This week on With Honors, Amberlynn and Katie take the mic for a patient, and at times delightfully unexpected, exploration of symbolism in literature. Starting again with Remarkably Bright Creatures, they unpack the deeper meanings behind characters like Tova and Marcellus and explore how age can be a symbolic season of life. From there, the discussion takes a darker turn into Edgar Allan Poe’s cautionary tale "The Masque of the Red Death." They balance Prince Prospero's symbolic role as a corrupt elite celebrity against similar corrupt celebrity figures of today. We discuss how isolation (especially that of the 2020 pandemic) feels eerily relevant to the world today. As students eventually do, they entertain the idea of a class pet. Since one girl is an FFA member working in a vet’s office and the other has experience raising exotic animals for fairs, finding the right symbolic class pet is right in their wheelhouse.
This episode features inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
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