Ramayana Noir

We're just beginning our yearly Faculty Collaborative here at Champlain, a dreary and pointless exercise in time-wasting of the first water.  With that in mind, I've officially declared it the Collaborative Noir, with the entire two week period acting as an homage to film noir and roman noir, but more on that later.  I'm including a picture of one of the most inspired student assignments I've ever received in thirty years of teaching.  When we were in India during the spring break trip and grabbing lunch in Ellora I suddenly had this crazy idea of a potential alternative path for their final projects.  One of the things that the students struggled with all semester was trying to understand Rama and Sita; essentially, how do does an American reader leave behind their western mindset and embrace a hero/heroine from a different culture?  So, my insane idea, which I ran by the students over lunch (which reminded them, and my friend and colleague Cyndi, that I clearly can never turn this off), was that they had to find a way to retell the Ramayana in such a way that a western audience would understand it (they also had to write a separate paper analyzing the own Ramayana narrative because, well, I'm Scudder and there's always time for more work). We ended up with several interesting efforts, but the most inspired was my students Michael, Sally and Nick turning the Ramayana into a roman noir trilogy (three books to match the three stages of Joseph Campbell's monomyth).

The Dame's Departure covers the section in the Ramayana when Ravana kidnapped Sita.  Classic. This should clearly be turned into a graphic novel.