Short Story Analysis
Task 2
Jules Vernes was my father.
H. G. Wells was my wise uncle.
Edgar Allan Poe was the bat winged cousin we kept high in the back
attic room.
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were my brothers and friends.
Adding, of course, the fact that in all probability Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was my mother.
You who read, and I who write, are very much the same.
- Ray Bradbury
Draw up a
similar table in
your
workbook
TV Habits
How much time do you spend watching TV per
day?
0-2 hours
2-4 hours
4+ hours
Why do you watch TV?
Spare time
TV Shows
News/other?
Is there an alternative for the TV? What is it?
Television influence still strong
DESPITE all the various entertainment devices available for our viewing
pleasure, the latest study shows Australians still favour the trusty TV
(based on a report from Neilsen and OzTAM).
The average viewer spent about 97 hours per month in front of a TV
screen between July and September, 2015.
“Television is still the centrepiece,” said OzTAM chief Doug Peiffer, whose
organisation directly monitors the viewing habits of 3500 households.
Netflix invasion
At a time with more scripted television than ever, how
long does it take to finish a season of a show?
According to Netflix, not much time at all.
Subscribers who finish the first season of a show
generally do so in a week. And those viewers are
dedicating a significant amount of time to do it: They
watch about two hours a day.
Streaming entertainment content has become a way of
life for Australians, with around two thirds of us now
streaming our favourite shows (WA Today, 2017).
Task 2
The Pedestrian (1951)
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
• Born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, Ray
Bradbury began writing when he was twelve.
• Bradbury sees himself as a magic realist and a
disciple of Edgar Allan Poe. In “The
Pedestrian,” Bradbury critiques a future
society in which everyone behaves the same
way.
• He says that his lifelong hatred of thought
control grows out of his sympathy for his
ancestor Mary Bradbury, who was tried as a
witch in seventeenth-century Salem.
The time is an evening in the
future—November 2053.
Introducing
the story
The place is a silent city.
In the early 1950s, Ray Bradbury was a young man living in
southern California. He did not know how to drive, and he
liked walking around his suburban neighborhood at night.
Even back then such behaviour was so rare that he was
once stopped and questioned by the police. If an innocent
walk was so suspicious in mid-twentieth-century America,
Bradbury wondered how it might be viewed in the future.
Then he wrote this story.