Atonement

=//Atonement Project//= media type="custom" key="12195328" align="center"

//Assignment Directions// You will complete the following tasks:
 * Brainstorm a list of themes (morals) or motifs (recurring ideas) in Ian McEwan's //Atonement//.
 * Share your list with the class.
 * Volunteer to examine the occurences of this theme or motif in the novel and document examples of the theme or motif using any media at your disposal. You may include video, pictures, sounds etc.
 * The project may be presented in whatever format you are most comfortable: poster, wiki page, web page, PowerPoint (yawn), Smart Notebook, etc.
 * Finally, a digital copy of your presentation must be posted on the wiki. If your group chooses to make a poster, then we will take a picture of it.

Individually, asnwer one of the following essay questions (about 3-5 pages) about //Atonement://
 * The novel's epigraph is taken from[| Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey], in which a naïve young woman, caught up in fantasies from the Gothic fiction she loves to read, imagines that her host in an English country house is a villain. In Austen's novel Catherine Norland's mistakes are comical and have no serious outcome, while in **Atonement**, Briony's fantasies have tragic effects upon those around her. What is McEwan implying about the power of the imagination, and its potential for harm when unleashed into the social world? It would be helpful to consider other imaginative and distastrous plans in history (Hitler's "Final Solution" for example).


 * About changing the fates of Robbie and Cecilia in her final version of the book, Briony says, "Who would want to believe that the young lovers never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism?" McEwan's **Atonement** has two endings—one in which the fantasy of love is fulfilled, and one in which that fantasy is stripped away. What is the emotional effect of this double ending? Is Briony right in thinking that "it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end"?


 * In her letters to Robbie, Cecilia quotes from W. H. Auden's 1939 poem, [|"In Memory of W. B. Yeats,"] which includes the line, "Poetry makes nothing happen." In part, the novel explores the question of whether the writing of fiction is not much more than the construction of elaborate entertainments—an indulgence in imaginative play—or whether fiction can bear witness to life and to history, telling its own serious truths. Is Briony's novel effective, in her own conscience, as an act of atonement? Does the completed novel compel the reader to forgive her?