CLASS MINUTES

Literatura Anglófona II DATE: 17/07/2020

Novel: 1984

Author: George Orwell

Presented by Carolina del Rio

Carlos Pulido

Sebastian Aguilera

Submitted by Karen Nataly Garavito Martín

In this class minute, I will present my personal comment on the

presentation of George Orwell’s novel: 1984, presented by my classmates.
First of all, I will mention the aspects to highlight in their presentation, and
then I will give my opinion about some aspects which could have been better
in this work.

The first element I would like to highlight is the way in which my

classmates made the plot of the novel, since they used some fragments of the
film as resources and made their own narration, which gave dynamism to the
presentation. Thus, the way they told the plot was an element that I really
liked. Although, it is a strategy that they had previously used in the
presentation of the play, they used it again and I enjoyed it. Because, it not
only shows the reading they did, but also the creativity they have to tell the
story in a fun and concrete way. Secondly, I would like to mention that the
presentation of the characters was complete. Even if it was a little bit
extensive and long; in my opinion, it was very appropriate, because they not
only described the main characters but also mentioned the role of each one
within the novel. Therefore, they made an adequate characterization and
underlined the most characteristic elements of each character. Finally, the last
element that I would like to mention is the analysis of the novel. It seems to
me that it is important to highlight that presenting a thesis statement was a
good strategy to develop the analysis, because with this statement they could
develop other important topics to consider the novel. Furthermore, they not
only focused on the novel as such, but also on the novel context and our
current context. In my opinion, the analysis was appropriate, because they
related it to the contextualization and mentioned other important topics such
as hierarchy, language as mind control, psychological manipulation,
technology and power systems.

On the other hand, I will mention some aspects I think could have been
better in this presentation. First, it is the PowerPoint presentation since there
was no harmony between the slides. Saying this, I mean that some slides were
saturated with text, which they sometimes read, while others were just images.
Hence, I think the presentation lacked balance. Second, I think that the
participation of the members of this group was not equitable. From my point
of view, I could say that some of my classmates spoke more than others, thus
there was no organization between them. Finally, I will focus on interaction
with the public. In my opinion, it is important to interact with the classmates
to make the presentation more dynamic. I think that presentations through this
medium sometimes get a little boring, especially when only the presenters
speak during the whole class and do not involve others. Thus, I think it is
important that some classmates participate during the presentation either by
asking them to read something or by asking them short questions, and do not
wait until the end of the presentation to interact with them.