The Tempest Discussion Questions

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Corum/Ingham Discussion Questions for The Tempest

• Here's a passage from Marianna Torgovinick's book Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. While it is not directly associated with any of the four critical discourses we've discussed this quarter, it may provide an interesting connection between them, especially in terms of analyzing representations of the exotic in Antony and Cleopatra or The Tempest:

To study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world which is also a familiar world. That world is structured by sets of images and ideas that have slipped from their original metaphoric states to control perceptions of primitives--images and ideas that I call tropes. Primitives are like children, the tropes say. Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces--libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies. Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the "lowest cultural level"; we occupy the "highest," . . . The ensemble of these tropes--however miscellaneous and contradictory--forms the basic grammar and vocabulary of what I call primitivist discourse, a discourse fundamental to the Western sense of self and Other.

With this in mind, how might you think about the representations of Arica, Caliban, Sycorax? Take a look at this passage: I.ii.305-365. How would you analyze this interaction? Which of our critical discourses might be helpful?

• In lecture on Tuesday, Prof. Corum left us with a myriad of questions to think about. Why did the indigenous peoples under colonialization engage in cannibalism? Why the slavery and magic in this play?
• How do you want to read Prospero's breaking of his "magic staff?" If we don't read it as a renunciation of power what do we read it as? Look at Prospero's last speech . . . what does this speech actually tell us?

--MarthineSatris 18:48, 24 August 2007 (PDT)