Postmodernism Meets the Mopey Prince: Comparing the Ideologies of \u3cem\u3eHamlet\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eRosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead\u3c/em\u3e

It is often said that Hamlet’s tragic flaw was indecisiveness. Centuries of scholars and high school students have imperiously pointed at Hamlet, prescribing an oh-so-obvious solution to our dithering hero’s problems: just do something! Yet in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard takes the opposite tack, introducing us to characters who are even more actionless and aimless than our troubled Danish prince. Stoppard’s main characters are an obvious homage to Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot: purely Postmodern men—clueless, directionless, and passionless. By juxtaposing Beckett-like uncertainty with the Bard’s iconic characters and setting, Stoppard is able to clearly illustrate the principle ideological change that has occurred during the centuries that separate Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: a transformation from caring for oneself and others to apathy, and a change from passion to indifference

The IMSA-SF Paradigm: Why it’s All The Same to Me

On what must have been my third or fourth day of IMSA, I remember an upperclassman asking me, “You’ve read Ender’s Game, right? You have to read that book—everyone at IMSA does.” I had, in fact, read the book, and I immediately felt relieved. I felt had passed my first test at IMSA, plus I was geeked to learn that my taste in books wasn’t out of place here. I shouldn’t have been so surprised. IMSA is overflowing with science fiction fans of all varieties—we are a nerd school after all, even if the Admissions Office disapproves of my terminology. But reading David Hartwell’s “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve” has made me realize that IMSA’s association with science fiction runs even more deeply—IMSA is science fiction, or at least the reality TV show version of it. The main effects of science fiction upon its readers—to isolate readers from normal society, to introduce scientific ways of thinking, and to influence the way readers see the rest of the world—are, in my opinion, identical to the main effects IMSA has upon its student