DewaltYALens4

Kyle Dewalt YA Lit Lens #4 Dr. Sherry

Intertextual I believe that the text //The Hunger Games// by Suzanne Collins is an example of a great young adult literature. It is also a text that our students could either connect to or place themselves into the storyline and become one with the characters. It is interesting however, to relate //The Hunger Games// to some other texts for our students to read and also to what is or has occurred recently throughout the world. While I was only able to really remember one text that I have read in my past, I decided to also do some research and discover connecting texts and also some events that could relate to what to the plot and the characters.

One text that truly matched up with the plot of traditions of an area and an unneeded death is Shirley Jackson’s //The Lottery//, which is a short story that I read in around eleventh grade. The storyline is that it is a tradition for the townspeople to have a lottery system and a name is selected every year to have one person die so that they can be guaranteed a good and plentiful harvest for the year. This really relates to //The Hunger Games// because it is a lottery system and an unjust death occurs so that they can have food and the name given in high reward. While these two works of fiction were not written during the same time period and are two separate types of writing, they do relate and students would find this parallelism. Interestingly, you as a teacher could lead in the novel by having a class read the short story to gain a perspective on the overall theme. When I was looking for other texts that really relate to //The Hunger Games//, it seemed that //The Long Walk// by Stephen King was a relatable text. It had characters that were younger and it also deals with survival of the fittest and however wins gets happiness and bliss for their future. Other than texts, there was the war in Iraq occurring during the period of Collins’ writing and this would definitely play a role on her writing because of the devastation.

It is interesting to compare specifically //The Hunger Games// to //The Lottery// because while they are so different, they also have so many similarities that are interesting to pick up on. When you compare the two different texts, you open up new doors for your students to analyze the texts and be able to learn more. One good thing also, is that this helps students because if one doesn’t particularly enjoy reading a larger text, they may benefit extremely from //The Lottery//. By just reading the one text, students will indeed enjoy reading but when you include more comparing elements, they can learn more or you will encourage them to seek out more resources; which is essentially what we want to do as educators.

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