Mean World Syndrome: A Social Study

Stephen Mallatratt’s adaption to play of “The Woman in Black” portrays the story of a man named Mister Kipps, who is a solicitor who has been sent to an abandoned home in the East of the country in order to collect the legal papers of a recently deceased woman. However, the audience learns that the woman living in Ell Marsh House was haunted by a spirit known as The Woman in Black. Being based in the turn of the previous century, the play tackles the themes of how the fear of the unknown can transform a man of science into a man fearful of the dark and every single creek; and how the concept of revenge can cause an embittered woman to seek vengeance and claim the thing she lost: Children. The play is set during the time where superstition was surpassed by science and where a rational explanation was being required for how everything occurs but how science can be destroyed by the unexplainable…

Meyer, Michael. "Killings." The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Ninth ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012. 96-108. Print.

A short play is usually filled with a theatrical energy of diverse anthologies. The time allotted may be only ten or fifteen minutes, so it must be able to capture and engage the audience with some dramatic tension, exciting action, or witty humor. Just as in a short story, a great deal of the explanation and background is left for the reader or viewer to discover on their own. Because all the details are not explicitly stated, each viewer interprets the action in their own way and each experience is unique from someone else viewing the same play. Conflict is the main aspect that drives any work of literature, and plays usually consist of some form of conflict. In “Playwriting 101:

The presence of violence in our society has become commonplace as the media is filled with it. From our favorite television shows, video games and even the news, violence is made available to us at the click of a button. This ubiquitous presence that violence seems to have over our society has increased the discussion of whether violent content makes the viewer violent. Through The Mean World Syndrome shows that violent content doesn’t necessarily lead to aggressive behavior but might even make the viewer afraid of the world they live in. So how does mean world syndrome theory tie in with other leading thoughts on violence such as the bandwagon, cultivation theory, priming, framing, and catharsis.

The idea of the play is “a director who left the kids… on their own,” said Fiona Connelly, actor, “And they try to put together as many plays as they can because they have a whole crowd waiting… and they have no idea what the play they were supposed to be doing was so they just find a bunch of scripts and throw something together.”

In the reading there is a photo shot by photographer Arthur Felig of a group of children and two adults looking on to the scene of a murder in the streets of New York. The children push, shove and smile in an attempt to see the presumed body out of frame. They are in contrast to the two adult women in frame who are both in anguish. One lady cries with her eyes closed while the other looks down to avert her gaze from the scene. It latter goes on to refer to the second lady’s downward gaze as an adult practice to not look at “something awful” (page 11). I find the stark contrast between the two groups of adults and children to be very compelling toward the idea that humans have been sensitized, or unaccustomed to the sight of death. I am not

To begin with, in this play the author unfolds family conflicts that involve its characters into a series of events that affected their lives and pushed them to unexpected ways.

Often people find themselves captivated by the small, fabricated details in a story and that tends to make it difficult to decipher the actual meaning behind the story. In Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” this is the case as he demonstrates the influence of storytellers’ tone and the mood they create on people’s understanding of a moral in a story. By the same token, in Malcom Gladwell’s “Power of Context” and Karen Ho’s “Biographies of Hegemony,” the two authors explain the ideology of social determinism and its power over people’s perception of the truth. The power of inducements play a big role in the way people are able to understand reality. The complexity of the truth can often alter the way people perceive things because there are so many different meanings that people interpret from the context of stories and situations. There are certain qualities of context such as inducing words and a plethora of meanings that obscure the true actualities, making truth very complicated.

One of the earliest idioms taught to students of all ages is “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Oftentimes, a quote like that can easily be disregarded, however, it is applicable to people who aren’t always who they seem to be. Shakespeare’s play the Merchant of Venice is an outstanding work that contains a very strange villain in Shylock, who is hated by all, although he has not wronged them in the past. Thusly, his habits and personality evolved from his interactions with the Venetian populous. By examining the changes Shylock displays in tone, Shylock the villain’s motivations can be seen and ultimately display that no matter how twisted a person is or may seem, the motivations behind their actions indicate that innately they have a

The way in which Forster alerts the reader to the fact that Dolly has been physically attacked is cunningly subtle: the word 'bloody' is mentioned in a quiet subclause among a barrage of detail, and the incident is not alluded to afterwards. This partial obscuring of the truth is perhaps in itself a satirical look at the superficiality of public-school mentality, while the comment that

Malcolm X once said “The media 's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that 's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” The media reaches out to all places and affects everyone. It changes how we think and what we do. In the novel White Noise, Don Delillo uses Babette’s moral ambiguity, conveyed through her decisions and actions, to reveal the influence that media has on the internal conflict between one’s self interest and morality.

At first, the Ripper murders were a source of fascination to the public of Whitechapel and even more so in the rest of London. In her book The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders found crime and murder can be a form of entertainment for people. She says, “Crime, especially murder, is very pleasant to think about in the abstract…It reinforces a sense of safety, even of pleasure, to know that murder is possible, just not here.” Those who were at a distance from the crimes lapped up the news reports like serials of fiction; their pleasure greater because the horrible stories were real. In Whitechapel, citizens visited the sites of the murders out of curiosity. The crime scenes became exhibits, and sometimes they returned to and retraced the path of blood the Ripper spilt. At first, it was a game to the public—a form of entertainment. Some members of the public attended victims’ funerals or traveled in groups seeking out the Ripper. Later, these groups became mobs on the hunt for the killer the police were unable to catch.

The play revolves around three main character’s Ian, Cate and the Soldier in a hotel room in Leeds. To summarise; “Ian and Cate meet in a hotel room some years after their relationship has ended. Ian makes various attempts to cajole then, it is implied to force Cate to have sex with him. A bomb goes off and destroys part of the room. Ian becomes the victim as a Soldier re-enacts war crimes perpetrated on his girlfriend, who was subsequently killed. The Soldier shoots himself. Blinded, hungry and alone, Ian makes…attempt to find relief. Cate has left the hotel in search for food and as the play ends, returns with provisions…she shares with a finally grateful

The play revolves around three main character’s Ian, Cate and the Soldier in a hotel room in Leeds. To summarise; “Ian and Cate meet in a hotel room some years after their relationship has ended. Ian makes various attempts to cajole then, it is implied to force Cate to have sex with him. A bomb goes off and destroys part of the room. Ian becomes the victim as a Soldier re-enacts war crimes perpetrated on his girlfriend, who was subsequently killed. The Soldier shoots himself. Blinded, hungry and alone, Ian makes…attempt to find relief. Cate has left the hotel in search for food and as the play ends, returns with provisions…she shares with a finally grateful

The play begins with a Nurse giving us a brief synopsis of the events leading up to the current time, like Medea falling in love with Jason,