While us students like to complain about the traditional research paper, I think it has serious merit in organizing and creating a thesis-driven argument (and in a way other media can’t). It’s not a stopping point though. As I thought about my topic more, the idea of stopping at a ten-page paper seemed ridiculous. It would be to an audience of zero, or zero people that actually needed to hear any of it.
So I started to think more about my audience: abuse victims, primarily women. A lot of the looking around I did didn’t end up anywhere near my paper because it wasn’t the right format. From what I’ve seen, women who struggle with abuse don’t go anywhere professional first. They go to Google and search.
And they find themselves in forums. Oh, sometimes people link to various blogs or sites they have dealing with the issue, but for the most part these communities exist in a space in between blogs and forums. The forum “questions” are often long enough to be blog posts, anyway. Certainly, no one is touching a link to a research paper.
How best to be useful, then? Well, first another observation. No one really wants to tell the details of their story, but they want to be validated by the details of someone else’s. Which leads me to think—what better story than one that, while detailed, belongs to no real person? I think that by taking a Shakespearean story of abuse and telling it in a modern way, a lot of women could be drawn in to the larger issues. So, start with the story, lead to the implications. Maybe by having the story as a forum post that links to a blog series? One thing I wouldn’t want is for it to seem deceptive in any way. Thoughts?
I think it's true that we can learn a lot from literature. I can see the benefit in reading a Shakespeare play to find the abuse and then trying to conquer a specific element through that example. Racism works really well for the Merchant of Venice. Spousal relations would work well in The Taming of the Shrew. Women degradation would work well in Othello, King Lear too (though this might be a stretch). Or you could focus on the abuse of power.
ReplyDeletePower struggles are all over Shakespeare. You could focus on the need to overpower other characters in order to gain power for themselves. Abuse leads to power. Again I think of Othello, Iago's character specifically. Or in Much Ado About Nothing, Don Jon.
I am not exactly sure if you are aiming to fix abuse or just aiming to help people recognize it. That could be a big defining factor in your idea. Maybe to keep it a more positive influence a focus on the overcoming of the problem should be focused on. (Although if you think about it Shakespeare doesn't always give out happy endings for his abused victims)
Here is another idea make a forum in which the experts you can speak with are characters from Shakespeare. So you can use quotes and interpretations that might be useful to victims of abuse.
I'll research some more stuff that might help you.