Casino Royale Presentation

        When it came time to pick the text for the presentation, I was completely torn.  Half of me wanted to do something that was closer to current times (the movie or social networking site) and the other half of me wanted to take a chance to learn about an older text and it’s relation to pop culture, structuralism, post-structuralism, etc.  I ended up choosing Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale because the fact that was written some years back still holds a great amount of popularity (movies that I enjoy today), not to mention the fact that this story and it’s main character has literally lasted generations, intrigues me.

        There are a few things that went into the preparation of this presentation,  the first of which was discussing the book as a whole and as a group.  We met a few times discussing the reading and the (possible) correlations that Casino Royale has to the class material, but after a few of those meetings I felt that we needed to break down what it was exactly that we all wanted to talk about and ask to get the class discussions going.  I set up two different meetings for the group so we could use this time to make sure that our subjects would not overlap and then asked the rest of the group in which style they would like to present.  During these two meetings we decided to composed a power-point as an outline for our audience to help keep them on track.  We each designed our own slide (shout-out to Nick for putting all the slides together/letting us use your computer!) which would contain what main points we wanted to talk about, along with pictures and clips that we felt demonstrated the points and ideas we wanted to bring up.  I am leading the discussion on Vesper and other topics containing women that interact with Bond and how the text Casino Royale’s elements differs from how women “should” be treated by a man in pop culture today.  In addition to setting up the meetings and designing my slide, I came up with the classroom activity idea.  We all discussed different ways to split up the classroom into groups, but I thought it would be fun to have trivia questions in between the different topics that we wanted to cover to break up the deep theory-relation thinking, and add a little fun, basic text (and movie) reference thinking.

        I seriously could not be happier with my text choice, but I have to say that I don’t ever think I’ll hear “James Bond” and not think about all the analyzing that I did in relating it to everything we’ve been learning in class.  I think it’s great that I know I have the ability and the desire to view things in a deeper, more objective way than I would have before.  I know that this is all part of learning but one of my favorite things about deconstructing a certain book, movie, or play is that the story resonates with me differently and every time I hear the title or plot being discussed I’m please that I know more than just the story.