that is the game itself … Survivo.-on-steroids. But while the Games are, on their face, ‘reality’, they are de-realised into a Foucauldian set design, constructed as entertainment/distraction for Capitol, and a constant reminder to the Districts of their subservience. Contemporary Western culture, where reality TV forms a symptom of its underlying malaise, is inscribed at least as an incipient Panem, its public/political space diminished by the pre-occupation with and distractions of materiality and media, and the increasing concentration of power/wealth into a smaller proportion of the population. Within this theatre of cruelty, Katniss Everdeen turns the rules of the game against the Gamemakers, and in doing so, transcends the mere survivalism of animal laboran., succeeding to the status of homo politicus.

NCSS Notable Trade Book Lesson Plan The Hunger Games written by Suzanne Collins

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is a post-apocalyptic tale that takes place in a barely recognizable North America. Told in the voice of 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, a citizen of the desperately poor District 12, the reader learns of the government’s method of keeping the deprived population under control. Every year the Capitol demands that each of the 12 districts select, through the means of an unfair lottery system, a boy and a girl to become tributes in the nationally televised “Hunger Games.” Here, with much fanfare, the 24 young participants must fight to the death until only one remains. Full of social commentary, the content of this cautionary tale is an ideal tool for teaching economic content and initiating meaningful classroom discussion.

The Hunger Games: A Conversation

The series of novels and the film, The Hunger Games, presents Katniss Everdeen, a female protagonist, and her journeys through an impoverished, dystopian future world. This review, in the form of a mother-daughter conversation, examines the way the books deal with extreme forms of violence by young people and the treatment of violence in our current culture. We note the historical resonances and possible predictions for the future that the book might offer us. We examine gender and sexuality as it is reflected in the main character, Katniss, and what Katniss, as protagonist, embodies as perhaps a new and developed female character in young adult literature.