The theme for this week’s blog is alienation from one’s family. This theme was very prominent during both the Realism and Modernism eras of literature. There are a multitude of works from this time period that showcase alienation, however we will be focusing on two works that I feel are particularly great examples of this theme. The first work is The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, which is an example of Realism. The second work is The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, which is an example of Modernism. There are quite a few similarities between these two works, the biggest being that both of the main characters are alienated by those around them. Ivan Ilyich, of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, metamorphasiscomes down with some undetermined terminal illness and is put in a room away from his family and is alienated by his family, friends, and co-workers. Throughout the novella, no one is particularly concerned about Ivan. In fact, the characters are more concerned with money than with Ivan. The main character in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, awakens one morning as a ginormous insect of some kind. Upon seeing this transformation, his family locks him in his room and he is quickly alienated from his family and co-workers. Once again, money plays a prominent role in this novella. Because Gregor was the sole breadwinner of the family, they are more concerned with how they will get money than with Gregor’s well-being.

Of course, these are very broad overviews of these wonderful novellas and I would highly recommend reading both of them at some point, especially if you plan to make writing your career. Aside from being world renowned works, they do an amazing job of incorporating themes that are still around today. If any of you plan to incorporate themes of alienation into your writing I would highly recommend doing close readings of these novellas. For those of you that are teachers, I would recommend trying to lighten this subject with fun games and more engaging assignments. An interesting idea would be to take the game Life and re-writing the rules to have more of a Realism/Modernism feel to death-of-ivanthem. For example, you could add cards that have diseases that your character will come down with that cause you to lose money. You can make it even more interactive by having all the students make up a few rules each! This will make a depressing theme much more fun and interactive. Also, instead of just assigning a standard paper for your students to write, I would recommend taking a more modern approach to the assignments. An example of this would be to have them make their own memes for the stories. In case you aren’t sure of what a meme is, it’s a picture with text over it that is usually sarcastic. Though some of them are just silly, they can actually be very good examples of modern social commentary. This assignment would allow the students to show their creativity while also showing their comprehension of the reading material.