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Halisnacks posted:Thanks for the reassurance and the help. I can't speak for admissions committees everywhere, but I don't know anyone who'd give your undergraduate GPA a second look. If I'm looking at a candidate, I'm really only interested in three things: the best or most interesting things an applicant has done, what he or she has done in the most recent phase of their education (say, the last two years), and whether this describes a trend. So I'm less interested in a student who's constantly strong than a student who's showing constant improvement. And I'm more interested in a student with pronounced strengths and weaknesses than one who's steady across the board. The common denominator here is improvement. I want someone who'll be much better going out than coming in. quote:Also here's an English question! I'm currently reading the works of a historian and I noticed he was conjugating certain verbs (i.e. to come, to become, etc.) with the 'to be' auxiliary. I soon realized he was doing this with all the verbs whose French translation would be conjugated with 'être'. The effect sounded pretty nice to me and then I thought of two other examples I had heard this before: "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" and "The Lord is come." I think this is fine as long as it's used well. Unconventional constructions need to show some compensating merit, and I think what you get with these constructions are (a) bitchin' cadence and (b) spin the perfect sense of the verb tense. Both your examples point to an event with unusual chronology. I would keep this in your back pocket, mostly. EDIT: Radical surgery on borked sentence. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Jul 22, 2009 |
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Jul 22, 2009 16:16
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Brainworm posted:I think this is fine as long as it's used well. Unconventional constructions need to show some compensating merit, and I think what you get with these constructions are (a) bitchin' cadence and (b) emphasis on the progressive sense of the verb tense. Both your examples point to an event with unusual chronology. I think that construction is the old timey way of doing the perfect.
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Jul 22, 2009 16:35
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MagneticWombats posted:I think that construction is the old timey way of doing the perfect. It is; it's a result of 18th and 19th century attempts to make English more like Latin, and that construction exactly mirrors the perfect passive in Latin (i.e. a form of "to be" plus a perfect participle).
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Jul 22, 2009 16:52
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Bel_Canto posted:It is; it's a result of 18th and 19th century attempts to make English more like Latin, and that construction exactly mirrors the perfect passive in Latin (i.e. a form of "to be" plus a perfect participle). What I was getting is that it's mucking about with the passive to suggest an attribute best described by a non-terminal action. "I have become death" is a perfect (complete) action while "I am becoming death" is progressive (ongoing), but "I am become death" suggests an action that is both complete and ongoing in a way that would be paradoxical if we weren't talking about a god. So it's lending a progressive attribute to a perfect construction (or vice versa), but the real issue isn't grammatical. It's the complex event chronology implied by the inclusion of the auxiliary verb.
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Jul 22, 2009 18:08
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Grouco posted:Which of Shakespeare's sonnets are your favourites (don't say 116)? I'd have to go with 27-30, 57, 64, and 91, although every time I read through them I find myself falling in love with one I'd previously not really cared for. My favorite, far and away, is 129 ("Expense of spirit in a waste of shame..."), closely followed by 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth...") and 151 ("Love is too young to know what conscience is..."). 151 mostly makes it in as the best dick joke in Renaissance sonnetry. quote:Also, Wyatt or Howard? Wyatt. That contest's as one sided as a Mobius strip. Everyone reads "Lute" and his rewritings of Petrarch, but "The Flee From Me" is probably the strongest advocate for Wyatt's talent. Check out how he works the meter. "Flee" is a highly metrical and formally intricate poem, but it reads like totally natural speech. The easiest way to see this is in Wyatt's lineation, which almost always patterns against his phrasal structure. There's a lot of enjambment. For my money, Wyatt does this better than any poet of his period and at least as well as any poet in the language. Robert Frost's his only realistic rival on that front.
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Jul 22, 2009 20:12
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Any thoughts on the poetry of Paul Muldoon? There is something in his work that I like, but I often feel like there is artifice for the sake of artifice at play. Once in a while real beauty shines through*, but often I feel like I'm being toyed with. * Wind and Tree being one of my most loved pieces, and one of the few poems I have memorized.
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Jul 22, 2009 21:26
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Mr. Wonderful posted:Any thoughts on the poetry of Paul Muldoon? There is something in his work that I like, but I often feel like there is artifice for the sake of artifice at play. Once in a while real beauty shines through*, but often I feel like I'm being toyed with. Let me get it out in one go: Paul Muldoon's a fantastic guy and a motherfucker of a poet. I'm not surprised you feel like you're being toyed with in his poetry, because that's exactly how he sets it up. I should back this up a bit, and I promise that this has everything to do with Muldoon's poetry. I'm friends with Nigel Smith, another Princeton guy who's also 17th century and plays bass in Muldoon's band. So that's one place to start with Muldoon's poetry. He has a band. Meaning he writes lyrics, which in turn means that the metrical structure of his poetry tends toward the irregular but significant. In "Wind and Tree," for example, "wind" always falls on the accented syllable of an anapest, and anapests are at the center of the wind's most violent effects (e.g. "breaking each other.) So the meter's used to build a conceptual link between what the wind is and what it does, which lets him talk about how the wind's breaking the trees without, you know, mentioning the wind. Muldoon does this kind of thing with meter all the time, which is (a) cool and (b) only really accessible if you've done some heavy poetic lifting, since Muldoon's meter tends toward complex understatement. If you scan any of the short lines in "Wind and Tree," (say, "It is no real fire"), you'll find the accents falling on different syllables depending on how much you've been drinking and the phase of the moon. You might even come to blows over how many syllables are in "real" and "fire," depending on the metrical case you're trying to make. And I think that's kind of the point. Muldoon builds metrical (and therefore interpretive) ambiguities into the line so that different meanings in the preceding lines get activated as you read and re-read each short line differently. Like I said, it's a motherfucker. It's insanely intricate metrical technique that approaches the impossible if you're not the kind of person who thinks about meter for a few hours a week. Seamus Heaney doesn't do this. And if he did, he wouldn't be so ruthless about it. That's probably why all the poets were reading Horse Latitudes while everyone else was reading District and Circle.
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Jul 22, 2009 23:22
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Hey Brainworm, I figure I'd pass this on to you - Screenwriter John August (Go, Tim Burton poo poo) wrote a short story and offered it up for both download in pdf form and over the kindle. He's released the numbers from his first two months: http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/june-figures-for-the-variant It's interesting both to see what kind of money involved and the different splits for different mediums.
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Jul 23, 2009 11:48
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NeuroticErotica posted:Hey Brainworm, That's interesting, and consistent with what I've seen elsewhere. I'm right now in contract negotiations over my next book -- actually, probably the next two books -- and one thing I've noticed is that (a) Kindle terms have been spun off from other electronic distribution terms and (b) Kindle terms are extremely generous, even when set against other publisher-distributed ebooks. I'm not suggesting that August is in the same position, since I don't know the outfit he's using to distribute his PDF. But his Kindle deal looks about like where my publisher's at -- about 33% royalties on the Kindle edition, with a system of graduated royalties after X sales or after X amount of time (topping off somewhere around 45%). That, incidentally, would mean I'd make about $3-5 per sale of a $10(!)* Kindle book, which is about twice what I get per sale of the ~$60 library hardback version. This makes me suspect that Amazon's got some kind of crazy economics going to get publishers (and authors) on the Kindle train. If I'm getting 33-45%, my publisher's got to be getting close to the same, which means Amazon's operating on a pretty thin margin. It also means that, despite all kinds of problems with vendor lock in, I could live with the Kindle as a textbook platform. At least if the pricing and royalty structure stays as it is. Textbook royalties suck. We're talking something less than a dollar a copy. In Kindle world, though, there could actually be a financial incentive for decent writers to take them on. Right now, people only seem to write textbooks out of either frustration with the current offerings or as CV padding at the second-tier research universities that count such writing toward promotion. * I don't know what the Kindle version of my book would cost -- the contract leaves that to Amazon -- but Kindle prices seem to top out at ten bucks.
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Jul 23, 2009 22:39
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Brainworm posted:That contest's as one sided as a Mobius strip. Is this gem your own? Also, do you communicate as well in person as you do in writing? I ask because one of my professors wrote great articles, but was awful in the classroom. On the flipside, another professor was a brilliant orator but his written works were poorly-written bores. Though I should wait for the answer, I won't: If you speak as well as you write, how do you recommend one go about bridging this common gap? It seems that people rarely write as naturally as they speak, or speak as eloquently as the write, etc.
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Jul 23, 2009 22:54
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Halisnacks posted:Is this gem your own? It is, but Google tells me I'm not the first to the simile. quote:Also, do you communicate as well in person as you do in writing? I ask because one of my professors wrote great articles, but was awful in the classroom. On the flipside, another professor was a brilliant orator but his written works were poorly-written bores. I'd like to think I do. I've spent considerable time chasing written and spoken clarity, and it helps that I've gone through some training as a speaker and an actor -- not because I want to act, but because its one way of getting at what goes into a dramatic interpretation. Still, it was worth learning to listen to myself. I'm a more consistent writer than speaker, though. My writing mostly ends in the same place, no matter my mood. The real variable is revision. If I'm having an off day, it can take me a half-dozen swings to hit an idea that, most mornings, would be a fat, slow pitch. And sometimes I don't make the time to get it right. You could probably read my posts in this thread and figure out where I've put in my hardest days. But speaking? Off days, I'll always miss the target. It's like the speech center of my brain's the first part to shut down when the bills run late. quote:Though I should wait for the answer, I won't: If you speak as well as you write, how do you recommend one go about bridging this common gap? It seems that people rarely write as naturally as they speak, or speak as eloquently as the write, etc. You've got to cultivate whatever grows for you. As a kid, I read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson and Robert Heinlein, and one of their common strengths is well-crafted trope. They're great at comparing things to other things.* I stole that from them, and it's my window move. So find some writing you like and mine it for skills. You've got to treat these skills like a ricer treats a Civic -- pulling it apart every weekend to get a little more speed. I'd read, and I'd flag the tropes I liked and try to figure out why I liked them. And I read some I.A. Richards to get my trope anatomy, and some Mary Oliver to figure out the differences between simile, syllepsis, and rough comparison. So now I am where I am. If tropes had weight I could break rocks with them. What I'm saying is, apart from basic competence, being a good speaker or writer is about doing a couple things really well and playing over to them whenever you've got the chance. If you do something really well, people forget everything else. It's like clubbing a seal. One hit gets you a pimpin' coat. Doesn't matter if it comes on swing one or swing one hundred. * Though Hunter does this better in his letters than he lets himself in his journalism -- like nobody'd read him if his writing came off too crafted.
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Jul 24, 2009 00:54
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Brainworm posted:This makes me suspect that Amazon's got some kind of crazy economics going to get publishers (and authors) on the Kindle train. If I'm getting 33-45%, my publisher's got to be getting close to the same, which means Amazon's operating on a pretty thin margin. This seems in line with the Long Tail-based business model for the site. I think it's ingenious.
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Jul 24, 2009 02:14
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DirtyRobot posted:This seems in line with the Long Tail-based business model for the site. I think it's ingenious. I hope it is. The triangle trade academic publishers have going with textbooks and college libraries needs disrupting. This happened on the journal scene years ago and got us databases like JSTOR and MUSE which, for all their flaws and the high price tag, are a better deal for everyone (except maybe printers). Students everywhere get access to a wider range of journals, college libraries don't have to spend oceans of money on facilities to house easily lost and damaged back issues, journals see their readerships increase,* and I can have my students read up on vampire watermelons in the Journal of Gypsy Lore instead of heading to Wikipedia.** I think the Kindle, or something like it, could be a similar kind of game changer, since the current situation with textbooks and monographs is roughly parallel to the journal situation as it stood in, say, 1995. Printing textbooks and scholarly monographs isn't cheap (hence the crazy prices), and housing collections is expensive.*** So if something like the Kindle could drop the cost of a scholarly monograph or a garden-variety textbook to the $10 range, you'd see students and deans uncontrollably masturbating to pictures of Jeff Bezos. * At least for back issues. JSTOR still has that publisher-demanded "moving wall," so you still have to score print copies of anything newer than about 2005. ** Actually I can't. I had to go to Berkeley to get a copy of TP Vukanovic's article on Romi Vampire superstition. But Vukanovic's far better two-part series on Balkan witchcraft is on JSTOR. Highly recommended. *** This is truer on some campuses than others. Colleges tend to be located in places where adding square footage isn't cheap -- one reason parking's a constant problem on and around most campuses. There's a not college president on Earth who doesn't occasionally look at a library and wish it were a dorm crammed with full-pay students or a lab full of grant writers. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Jul 24, 2009 |
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Jul 24, 2009 03:38
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Brainworm posted:For my money, Wyatt does this better than any poet of his period and at least as well as any poet in the language. Robert Frost's his only realistic rival on that front. What about Donne?
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Jul 24, 2009 04:58
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Grouco posted:What about Donne? Good question. Donne does some things better than anyone else, but highly metrical verse that reads like natural speech isn't one of them. I'll even make a broader case for the sake of getting Donne in the right bucket. There is nothing natural about what he writes. It's artificial, with an emphasis on artifice. It is, and reads like, the verse of a baffling and detail-minded intellect with a sex life that could best be described as pornographically devout. It's the kind of poetry you'd get if Jesus molested a young Will Shortz. That's part of what Dryden was getting at when he tossed Donne and the other metaphysicals into some "peasceful province in Acrostic Land" where they could "torture one poor word ten thousand ways." Their poetry reads like a crossword puzzle with meter. I mean, here's a typical and famous piece of Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning": John Donne posted:If they [our souls] be two, they are two so It's typical because it's (a) built around a counterintitive trope (our souls are like a compass) and (b) it ends with a sex joke, which seems somewhat in tension with the "souls" language for most modern readers. We don't normally yoke sex to religious exercise. More to the point, there is nothing in this passage I can point to that sounds at all like natural speech, though it plays by some of the same rules and it's intricate and pretty. Kind of like Tori Spelling or (when she didn't look like a zombie) Jenna Jameson. They're both pretty, but there's nothing natural about either one. And I suspect a skilled plastic surgeon could appreciate the work that's been put into them, the same way a skilled reader can appreciate Donne's artifice or a film student could appreciate the opening shot in Children of Men. Toss that up against a similarly representative passage from Wyatt's "They Flee From Me": Thomas Wyatt posted:[...] but once in special, This is typical Wyatt. There's nothing here approaching wordplay, much less a trope. The organization is totally chronological, and it sounds like something a person might say (at least in the 16th century, though it ages well). Or at least it sounds like something someone might say in reflection on a confusing moment. It has the appearance of emotionally-driven spontaneity. So you get a clearer picture of the person behind the text. He's emotive. You can ask questions about him that you can't as usefully ask about the narrator of "Valediction." How does he feel about this woman and this incident? How does he feel about romantic process in general? Who is this guy and what's important to him? This is the quality that Tennyson, Coleridge and the rest of the Romantics built on in their own poetry -- "Flee" is as close to "emotion recollected in tranquility" as any other poem, but predates Lyrical Ballads by two and a half centuries. This doesn't make Wyatt better or worse than Donne, but it does mean that he plays this natural-sounding verse game somewhat better, just as Donne plays the trope game more skillfully than Wyatt (or really anyone else).
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Jul 24, 2009 17:12
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I wish I could take a class with you! Some more questions: What is your favourite "country house" poem? I wrote a paper on Marvell's poetics/politics of scale and dimension in "Upon Appleton House", so I have a special spot for it. quote:Humility alone designs Who are your favourite Renaissance women writers? Lanier, Wroth, Bradstreet, Behn, Finch? Also, have you read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy?
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Jul 25, 2009 04:21
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What are your thoughts on Freudian criticism? Especially on using Freud with pre-1800 literature.
emys fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Jul 25, 2009 |
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Jul 25, 2009 09:55
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Grouco posted:I wish I could take a class with you! I wish you could, too. This whole global financial mess means our enrollment's a little anemic. I'd be glad to have you, and the college is about ready to start accepting payment in blood plasma. quote:What is your favourite "country house" poem? I wrote a paper on Marvell's poetics/politics of scale and dimension in "Upon Appleton House", so I have a special spot for it. I never expected anyone to ask about country house poetry. The form's underappreciated. On one hand, Jonson's "Penshurst" is a fantastic reworking of Horace, and I think that aspect of Jonson's poetry never gets enough respect -- people talk about Jonson like he's just some classicist pedant making gratuitous allusions, when really he's wrestling with the strongest of Classical authors. And that's a gently caress of a match, even now. Horace and Martial, they're worth learning Latin for. So I like what "Penshurst" does. Everyone talks about the similarity between the opening lines of "Penshurst" and Horace's "Non ebur neque aureum" (II. 18), but that's usually where they drop it. What's really genius is how Jonson reworks the close of "Non ebur." I'm thinking especially of the last nine or ten lines: Horace posted:Quid ultra tendis? Aequa tellus I'd translate* this as: My lovely Translation posted:Why reach for more? The world is as open to poor men as to princes, and gold couldn't convince (seduce?) Orcus’s ferryman [Charon] to bring back the wily Prometheus. He [Charon] holds proud Tantalus, and his son Pelops, and whether he’s summoned or not, he listens, and frees the poor man when his labors are finished. An unfair paraphrase of this might be: "Poor? Miserable? No problem. Know that you can roam the world as well as the sons of kings, and you're free to await death's sweet release from your labors." For a pile of reasons, this is a less pessimistic message in Horace, but other than that I think I've ballparked it. What Jonson does with this in "Penshurst," especially in terms of labor, is really interesting. For instance: Ben Jonson posted:Thy copse too, named of Gamage, thou hast there, There are lots of ways to read the relationships between these two passages, mostly depending on how deep you think Jonson's class antagonism goes. But I see Jonson calling Horace out on the evasions implicit in his "we're all equal in death." So Jonson escalates. "Forget death," he says, "turns out, poor people have easy jobs. Fishing, masonry, whatever: the 'humility' of a massive country estate turns these things from work into employer-directed leisure that everybody loves." I don't think this means that Jonson's critical of the ways Penshurst operates, only that he's not completely buying in to the ways Horace (and presumably others) pride themselves on not being as ostentatious as they could afford to. It's like they got a Bentley, but they're one of the people because it doesn't have a sunroof. On the other hand, I like Lanier's "Description of Cooke-ham," mostly because it's one of the few country house poems that works in any depth with the narrator's attachment to place. In that sense, "Cooke-ham" is a more accessible poem -- and I mean that in the best possible way. It's largely about nostalgia, or the ways memories of place evoke complex recollections and reevaluations of the past. And I think this is something most people experience with some poignancy, like when you see someone else living in your childhood home or drive though the town where you grew up and see, like, fifty more McDonald's. What's interesting about "Cooke-ham," though, is that these recollections are pretty hosed up. I mean, we are talking about Amelia Lanier. So you get stuff like: Amelia Lanier posted:With Moyses you did mount his holy Hill, That's right. I remember how pious you were. Mount that hill, you whore. Or: Lanier also posted:And that sweet Lady sprung from Cliffords race, [...] Yeah, I remember her. I used to be in love with her, but she married Dorset. He seemed like a good guy, back then. quote:Who are your favourite Renaissance women writers? Lanier, Wroth, Bradstreet, Behn, Finch? There's something you've got to love about Amelia/Emilia Lanier/Lanyer. I know it's a little impolitic to talk about women writers solely in terms of their biography, but it's fun. Fun as hell. Especially with her. I mean, there's one Jewish girl in the Elizabethan court and she's a promiscuous** feminist poet? There are layers of stereotype and historical irony here that I'll never dig out of. Also, I don't think Mary Wroth gets enough respect. This might be because she's late enough to stand in Aphra Behn's shadow, or because Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is an uneven collection. But at her best ("Am I Thus Conquered...," for instance), she brings a technical and emotional complexity to her writing that deserves at least a careful read. And of course there's Aphra Behn. There's a lot to like about her, but I think her work's relationship to John Wilmot's has to be one of the most interesting in the Restoration. And not just because of the subject matter. Tossing "The Disappointment" up against "The Imperfect Enjoyment" (and/or "Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay") is a great way to see how authors play off one another, and how complicated that game can get. quote:Also, have you read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy? I have. I tried including it in a class last year, but it didn't fit well. It's one of a few deeply excellent but etceterative texts (like Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy) that's just too big for a survey course. Also, Steve Coogan's film adaptation was brilliant. Much better than Hamlet 2.*** * If your Latin's better than mine (and it probably is) let me know how you'd translate this. I don't have an English language Horace handy. ** I mean this in the connotatively neutral sense of "had sex with a remarkable variety of married and unmarried men," perhaps including Shakespeare if you're into reading the Sonnets as biography. *** I thought it best to talk about the book without actually talking about the book. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Jul 25, 2009 |
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Jul 25, 2009 19:59
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emys posted:What are your thoughts on Freudian criticism? Especially on using Freud with pre-1800 literature. I depends on the Freudian/psychoanalytic criticism. Good psychoanalytic criticism uses essentially Freudian terms as flexible or even tropic vocabularies for describing complex relationships between authors, texts, and history. In that sense, there's no strong danger of anachronism, or of bringing 20th century psychoanalysis to bear on psychologies that are built entirely differently, since these terms describe chiefly by comparison. A good example of this is Seth Moglen's Mourning Modernity, which uses psychoanalytic terms to do genre criticism -- basically, he splits Modernists into the "mourning" (writers who implicitly assume that culture can recover from the cultural injuries of capitalism, industrialized warfare, etc.) and the "melancholic" (those who implicitly assume these injuries are culturally fatal).* The psychoanalitic terms play out in more detail after that, but on an equally metaphorical level -- they're used to describe complex social relationships that aren't properly psychological, and that's totally cool. It's like comparing how an airplane flies to how a bird flies. It's useful, and it doesn't make sense to criticize it because a bird is an animal and an airplane isn't. For pre-1800 stuff, the story's about the same. Patty Ingham (at Indiana/Bloomington) does something similar with psychoanalytic terms, except she presses them into service to describe the ways Arthurian legend helped consolidate early understandings of English nationalism. Again, I don't think anyone would call this anachronistic. It's just using psychoanalytic terms as tropes to describe social relationships for which there does not currently exist a more apt vocabulary. When things get more Freudian, though, I put the book down. I'm generally not interested in readings that diagnose authors or characters, or (worse yet) play the HS English game of mining texts for things that look like genitalia. Not that this is commonly done anymore, but there was a short phase of criticism that got off on, say, calling Hamlet "melancholic" or "depressed" in a clinical sense, and its legacy is more durable than it deserves to be. * Incidentally, if you're at all interested in Realism/Naturalism/Modernism, Moglen is the dude to watch. He's at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton right now, and friendly as hell. Definitely worth talking to.
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Jul 25, 2009 20:34
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What texts do you recommend for becoming more effective at scansion? I've read Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form but found it a little dated.
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Jul 26, 2009 02:13
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Grouco posted:What texts do you recommend for becoming more effective at scansion? I've read Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form but found it a little dated. There's definitely a shortage of good books on meter. I think the best is Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance. Even though it's aimed at poetry writers rather than exclusively at readers, it's the most comprehensive treatment of meter I've seen. That's where it starts and stops, though. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland's Making of a Poem is a closer analogue to Fussell than Dance is. It's a "how to read a poem" book, but concentrates on poetic forms (e.g. sonnets, villanelles), and consequently has a deal to say about meter. I don't think you can go wring with either, and they're common enough in poetry classes that finding cheap, used copies shouldn't be a problem. Not that either one's expensive to begin with.
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Jul 26, 2009 03:01
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I bought the Stand yesterday because of your frequent references to it. It's a lot better than what I've come to expect from King.
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Jul 28, 2009 05:22
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Mother FUCKER. I got to your post about Oxford commas, this one:quote:
I've gotten points docked on papers I've written in every single goddamn loving english class ever for including that extra comma. I don't know if I should feel pissed off or vindicated or what. Now, on to this example you posted: quote:So you could use rough comparison. E.g. Most of my english classes would never, ever give an example of how to improve a sentence like this, because "I can't do your writing for you." Nothing pissed me off more than getting points deducted for writing a sentence like that first one, asking how I can improve it, and getting fed that bullshit line. I needed to see a goddamn example. Mother fuckers. Almost all of my english classes sucked, including college ones. While I'm ranting about all my lovely english classes, what are your thoughts on peer reviewing as a tool in class? Do you make your students do peer reviews, and if so, how do you conduct the process? Every english class ever made me do this, and it typically fell into 1 of two methods. 1) Collect all the papers, shuffle them up, and hand them back out randomly to someone to grade. 2) Trade with the person next to you, which often was your friend, and everyone would just end up saying "Looks good man." If someone did a study of the most commonly used phrase on peer review days, I'd say it would be "Looks good man." I always felt like peer reviewing was a giant loving waste of class time. Nobody wants to look like an rear end in a top hat or hurt anyone's feelings, so they barely point anything out at all, especially if the peer review "score" is factored into the actual grades whatsoever.
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Jul 28, 2009 10:29
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I was never involved the argument about Oxford commas, I've only known about it for maybe a year. The idea of not using them is completely alien to me. I once took a history class taught by the biggest APA formality bitch you've ever seen (specific number of lines per page, she would measure margins, oddly enough you could choose your font) and she never mentioned Oxford commas.
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Jul 28, 2009 11:01
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Brainworm posted:It is, but Google tells me I'm not the first to the simile. Will you please explain (and define) your use of the word trope? It's not a term of art I'm familiar with.
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Jul 28, 2009 15:10
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TheChimney posted:I bought the Stand yesterday because of your frequent references to it. It's a lot better than what I've come to expect from King. Yeah. In King's early work, he's insanely good at lending poignancy to everyday events without betraying their everyday qualities. He does this especially well in Stand, Carrie and Cujo, and it's part of what makes these books work so well. It's telling that in, say, Cujo, Donna's standoff with the dog is barely a tenth of the work. The rest is just a detailing of everyday events -- the fallout from her affair, Vic's ad agency failing -- that shows why the standoff with Cujo matters. The Stand's in a similar position -- the progression of the Superflu, the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, and everything else that would make a short plot summary, they're all subordinate to, or at least framed by, characters' everyday, domestic concerns. Anyway. King's skilled treatment of the everyday (and his progressive abandonment of it) is probably the most notable difference between his early and late work. I say this a great deal, but the everyday is difficult to write, and that King does it well is a testament to his skill. Most writers deal with the everyday by either eliminating it from their writing altogether (e.g. Michael Crichton, most genre fiction) or by lending it some kind of high drama -- that is, betraying its "everyday" quality by lending it an unconvincing artificial significance (e.g. soap operas, teenagers, gossips). And there I go again. You'd think I read The Stand like I read Hamlet.
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Jul 28, 2009 18:21
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J posted:Mother FUCKER. I got to your post about Oxford commas [...] I'd feel vindicated. In the coming war of the commas, you'll be ankle deep in the blood of those who've wronged you. I will set you to burn. quote:Most of my english classes would never, ever give an example of how to improve a sentence like this, because "I can't do your writing for you." [...] I can see the reasoning behind this if I squint just right, but it's silly. Part of education is modeling. Part of education is imitation. You can't reasonably expect someone to improve a skill without showing them accessible examples of what the skill looks like when its exercised well. That's basic, basic stuff, and it's not at all difficult. And, in all honesty, it saddens me that your experience missed it. Probably, everyone gets frustrated by what they think goes wrong in their profession. But to hear about a pro missing such a fat pitch, that's almost beyond apology. quote:While I'm ranting about all my lovely english classes, what are your thoughts on peer reviewing as a tool in class? Do you make your students do peer reviews, and if so, how do you conduct the process? Every english class ever made me do this, and it typically fell into 1 of two methods. 1) Collect all the papers, shuffle them up, and hand them back out randomly to someone to grade. 2) Trade with the person next to you, which often was your friend, and everyone would just end up saying "Looks good man." I do peer review, and I think it's effective when it's done well. But that thing you described, I don't know what the gently caress it is. I can't even imagine how someone would go from a clear educational goal to that classroom practice. It seems entirely unfocused. Peer review's useful for at least three reasons. I try to get at each of them in every peer-review session: Practical Context. Students who read other students' work get to see an assignment in practice, which means they're in a better position to judge whether the work they've done is typical of the work done in the class. So they can ask questions about their work that they weren't in a position to ask before, e.g. "everyone else mentioned X point, so why didn't I?" or "my sentences seem shorter than everyone else's, so is that a defect or a virtue and how can I tell?" My peer review sessions use a questionnaire that asks the reviewers about the best things they saw during the review session, and also asks them to think about their own drafts in the context of what they read of other students' writing. And it always specifically asks what they thought was done well, and which parts of that they can bring into their own writing. Developing Editing Skills. Editing is a structured process, and a skill largely independent of plain old reading. It needs separate and deliberate exercise if it is to improve. It helps if that exercise works with dissimilar texts that can be evaluated or edited using roughly the same criteria. A class full of drafts is as perfect a setup for this as you're likely to see. My peer review sessions use a rubric. You can't expect people to read for everything all of the time, so the rubric asks reviewers to focus on particular aspects of the assignment (complexity of ideas, style, clarity, and so on). These are normally things we've gone over recently in class, so the peer review is a practical application of recent discussions and course content. Improving Student Writing. A peer reviewer might give useful advice, and if that happens, great. But the more common mechanisms for improvement in peer review are that (a) it shows students techniques that they can repurpose for their own writing and (b) it shows students that different editors will provide different or even contradictory feedback, and that part of being a good writer is interpreting and reconciling that feedback. My students write a short peer-review report to hand in with their final drafts, mostly involving (a) what they repurposed from others' work and (b) how they interpreted and applied the feedback they got. This gets factored into their final grade, and is usually matter for one-on-one conferences. That's not perfect. It involves lots of process documentation and makes grading complicated, but it passes a basic pedagogical sanity check. Peer review, like any class activity, should have clear goals that depend on well-defined skills. And it should articulate with assignments that exercise (or confirm the exercise of) those skills. But having students trade papers and give undirected feedback? That's a loving platypus. I can't even guess what it's designed to accomplish.
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Jul 28, 2009 19:33
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builds character posted:Will you please explain (and define) your use of the word trope? It's not a term of art I'm familiar with. I'm pulling from traditional rhetoric, which divides most deliberate novelties of speech into schemes and tropes. Schemes are essentially defined by the reorderings of words. This is usually in pursuit of symmetry, as in parallelisms (e.g. "the bigger they are, the harder they fall") or antimetabole (e.g. "ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country"). Other times, it involves breaking grammatical conventions, as in hyperbaton (Milton's "Satan exalted sat" or "Eve's hand soft touched..."). Schemes include a/polysyndeton, alliteration, consonance, assonance, anaphora, and other devices that rely on structural or content repetitions. Tropes are essentially comparative. Usually, they compare a thing (the subject) to an unlike thing (the vehicle) using an abstract relationship (the tenor). In most tropes (simile, metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, syllepsis/chiasmus), at least one of these terms is left unstated. The exception is rough comparison, which makes all three explicit. So if our subject is "rear end," our vehicle is "a water balloon" and our tenor is "jiggling," we'd get: Metaphor: She's got a water balloon of an rear end. Simile: She's got an rear end like a water balloon. Rough Comparison: She's got an rear end that jiggles like a water balloon. Synecdoche: And water-balloon rear end gets all up on my junk... Metonymy: I tapped that water-balloon rear end* Syllepsis: I'd pop that rear end like [I'd pop] a water balloon.** These aren't hard and fast distinctions. Chiasmus in all its varieties can fall on either side, and there are some devices that aren't well served by this distinction. So as a term of art, "trope" generally comprises structures that are always described by tenors and vehicles (metaphor, simile, rough comparison, synecdoche, metonymy). In my own writing, I've found that similes and rough comparisons are more accessible than metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, so I lean on them more frequently. * When referring to non-anal sex; the "rear end" is associated with, and stands in for, whichever part was properly tapped. ** With a prick, if you're going to further play on the chiasmic relationship between the two different uses of "pop." That's usually where it goes.
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Jul 28, 2009 20:12
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Brainworm posted:As a kid, I read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson and Robert Heinlein, and one of their common strengths is well-crafted trope. They're great at comparing things to other things. I stole that from them, and it's my window move. So find some writing you like and mine it for skills. So I hate to put you on the spot, but have you written any tropes of which you are particularly proud? Whenever I read a grin-inducing phrase, I always wonder if the author her/himself celebrated quietly after hitting the period. And while we're on the topic of pride for one's own work, have you authored an article, book, essay, whatever that you consider your best? If so, was it your most recent? I think of an academic's knowledge as ever-expanding, so it would follow that each work, if living up to the author's potential, should be better than the last. Or do you think it's possible to peak in terms of academic abilities? I'm not talking about senility settling in, but about losing a certain je ne sais quoi. Like a guitarist who gets more and more technically skilled and develops insanely good chops, but whose songwriting just doesn't have the magic it once did.
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Jul 29, 2009 00:38
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Halisnacks posted:So I hate to put you on the spot, but have you written any tropes of which you are particularly proud? Whenever I read a grin-inducing phrase, I always wonder if the author her/himself celebrated quietly after hitting the period. I don't celebrate so much after I write as I do after something makes print. When you're sending out articles or books, every word's like a Choctawhatchee beach mouse: tiny, obscure, and teetering on the edge of extinction. So you don't get your hopes up. Most of them won't live through the dry season. But I think my favorite one (so far) made it into the R************* two years ago. R************* is an exclusive and editorially conservative journal. The piece I wrote explored the ways that pervasive cultural representations of teachers hamstrung teaching techniques that should have worked wonderfully,* explaining some otherwise confusing studies in the process. Apart from being highly theoretical, the article was also statistically dense. So I made things more tangible by using an extended comparison of accountants to teachers. Here's a piece: the article posted:The 2000 Census suggests that the United States has about as many accountants (1.7 million) as secondary and post-secondary teachers (1.8 million). A quick Google for “teacher’s body” generates about seventeen thousand hits, while a search for “accountant’s body” generates 331 (most of which are semantic accidents). But a healthy majority of the seventeen thousand results from the “teacher’s body” search are clearly the products of baffling cultural intent [...] Also, there's an extended comparison of educational authority (policing) to bestiality. For instance: the article posted:[...] for instance, a cowboy’s sexual attraction to a well-muscled bull is shut down by designification; his wife, his girlfriend, his boyfriend, his pastor all police him, just as he polices himself, to make sure he and the bull never make it to first base [...] Just to clarify: This article went through two full rounds of peer review and another three rounds of edits. The whole process took about eighteen months. Nobody ever suggested turning down the volume on the porn or the bestiality. It's constant. There's like twenty pages of it. The only place it doesn't show up is the appendix. So it's not my best, but I think it's my favorite. I like to imagine there's some education undergrad cracking it open right now and wondering what the gently caress she's getting into. That's a fantasy I rarely entertain with my other published writing. quote:And while we're on the topic of pride for one's own work, have you authored an article, book, essay, whatever that you consider your best? If so, was it your most recent? I just finished a manuscript for a new book -- actually a collection of essays -- and I'm ashamed to say that my first book was better. I don't think this most recent book makes a trend, though. My first book read Shakespeare in the context of late 16th century harvest failures. Once it hit the publisher wanted more, and quickly. So they got it. I mean, I finished the last edits for the first book in late 2005. I thought I had the bodies buried. I moved on to other projects. So I ended up revising old, limp material, and on a schedule tight enough to make it stressful. It's like your ex-GF/BF shows up for a quickie, they've gotten fat(ter), and you've got to finish before your current gets back from work. That's no road to performance. But some of the questions in this thread have got me putting together proposals. A companion to Hamlet. A guide to reading texts on texts (like Watership Down and The Stand). The sample chapters, they've got some heat. So I'll give the motivational shithead answer: my best book, that's my next one. * That is, they were theoretically sound and had seen documented success in comparable schools. ************* Redacted. I need to at least try to pretend to semianonymity. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Jul 29, 2009 |
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Jul 29, 2009 02:29
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That article sounds fantastic; I'd love to read it (if only to see what there is to write about the effects of cultural representations of teachers on classroom techniques- I wasn't aware that was an active research field). It doesn't seem to be in any of the databases I have access to via my school, though. Is there any chance you could link a copy here (or PM/email/whatever me)? Also, since you seemed to be trying to keep your identity somewhat hidden at the beginning of the thread, it's worth noting that a dedicated search for the above article can reveal your name. At least, I think so- N. E.? Just a warning, in case you care.
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Jul 29, 2009 06:22
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Handsome Rob posted:That article sounds fantastic; I'd love to read it (if only to see what there is to write about the effects of cultural representations of teachers on classroom techniques- I wasn't aware that was an active research field). It doesn't seem to be in any of the databases I have access to via my school, though. Is there any chance you could link a copy here (or PM/email/whatever me)? I'll PM you. I can email you either the article or the manuscript, depending on what I can find and when. Also, this isn't really an active research field. There was a special issue of R************* that touched on it, sort of -- that's the issue my article was in -- but apart from that I haven't seen much theorizing or research. quote:Also, since you seemed to be trying to keep your identity somewhat hidden at the beginning of the thread, it's worth noting that a dedicated search for the above article can reveal your name. I'm trying to avoid having this thread come up when someone Googles my name or my college, since I don't need my colleagues knowing what I make, my reviewers knowing what I think of my own writing, or Harold Bloom showing up at my office. He'd cut a guy. I mean, it doesn't matter to me whether anyone in this thread can find out whatever by looking out into the world. I just don't want anybody from the outside looking in, since that kind of visibility means I can't speak as plainly as I'd like.
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Jul 29, 2009 15:21
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Brainworm posted:I'll PM you. I can email you either the article or the manuscript, depending on what I can find and when. Sounds like you've run into Mr. Bloom before. Any anecdotes? I was reading his take on Measure for Measure in Invention of the Human, and he seemed a little nonplussed at the Duke's behavior. From my point of view though, the Duke's decision to hide and manipulate the situation from a distance seems like a very clear reflection of Catholic/Christian philosophy's view of theodicy. The Duke's actions are cruel, but they're also in a very comfortable place for me because I was raised Catholic. I'm trying to read Harold Bloom's discomfort, and I'm wondering if it has to do with his gnosticism; does he have difficulty getting into the "cruelty" of a Christian-God figure? But perhaps I'm reading the play incorrectly, in any case, I was curious about your opinion of it. Also: the Duke, gay or not gay? When accused of womanizing he seems to be saying "Oh, the Duke doesn't swing that way." By the way, I noticed your mention of the arklight Shakespeare, so I got it and I've listened to Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew so far. I really love it, so thanks for mentioning that.
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Jul 29, 2009 15:36
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Why don't you combine your idea on writing a guide to reading texts, your enjoyment of doing serious readings of pop culture stuff and your intense dislike of Bad Englishes Classes that all the rest of us had to suffer in our teens? If you wrote an engaging book that taught everything you think the general public SHOULD have learned in English class, it would probably be a better read than any current HS English textbook- because it would actually be read. Books that take a fun approach to serious subjects are big on the market lately. You're able to do serious work in an irreverent tone if this thread is any indication. I'm sure there are a lot of 20-somethings who buy books that had wretched English Classes in their youth and would love something that got right to the good stuff. Not to mention you could save anyone still in school who found a book like this a bunch of frustration by giving them guidance. I know writing for a general audience doesn't make the 90 year mummies running your (academic) life swoon, but I feel as though such a book would be well received.
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Jul 30, 2009 06:10
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Barto posted:Sounds like you've run into Mr. Bloom before. Any anecdotes? I met him a couple times. Thing is, the man's a walking anecdote. I think it's physically impossible for him to do anything that ups the ante on all-over oddness. Those chips, they're all in the pot. Just for instance: He has a grad assistant to carry his briefcase. Like Puffy's umbrella guy back when. I'll grant that Bloom's infirm, and he'd got one of those soft-sided dowel cases that's too big to be an airline carry on, so the idea makes some sense. But why a grad student? Shouldn't this be, like, a nurse? I mean, this is Yale. Demeaning your grad students can't be nearly as important as not having Bloom keel over while some pasty East-coast Ritalin lifer ransacks his steamer-sized briefcase for an EpiPen. And did I mention this is Yale?* Just get an ex-dean to crawl up from the campus crypts and make Bloom a vampire already. He sounds like he's doing an impression of Christopher Walken. But like Eastern European Christopher Walken, who moved to the states as a kid but every once in a while still tragically mispronounces a simple word, like "pancakes." Also, his Rs are often Ws. Add to that an eclectic mix of terms used to address whoever's around, keeping in mind that he apparently knows like five people by name. The overall effect is tough to capture: Harold Bloom posted:
quote:I was reading his take on Measure for Measure in Invention of the Human, and he seemed a little nonplussed at the Duke's behavior. From my point of view though, the Duke's decision to hide and manipulate the situation from a distance seems like a very clear reflection of Catholic/Christian philosophy's view of theodicy. The Duke's actions are cruel, but they're also in a very comfortable place for me because I was raised Catholic. I'm trying to read Harold Bloom's discomfort, and I'm wondering if it has to do with his gnosticism; does he have difficulty getting into the "cruelty" of a Christian-God figure? But perhaps I'm reading the play incorrectly, in any case, I was curious about your opinion of it. I can't well guess at the motives behind Bloom's reading. The thing is, the Duke doesn't seem like a human character, or at least a character with clearly human -- or even interesting -- motivations. That's part of why I think he allegorizes so easily, and maybe one reason Bloom's no big fan -- his readings of Shakespeare rest on the idea that Shakespearean characters have a depth and complexity that allows them to develop rather than unfold. It's tough to make a case for that with the Duke. I'd also bet no small amount that Gary Taylor's conjectures about Measure's provenance (that it was revised by Middleton) are either spot on or close, which might explain a bit of the Duke. He's exactly the kind of character that Shakespeare would give a revealing backstory to (like Juliet's nurse's), but that Middleton would use solely to advance the plot. quote:Also: the Duke, gay or not gay? When accused of womanizing he seems to be saying "Oh, the Duke doesn't swing that way." You can play it that way, which is another way of saying that the text raises questions about the Duke that could be answered by his homosexuality. That gives him a reason for harboring some guilt over his lax punishment of Vienna's sexual immorality, for instance, and could also explain his proposal to Isabella. He'd be looking for a wife he won't have to sleep with -- she is, after all, miss "more than our brother is our chastity." As far as the absence of her answer goes, she could (like the audience) be caught totally off guard by the proposal, and spend the next thirty seconds in stunned silence. That all makes sense. But so does a Duke who just isn't interested in sex. Maybe he's more interested in a holy life or solving what we could assume are Vienna's more pressing political problems -- in that sense, his appointment of Alonso is really more about keeping a moralistic faction of the city happy, just as his marriage to Isabella might be. That sounds overly complicated, but I've seen recent productions take this route to stage. It works better than I've made it sound. But, yeah. The text as it stands makes a good case for a Duke who's sexually atypical, a strong case for his harboring some guilt about this, and close to as strong a case for some facet of this atypical sexual whatever being known or suspected by the other characters. Homosexuality fits this. I'd play/direct/read him as a pedophile or (really borderline) ephebophile. It makes his sequestering himself in a monastery more a removal from temptation than an anti-Catholic sexual holiday, modernizes the realities of political pressure he might be feeling from some part of Vienna's population (you don't know, exactly, which types of sexual transgression he's turning a blind eye to) and means you've got some interesting casting choices for Isabella. A young-as-young-can-be Isabella makes Angelo a much creepier character, and poses a nice moral problem for the end of the play. With that casting, Angelo's mostly wrong because Isabella's too young even for a consensual quid-pro-quo. Consequently, the Duke's Act V marriage proposal poses a more well-defined problem -- it's not just that he doesn't seem to care what Isabella thinks; it's that, just like at the beginning of the play, the Duke can't be trusted as Vienna's moral custodian. So both tolerance and repression have clear issues. quote:By the way, I noticed your mention of the arklight Shakespeare, so I got it and I've listened to Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew so far. I really love it, so thanks for mentioning that. I like them, and they're an easy torrent, too. Plus, one guy in the company sounds eerily like Kelsey Grammer. That opens up whole new interpretive vistas. * If you've never seen the campus, it's like Hogwarts without the magic. And the weather -- it's like they're importing their sunlight from Dublin.
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Jul 30, 2009 19:57
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Paladin posted:Why don't you combine your idea on writing a guide to reading texts, your enjoyment of doing serious readings of pop culture stuff and your intense dislike of Bad Englishes Classes that all the rest of us had to suffer in our teens? If you wrote an engaging book that taught everything you think the general public SHOULD have learned in English class, it would probably be a better read than any current HS English textbook- because it would actually be read. I like this idea, but my knee-jerk reaction is that it's best done as a short series: Everything You Should Have Learned About Shakespeare/Poetry/The Canon/..., and so on. I mean, this thread is edging up on something like 700 posts. I'd be willing to bet that 150-200 of them are mine. And most of my posts, they're not short. So just the notes I've written in this thread, strung together, are something approaching a book-length manuscript. Not a long book, for sure. And not a coherent one. And not a comprehensive one -- I've left out huge points even in Shakespeare plays (e.g. Caesar being Brutus's natural father according to North's Plutarch and Seutonius, Mercutio and the Nurse as the villains in Romen and Juliet -- that is, stuff that would definitely come up in a short class). On the other hand, a series sounds like a wank. Maybe it's more workable to focus on a treatment of how the canon's really an ongoing conversation between authors instead of just an arbitrary collection of good books. So maybe the thing to do is throw it open. If anything, or any combination of things, in this thread were to form the basis for a book, what would you want?* * Also, what's a just reward for your ideas? Keeping in mind that the amount of money involved is unpardonably modest. Free copes? A dedicated thanks in the introduction? A gallon of milk challenge with Toni Morrison?
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Jul 31, 2009 19:57
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Paladin posted:I know writing for a general audience doesn't make the 90 year mummies running your (academic) life swoon, but I feel as though such a book would be well received. I hear what you're saying. And what I'm about to write addresses a widely-held assumption that I think I see in it. If it doesn't touch what's behind your post, please forgive it. But the matter's been weighing on my mind. I'm not under the same kinds of pressures as the other academics I know. Part of that's me, and part of that's my College (or any other College I'd work for). I'm not concerned about what the academic world, 90-year-old mummies or otherwise, thinks of what I do either professionally or personally. As a broader statement: I do what I do because it's inherently valuable, not because I'm going to be rewarded for doing it well or punished for doing it poorly. I mean, right now (as in this afternoon), I'm designing and proposing a Summer program at my college where faculty members will volunteer to teach free, for-credit, classes for our needy students. As far as our tuition income goes, this is a big money-loser -- my best guess right now is about $10K per student (since the Summer programs basically shave a semester off of each student's degree). This is probably not good for the College. But it's good for the students, which makes it a clear obligation for me. So rewards and punishments, they're not really the point. If a book (or books) for general readers will be interesting writing and worthwhile reading, I'm on it. It's not like I'm not good enough at everything else I do, or like I'm not placing larger bets with my career. So even if a general-reader book would harvest me enough disdain to complicate my tenure, I think it's more worthwhile than another academics-and-college-library only monograph.
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Jul 31, 2009 20:42
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Brainworm posted:I'm not under the same kinds of pressures as the other academics I know. Part of that's me, and part of that's my College (or any other College I'd work for). I'm not concerned about what the academic world, 90-year-old mummies or otherwise, thinks of what I do either professionally or personally. If this is truly the case you should definitely go with serious literary treatments of pop culture, like you did in this thread with The Hobbit and The Stand. I'm a philosophy grad student myself, and some of the most fun I've ever had writing a paper was one where I explained Leibniz' conception of free will by comparing it to and illustrating it with examples from Harry Potter. Harry Potter lends itself amazingly well to these sorts of readings (not just when it comes to free will but other issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind as well) even though I'm pretty sure Rowling herself never intended it to, which only adds to the entertainment value. If you are not concerned about professional repercussions, reading something into a text that might not actually be there (but makes for great secondary literature) isn't a problem and allows for even more entertaining readings (provided of course the text supports them). Anyway, that's what I'd be most interested in, and I think it would even be fairly novel. edit: And you've made 266 posts in this thread so far (click on the number of posts, ie. '677' right now and it'll show you a list with numbers of posts per user in the thread) reflir fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jul 31, 2009 |
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Jul 31, 2009 20:55
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I've read a book with a somewhat similar idea, How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I think how it differs is that it felt like something you'd read at the start of an intro lit course (as I did when I took AP English in high school). My recollections on the book were that it mostly went over typical symbols and motifs, with some take away ideas about the connection between a text and the works that came before it, that sort of thing. I felt that it didn't do the best job preparing one to appreciate literature by just going over what rain can symbolize and telling you that if someone acts like Jesus, then they're a Christ figure. His examples were also drawn almost exclusively from well-known literature; but while seems like a good set of examples, I didn't think so. Examining popular film, TV, and books would let the readers think through your readings by themselves, instead of having to accept your appeals to literature they haven't read as insightful. I do think that it's a promising idea, and I'd read it if it were half as stimulating as this thread.
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Jul 31, 2009 21:12
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Peter Bosbon posted:I've read a book with a somewhat similar idea, How to Read Literature Like a Professor. I think how it differs is that it felt like something you'd read at the start of an intro lit course (as I did when I took AP English in high school). My recollections on the book were that it mostly went over typical symbols and motifs, with some take away ideas about the connection between a text and the works that came before it, that sort of thing. Yeah. I picked up HTRLLaP at MLA last year and was at least disappointed. It put more weight on nothing terms like "symbols" than I'd think appropriate for a competent reader, and the tone was irritating. Hip talking. Like what my Dad would say if a black kid roped him into a conversation.
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Jul 31, 2009 21:33
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