Additional Teaching Materials
© 2021 Luc Bovens, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0268.08
Chapter 1. Hope. Frank Darabont’s movie The Shawshank Redemption (1994), after Stephen King’s novella ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal’ in Different Seasons (1982), focuses on the value of hope. As to poetry, Emily Dickinson’s poems ‘Hope is a subtle glutton’ (Part 1. Life. 86) and ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ (Part 1. Life. 32) are good conversation starters. Martin Luther King’s ‘Shattered Dreams’ adds a political dimension to the discussion.
Chapter 2. Death. Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) will come as no surprise. Akira Kurosawa’s movie Ikiru (1952) addresses the search for meaning in the face of death. David Velleman’s ‘Dying: Some People Hope to Die in their Sleep. Not me.’ (OpenBooks, 2012; Think, 2012) is a short read discussing what the subtitle says. Nina Riggs The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying (2017), with an excerpt entitled ‘When a Couch is More than a Couch’ in the New York Times, 23 Sep. 2016, is a touching memoir about living with the prospect of imminent death.
Chapter 3. Love. Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) hints at many aspects of our models of love. Ann Beattie’s ‘Snow’ (1986) is a hauntingly beautiful short story about the loss of love. You may also find inspiration for short stories and related newspaper and magazine articles on my website ‘TESS: Teaching Ethics with Short Stories,’ following the links ‘Stories by Theme’ and ‘Gender and Relationships.’
Chapter 4. Reconciliation. Act 3 (‘Two Words You Never Want to Hear from Your Doctor‘) of This American Life, 277: ‘Apology’ (2004) discusses apologies offered by medical doctors for making incorrect decisions. Joe Wright’s movie Atonement (2007) after Ian McEwan’s novel (2001) by the same name will provoke discussion about responsibility for childhood transgressions and the impossibility of forgiveness. Off the beaten path, I have had some of my best student discussions with Milcho Manchevski’s movie Before the Rain (1994). It mixes topics on the ethics of war, moral luck, and the search for redemption in a non-linear temporal structure.
Chapter 5. Self-Management. This might be an opportunity to read William James’s lectures ‘The Will to Believe’ and ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ I recommend Arthur Miller’s play All my Sons (1946) (Act 1 and Acts 2 and 3) or Akira Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon (1950) for the construction of self-serving and exonerating frames. Act 5 (‘The All-Too-Real Housewives of Argentina’) of This American Life, 724 : ‘Personal Recount’ tells the story of a right-wing TV show host in Argentina who comes to embrace feminism.
Chapter 6. Counsel. E.E. Cummings’ ‘i thank you God for most this amazing’ brings in a religious dimension for ‘Count your Blessings.’ For ‘Help your Neighbor,’ I recommend Isabel Allende’s ‘And of Clay Are We Created’ in The Stories of Eva Luna (1991). As to ‘Don’t Cry over Spilled Milk,’ the NPR interview with Toni Morrison, entitled ‘“I Regret Everything”: Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life’ (2015), touches on regret and loss, race relations in the US, the joy of writing, and Morrison’s journey to becoming an author. ‘Express yourself’ can be matched with some observations on writing by T. Kira Madden in ‘Against Catharsis: Writing is not’ (Literary Hub, 2019) and by Julie Bunting in ‘On Making Things up: Some True Stories about Writing my Novel‘ (Catapult Magazine 2017). To complement ‘Eat well,’ I am proposing a piece on the physiological pathways between diet and mental health: Joseph Forth and colleagues ‘Food and Mood: How Do Diet and Nutrition Affect Mental Wellbeing’ (British Medical Journal, 2020), either as a short and accessible scientific article or as a podcast. Tamar Adler’s ‘All You Can Eat? Inside the Intuitive Eating Craze’ (Vogue, 2020) is an interesting read as well.