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Produsage Example

 Note: This blog post is representative of an example of the work students are tasked with in my produsage assignment. Utilizing the blogs throughout this semester is what gave me this idea. With my background in ELA, I knew I wanted to do something related to Literary Analysis. The assignment made it clear that the lesson cannot just be writing a paper within a blog. Though that is a part of this lesson, it is coupled with chunking concepts through the blogs, and social media posts are an integral part to building the literary analysis- it is not just writing a paper within a blog. The blog also serves as a great mechanism for peer review before the final assessment: a video-based literary analysis. 

Example for Produsage: 

Symbolism in The Masque of the Red Death

Symbolism plays a central role in Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. It is crucial to setting the story's dark and macabre tone, and it establishes the theme of the inevitability of death. The story is full of symbolism, from each of the 7 rooms to Death itself: a gruesome and inescapable plague that eventually consumes all individuals in Prospero's castle. The disease is personified through a masked intruder who moves through Prospero's masquerade without notice. He appears at midnight, a time often symbolic of transition or death. 

The 7 rooms throughout the castle are also heavily laced with symbolism. The rooms are arranged from east to west, and each color symbolizes the different stages of an individual's life. The first room is blue, and symbolizes birth. The second room, purple, is youth. The third room is green, meaning adolescence and transition. The fourth room, orange, is adulthood. The fifth room is white for old age. The sixth room, violet, is another transitional room, symbolizing the veil: the transition between old age and death. This room is meant to combine the purple room and the final room: the black room. The black room, containing the clock, is death. It is where Prospero, the spoiled prince who thought he could outrun the plague, meets his end. These symbols all add to the larger theme of the work: the inescapability of death. In the end, it comes for us all. 

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