Literature Discussion Group: Where is the fault, anyway?

23 April 2014

Where is the fault, anyway?

Is it in our stars, as the title of the book suggests? And if so, what does that mean?

Here's the Shakespeare quote from which the book gets its title:

The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars,But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

- from Julius Caesar, I, ii, 140-141

It's Cassius (a fellow underling) who speaks these words to Brutus, and he's saying ... well, I'll leave the interpretation up to you.

What is he saying? Why, exactly, are Brutus and Cassius underlings and not kings (in Cassius' humble opinion)? And what does that have to do with the title of John Green's book and the story within its pages?

And while we're on the topic of extracting meaning from quotes, let's take a minute to examine the epigraph:

As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the ocean:"Conjoiner rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. Look at it, rising up and rising down, taking everything with it."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Water," the Dutchman said. "Well, and time."

– PETER VAN HOUTEN, An Imperial Affliction

Why do you think Green decided to include this quote at the beginning of the book as an epigraph? What significance does it have? How does it relate to the story?

A Mission in Three Parts

That's the second part of your mission--to come to group next week with your thoughts on the epigraph. The first part of your mission is to come with your thoughts on the title. And the third part of your mission? Ha ha! That's to arrive with something of your own to contemplate.

As we did with Homeland, please come with two of the following:

a theme from The Fault in Our Stars, and what the author seems to be saying about that theme
a symbol you noticed and how it is used
a motif from the book and what purpose you think it serves
a discussion question to ask the group
a quote you found particularly interesting, meaningful, or puzzling

Got it? Thoughts on the title, thoughts on the epigraph, and two items from the list above. If we all do that, we should have a rousing discussion on this thoughtful book. (I'll bring the tissues.)

Happy reading.

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Looking For Hamlet Scholar Talk

This is another event at the PPL in March in honor of the First Folio Exhibit, and it's on Wednesday, March 9th from 12-1:30pm in the Rines Auditorium.

"Focusing on Hamlet, University of Southern Maine Professor Ben Bertram will examine the way editors, directors, actors, teachers, and scholars choose among folio, quarto, or conflated versions of the plays. He will also be accompanied by actors who will perform Hamlet’s soliloquies and join in a discussion of how Shakespeare’s words make it from the page to the stage."

Get the full description here.

Definitions and Clarifications

pneumatic, adj. - literally, full of air. This term is often used to describe women in BNW, and seems to suggest that a woman like Lenina, who's "wonderfully pneumatic," is buxom, curvy, shapely, and yes, even bouncy. But pneumatic could also have a second meaning here, and that is to indicate that someone is a bit of an air-head, light on the intellectual matter, or not bogged down by weighty matters or considerations.

viviparous, adj. - a creature that is viviparous gives birth to live young that develop inside the body, as in the way mammals reproduce. Humans are viviparous (at least, they were until A.F. 632).

Malthusian, adj. - based on the beliefs of Robert Thomas Malthus, a British economist who argued that "population tends to increase faster than food supply, with inevitably disastrous results unless the increase in population is checked by moral restraints or by war, famine, and disease." - The Free Dictionary

Pavlovian Conditioning, n. - also called Classic Conditioning, it's a way of getting a subject to make certain associations between two previously unrelated things; Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the psychologist who discovered that if he always rang a bell right before feeding his dogs, they came to associate the sound of the bell with getting fed, and therefore would start to drool upon hearing the bell. Here's a great comic related to that experiment.

Literature Discussion Group

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