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Burning Rain posted:They're really quite different, but if you haven't got the time, please check out at least the last one. Last one is blocked in America (which is where Brainworm is too).
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Sep 7, 2010 13:33
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Sorry about that. I've changed both that and the Jokerman video that was from the official channel as well. Hopefully it works fine now.
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Sep 7, 2010 14:01
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El Kabong posted:How do I get better at close-reading? This is a great question. I think "close reading" is a term generally misunderstood, and that many of the difficulties students have with close reading emerge from these misunderstandings. On more pessimistic days, I think that this is because they have teachers who are not gifted, motivated, or capable close readers, and rarely have opportunities to see good close readings in process. Anyway. "Close reading" is often misunderstood to mean "catalog a set of textual attributes." In practice, this might mean that one scans a poem for rhyme and meter, unpacks any tropes, names instances of assonance alliteration, personification, and so forth, and eventually reaches a point where every formal property of the poem, every rhetorical figure or scheme, is neatly labeled. This is bad because it confuses the identification of a text's mechanics with, you know, actually reading. It's the same kind of category error you'd make if you thought that naming parts of an equation was the same thing as doing algebra. Really, close reading is not about a naming of parts, which is boring. Really, close reading a structured process of pattern recognition, which is exciting. Or can be. So the best way to improve your close reading is to improve your ability to spot significant literary patterns; I say "significant" here because the patterns you choose to identify should be determined by what you want to do with the text. WIthout a clear idea of what you want to do with a text, or of which questions you want to answer about it, your close reading is going to be exhaustive and directionless. Just for instance, take the first stanza of Shakespeare's Sonnet 15: quote:When I consider every thing that grows You can talk about rhyme and meter here, about tropes, about word choice (why "but a little moment" instead of "for a little moment"?), about alliteration (stage, shows, stars, secret), and so on, but I think what you'll ultimately generate is a long list of patently obvious things. And this sets us up for what is likely to be an insipid reading of a well-known and often-cataloged poem. Point is, that kind of close reading's not going to tell most readers anything they don't already know or couldn't figure out for themselves. But things get more interesting if we add another poem into the mix. In this case, it's Milton's Sonnet 19: quote:When I consider how my light is spent, This gets us somewhere, because it draws attention to patterns in both sonnets that would otherwise seem insignificant. Just for instance: 1) Obviously, both poems begin with "When I consider..." Less obviously, the phrase that follows "When I consider" describes each sonnet's governing metaphor. In Shakespeare, this is botanical ("grows," as in plant); in Milton, this is luminary ("light," meaning "time," "religious devotion," or "poetic ability" or, in an historicist reading, "sight"). 2) Both poems follow a pattern in lines 2-4: a) they describe a time ("a little moment" in Shakespeare; "half my days" in Milton), then b) a place ("this huge stage" in Shakespeare; "this dark world and wide" in Milton), then c) a type of secrecy ("stars in secret influence" in Shakespeare; "talent which is death to hide" in Milton). 3) Shakespeare's sonnet is about generalities -- the way the world works in the abstract. Milton's is about himself; Milton mentions himself four times in four lines, while Shakespeare mentions himself only once. 4) Milton adopts a rhyme scheme different from Shakespeare's (abba instead of abab). 5) Milton enjambs his lines more than Shakespeare. The most conspicuous example is at stanza's end, where he runs his sentence into the beginning of the next stanza ("[...] though my soul more bent / To serve my maker [...]"). I think all five of those points are a solid foundation for a reading of either poem individually or of the poems as a pair. I also think it's clear that, without a second poem in the mix, it'd be nearly impossible to catch, or assign significance to, any of these five points. This is especially true of (2); I don't know how this time/place/secrecy pattern would be interpretively significant if it weren't followed by both texts. That's a long way of saying that improving your close reading skills has everything to do with understanding that (a) close reading is pattern recognition, and (b) patterns will emerge, or become meaningful, only in a larger interpretive context. So there's that. A second, and somewhat shorter, point is that people often think of close reading as "putting the text under a microscope," or though a similar trope that suggests concentration on detail. And a concentration on detail is fine, as long as it doesn't exclude "big" stuff, like how (or on what terms) a text is an example of its genre.
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Sep 7, 2010 15:54
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Burning Rain posted:[...] which books on everyday reading (i.e., focusing on practice of reading instead of high theory) and engaging with texts do you recommend? And what would you want to see in such a book? You've mentioned Harold Bloom, Kenneth Burke and others, but they mostly write on the nature of texts and/or specific examples. I've spent serious time thinking about this. Right now, I'm teaching an Intro. to Lit. class that really wants this kind of book -- that is, the kind of book that teaches and demonstrates good close reading techniques, instead of just providing a glossary of literary terms or senselessly tossing a selection of texts against high theory. And the frustrating thing is that there aren't any, or at least not any good enough that I'd order them for a class. Foster's How To Read Literature Like a Professor is really just bad high-school reading on steroids: rain means a character's depressed. A character's eyes are a window into his or her personality. Look at all the symbols. And other texts are really about naming parts. You know: this is an iamb, this is a spondee, this is a trope, and so on. Some of them do this well -- I think Howe's Close Reading is one of the better ones. But it's still like a book on hunting that just has pictures of animals and guns. Like once you know what a bear looks like you'll know how and where to find one. Like looking at a photo of a rifle makes you a better marksman. So what would make this kind of book good? I think the first thing it needs is an approach. Not a high theory approach; something more like Cleanth Brooks's "the language of poetry is the language of paradox," or the similar system that Fish lays out in Self-Consuming Artifacts -- the kind of approach that thinks of a text as following certain rules, and of interpretation as a complex process that emerges from a careful understanding of those rules, and that works with the text as a text rather than as a cultural artifact. I've thought about writing such a book for about a year, and using the "relationship between texts" approach I've built my responses in this thread around. I just don't know when or how I'll make time for writing that book between now and, well, whenever. I've got a sabbatical coming in three years. Maybe then.
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Sep 7, 2010 19:18
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Are you sure that's actually true? Because the fact that it's a palette swap of a popular (and mostly true!) story about Charlie Chaplain [sic] suggests myth. Yes, it was a competition in the New Statesman. It's in his Wiki article and a more authoritative reference shouldn't be hard to find (I'm pretty sure I read about it in the NS itself). edit: in fact the Wikipedia article suggests it happened twice! tilp fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Sep 7, 2010 |
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Sep 7, 2010 22:57
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Brainworm posted:So the best way to improve your close reading is to improve your ability to spot significant literary patterns; I say "significant" here because the patterns you choose to identify should be determined by what you want to do with the text. WIthout a clear idea of what you want to do with a text, or of which questions you want to answer about it, your close reading is going to be exhaustive and directionless. Tell me if I've got this right, but it sounds like I should question the significance of elements of the text (why this, and not that?) and read or reread them for the answer? I attempt to do this on my own, but I think it would be much more helpful if it were collaborative. Amazingly, this never happened throughout my entire academic career* and, at the time, I didn't know that it's what I wanted to do.  Concerning a good book on reading. I've found this book helpful for explaining the mechanics of how writers create meaning through diction, sentence structure, paragraphing, gesture, and dialog, among others. Perhaps it could be of use for your class. It isn't textbook, but I think that's a point in its favor. *As an English major, but it was more like a minor compared to my World of Warcraft studies. For good reasons I loathed the majority of my English classes, so no surprise there. El Kabong fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Sep 8, 2010 |
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Sep 7, 2010 23:17
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Brainworm, great thread, I've been reading through it and it's made some things I found boring in high school interesting to reconsider. Would you mind commenting on Sontag's essay, Against Interpretation? Is it still relevant to modern criticism, or is it not considered as valid today? It had an impact on me, and I definitely view at least film differently now since reading it, but I still see a lot of attention put on symbolism and interpretation in the literary world. I'd also be interested and grateful if you could point me toward anything more recent that responds to this essay or its ideas. Thanks.
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Sep 7, 2010 23:27
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Brainworm posted:I've thought about writing such a book for about a year Do it! I'd buy it, and I'm barely literate. A bit of creative marketing (like "How high school DESTROYED your ability to read") could give it a broad appeal. One thing this thread shows is that you have a gift for making this kind of reading relevant, showing people how it can be useful for them. Also, if you don't write it, no one ever will. Ever. It would have been done several times over, otherwise.
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Sep 8, 2010 01:37
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El Kabong posted:Tell me if I've got this right, but it sounds like I should question the significance of elements of the text (why this, and not that?) and read or reread them for the answer? [...] I think that's what I'm suggesting, yes. What I mean is, close reading is always done with a purpose and to some end -- it has to be, or it ends up exhaustive and uninformative. Sort of flabby. Another way to think about it is that a close reading is really an answer to a question; if you want a good answer, you need a good question. So consider a typically terrible college English assignment: take pages X to Y of a text, or this passage, or this poem, and perform a close reading. That's sort of like handing a biologist an animal, or handing a geologist a rock, and saying "tell me everything there is to know about this." What you'll get back is a Wikipedia article. Real intellectual inquiry requires a specific framework, even if that framework is totally artificial. When you hand a biologist an animal, you want to say something like "I'm looking for minks, and I've got a great tool for locating these critters here. How can I use location information for these critters to help me find minks?" To a geologist, you say something like "I'm looking for oil shale. How likely am I to find it in the vicinity of rock like this?" Close reading wants a similar framework. You can't just pick up a poem and do a close reading (at least, not a good one). You need something more. Maybe you ask "how are rhyme and meter used differently in poem A than poem B?" Maybe you ask "where does this poem break meter, and does this correlate with any of the poem's other formal characteristics?" I'm not sure the question matters as long as its specific enough to produce an inventive answer. That's another way of saying that good close reading needs an agenda; if you don't have an agenda, fake it. Either way, a close reading's got to be driven by specific questions if it's going to deliver interesting answers.
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Sep 8, 2010 16:39
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Brainworm posted:That's another way of saying that good close reading needs an agenda; if you don't have an agenda, fake it. Either way, a close reading's got to be driven by specific questions if it's going to deliver interesting answers. Thank you. I'll try to conjure an agenda for myself before I start reading the next novel on my list. I suppose you didn't think much of that book I recommended? I can see how it might not seem appropriate for a college class, but I wish someone had handed it to me a long time ago.
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Sep 8, 2010 20:58
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El Kabong posted:I suppose you didn't think much of that book I recommended? I can see how it might not seem appropriate for a college class, but I wish someone had handed it to me a long time ago. I only vaguely remember it -- I got a copy one MLA and read it on the plane back. If you found it useful I think it might deserve another read. There are times I'm too quick to put books aside, and this might be one of them.
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Sep 8, 2010 21:01
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Burning Rain posted:Also, somebody way earlier in the thread asked your opinion on Bob Dylan's lyrics. Have you given him a listen? If you haven't, here's a few samples from throughout his career. They're really quite different, but if you haven't got the time, please check out at least the last one. It's rare to hear an informed opinion on his texts which don't come from either side of the barricades. I've put off Dylan long enough, I think. I got the complete Dylan months ago and haven;t yet made time to carefully listen, but I did go through each of these songs ("Times They Are A-changin," "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Jokerman," and "Thunder on the Mountain") a time and a half. So what I'm about to write here are first impressions, and I'm afraid they might not tell anyone anything much that they can't see for themselves. Basically, I'd describe the arc of these songs like so: Each song has a persistent theme of individual resistance to larger forces that may at first appear to be natural, but are in fact the (possibly unintentional) effects of an aggregate of human choices. As these songs progress, and as we presumably move from early to late Dylan, this theme becomes increasingly indirect and obscure -- couched in semimystical language (as in "Jokerman") or in nebulous trope (as in "Thunder on the Mountain"). I also think we see a movement away from narrative intimacy. From the Tangible to the Archetypical Again, I think all these songs are in orbit around some relationship between an individual and the forces that describe his or her surroundings. But as we progress from "Times" to "T.o.t.M.," Dylan moves from a tangible, storytelling approach to this theme (using definite character types and, in the case of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," a detailed urban background), to a loosely allegorical approach (using intangible character types, as in "Jokerman," and inflated semi-allegorical imagery, like the army raising in "Thunder on the Mountain"). Of these four songs, "Thunder on the Mountain" takes the most work to fit into the trend, and I'm not totally comfortable with it being there at all; there's a lot in the song that seems tangible, after all -- it's the only song where a character has a clear proper name (Alicia Keys), and there are mentions of particular places (e.g. Hell's Kitchen). But even though these are proper nouns, they're not specific; that is, the mention of Hell's Kitchen is not a description of Hell's Kitchen, and the song does not seem to rely on detailed understandings of specific people or places in order to work. Replace "Hell's Kitchen" with "Toledo" and the song still works just fine. From Intimacy to Something Else "Jokerman" and "Thunder on the Mountain" also seem less personal than either "Times" or "S.H.B." By less personal, I mean that both "Times" and "S.H.B." have a narrator engaged in realistic conversation with a listener (or listeners) -- in both cases, giving advice. And the advice is at least written as thoughtful, perceptive, and detailed. So both these songs evoke a kind of intimacy, right? Advice, and especially thoughtful advice, either establishes or suggests a relationship of some depth between the singer and the listener. "Jokerman" and "T.o.t.M." totally discard this approach. In "Jokerman," Dylan seems to be singing to an archetypal figure whose defining characteristic is complete independence in face of massive and generally allegorized forces that are vaguely threatening but also largely indifferent. That's a character type, a sort of Byronic hero, but it's not a vulnerable or empathetic type (like the people change can roll right over in "Times" or the novice in "S.H.B"s slightly surreal and possibly dangerous city). In "Jokerman," Dylan pretends to give advice, but he's really just praising the "Jokerman" character type and cataloging his virtues. "T.o.t.M." is, as far as I can tell, addressed to someone for the the narrator feels a sort of pity and contempt, probably as a result of his (the narrator's) ramblin' background and varied experience. But that relationship's never really fleshed out -- we get a catalogue of what the narrator has done, and a bit of where he is now, and a bit that suggests he's a sort of unimpressive self-styled prophet, raising orphan armies and drinking a poo poo ton of milk. But that's really it. We don't get a sense of who he's talking to at all. So what do I see in Dylan? Basically, persistent descriptions of relationships between people and the larger forces that surround them. But these are couched in language that become more tropic and archetypal, and less personal, as we move from "Times" to "T.o.t.M." I think the overall effect of this is that, over time, I got a less precise sense of Dylan as a narrator. I think something would be lost even in a very good cover of "Times," mostly because the song's intimacy would very clearly make it someone else's words. I couldn't say the same of "Jokerman" or "T.o.t.M." They may be good songs, but they are not intimate.
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Sep 9, 2010 17:09
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Thanks a lot for the insight. I picked the examples that went from concrete to abstract somewhat consciously as that's the direction I feel he's heading (other examples would show pretty much the same thing, even though there are more than a few sidesteps along the way). I find it quite fascinating as despite the nebulosity of his later lyrics they resonate with me much stronger, which might be because of the way I (we?) usually process popular music lyrics, tuning in and out of the song, grabbing a phrase here and there instead of following it closely all the way through. That could be the reason why TotM and his other late-period songs work better for me as there are way more memorable phrases than in most of his earlier songs. I also find it very interesting that you picked up on the individual resistance, which is one of his main themes, but it's something people usually feel only unconsciously (and I'd wager one of the main reasons for his early popularity) but aren't able to put their finger on. But that's probably why you're a professor  So thanks again!
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Sep 10, 2010 10:47
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Captain Lou posted:Would you mind commenting on Sontag's essay, Against Interpretation? Is it still relevant to modern criticism, or is it not considered as valid today? It had an impact on me, and I definitely view at least film differently now since reading it, but I still see a lot of attention put on symbolism and interpretation in the literary world. I think Against Interpretation is typical of a kind of manifesto-style criticism that illustrates a problem and stops well short of proposing a solution, and I think that such criticism is necessarily short-lived. This doesn't mean that I don't think Sontag has a good point; in fact, I agree with much of what she says: a criticism that says Hamlet is "really" about subversions of absolute power, or that Kafka's Metamorphosis is "really" about the dehumanizing effects of bureaucratic capitalism is both widely practiced and misses the point entirely. It makes the mistake of assuming that every text is principally a complex social allegory. What it misses, I think, is part of my contention throughout this thread: a good criticism enhances the pleasure of a text. A good criticism suggests who Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, really is -- more Michael Cera than Olivier -- and allows you to imagine the play from his perspective (and Claudius's, and Gertrude's, and Polonius's, and Ophelia's...). In short, a good criticism allows you to make sense of a text in a way you could not before, and so enjoy it differently, more completely, and with a greater strength. It does not stop, or preferably even start, with the discovery of "hidden" meanings that draw the text into a political or social debate. I can think of two excellent and more recent variations on Sontag's theme, though. This first, and maybe more opaque, is Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text, which outlines an "erotics of art" like what Sontag calls for. A second is Eagleton's After Theory, which is a somewhat more tangible discussion of the problems that contemporary critical theory poses for readers, and how those problems might be negotiated. But just FYI, I think that "I'ma illustrate a problem with criticism" criticism is fundamentally broken unless it discovers some alternative. Most of the time, it takes remarkably little facility to describe a broad problem with any field. I mean, by the end of this semester, I'm sure every student in my Introduction to Literature class will be able to tell me what he or she doesn't like about the spectrum of criticism we'll read, and certainly Sontag's basic complaint -- that criticism generally doesn't make reading more enjoyable -- is common in such courses as the are usually taught. What takes tremendous skill, and what I think more useful, is providing a new criticism that addresses these problems. Complaining, saying we need to do something different, and stopping there, that's just barroom griping.
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Sep 13, 2010 19:06
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Brainworm posted:But just FYI, I think that "I'ma illustrate a problem with criticism" criticism is fundamentally broken unless it discovers some alternative. Most of the time, it takes remarkably little facility to describe a broad problem with any field. I mean, by the end of this semester, I'm sure every student in my Introduction to Literature class will be able to tell me what he or she doesn't like about the spectrum of criticism we'll read, and certainly Sontag's basic complaint -- that criticism generally doesn't make reading more enjoyable -- is common in such courses as the are usually taught. I don't really think this is a fair attack. The first step in fixing a problem is identifying it, and ignoring problems because you don't have a solution just makes it less likely that a solution will be found.
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Sep 13, 2010 19:16
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I don't really think this is a fair attack. The first step in fixing a problem is identifying it, and ignoring problems because you don't have a solution just makes it less likely that a solution will be found. That's fair criticism. In general, identifying a problem is most of fixing it -- in the real world, and for complex problems, good solutions are usually impossible to implement when a problem is not carefully framed and defined in some detail. But In order for the definition of a problem to be useful, that definition needs to have some integrity. What I mean by this is that defining a problem is a persuasive act; one needs to convince a reader that this problem is worth acting on, and that there is some mechanism, some further plan, for doing so. This is where I think e.g. Sontag falls short. Sontag ends Against Interpretation by claiming that we need an "erotics" of art instead of a "hermeneutics" of art -- in short, I think, she means that we need a system that emphasizes the pleasure of artistic appreciation instead of the process of artistic interpretation, or that teaches people to enjoy a painting instead of mining it for hidden meanings. I can agree with that sentiment, as can probably anyone else who's had a duty of criticism stand in the way of pleasure reading. But that's not really the problem, is it? The problem is that there is a pervasive and mistaken belief that "real" reading involves a search for hidden meanings, and that there are places and practices -- say, bad English classes -- that systematically reinforce this belief. What I mean is, it's clear that people know how to read for pleasure. It's not a lost art. It's just in tension with this widely held belief that reading for pleasure isn't reading completely or responsibly. But I'm following that rabbit into the woods. Criticism that finds a problem with criticism can of course be useful and good. In practice, however, it's usually a dead end. A cynical part of me thinks that this is because people who write that criticism aren't often interested in the work it takes to find a solution to the problem they're describing; Sontag herself was (probably understandably) more interested in writing novels, and writing articles on camp and photography, than she was in rallying teachers and critics around a new erotics of art. That's not me condemning Sontag -- I mean, she can do what she wants. But at the same time, you can't both solve a complex problem and dedicate yourself to other things.
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Sep 14, 2010 17:57
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Hi Brainworm, this is a great thread and I'd like to add my question to the pile, if I may. I'm finishing up my undergraduate degree in English Lit. (with minors in as divers fields as Computer Science, Classics, and Gender Studies) at the University of Utah, and the game plan is to apply to PhD programs in English, after taking a couple of years off to relax/write a personal statement/take the GRE, and also to wait for my girlfriend to finish up and see if we can't get into schools somewhat nearby. Just so you know, I am interested primarily (for the moment) in Medieval Literature/Chaucer and Queer Theory. I'm doing a research project at the moment which deals with sexual violence and institutional regimes of gendered control in certain of the Canterbury Tales and the Legend of Good Women and I'm having a lot of fun reading secondary scholarship and, especially, theory. So my question is about graduate school. I know the whole "no money, no jobs" line, but I think I would be happy being able to pursue an intellectual field despite the hard work and absence of recognition, even if I ended up getting a non-academic job in the final tally, so that is not the issue. My concern is that I've become increasingly concerned with social justice, particularly in feminisms/gender studies, but also in race and class. And while it seems to me that post-structural theory and cultural studies (or whatever you'd like to call post-colonial, feminist, et cetera theory) can be a force of good in these concerns, I also fear that there will be a lot of "careerism" and what I would identify as masculine-dominated discourse in any program I get into. In my (admittedly limited) reading of the Chaucer scholarship and other English scholarship there seem to be quite a few academics who will pay lip service to race/class/gender but continue to write in a way that can be seen as imperialist, white, and male. The situation, then, is that while I love theory in-and-of-itself, I would want to pursue a course of study that is both theoretical and, in an important sense, practical. Is this something which will be possible in English graduate school, or will the pressure to engage the next "hot thing" (whatever comes after queer theory or ecocriticism, I guess), produce papers, and compete for funding totally trample my newfound idealism? deptstoremook fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Sep 16, 2010 |
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Sep 16, 2010 00:57
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Asked this in the linguistics thread, no one came up with an answer, maybe you'll know something: what's the history of the practice of substituting a "z" for an "s" on plural nouns? First examples off the top of my head come from hip-hop culture -- N.W.A ("Niggaz with Attitudes"), Boyz n the Hood. Does it go back further than that?
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Sep 16, 2010 08:53
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OK, Brainworm, one of the themes of this thread has been the importance of understanding literary works as responses to other literary works, as part of a tradition. If you were going to argue against this position, what would you say? Why doesn't everyone take your line?
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Sep 16, 2010 18:56
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This whole thread is making me go  about once a minute.Also, this is from wayback, but I really need to comment. the chaperone posted:2) How do you deal with kids who don't speak English as their first language? I have 2 kids who work hard but obviously don't have a firm grasp of grammar/syntax. It is hard for me to look past it. Brainworm posted:ESL students are a challenge. Depending on how your college is set up, they may not be your challenge. That is, the first step is to refer them to whoever handles ESL issues -- usually a staff department where ESL students go to learn proofing techniques that address their specific problems. Does this really work? Just marking mistakes and not telling the student what the mistakes are? I teach junior college English (woo, temporary full-time adjunct!) in a town that is 95% Hispanic/Latino and have a lot of difficulty with students who speak Spanish at home exclusively. The only time they practice their English is with me. I find myself explaining, at the whiteboard, what a period is and what it is for. I guess your students are just on a different level than mine, but I would absolutely love to see a paper without a sentence fragment in it, just once. Then again, I'd also like to teach literature. 
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Sep 17, 2010 06:21
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deptstoremook posted:[...] What I'm about to give you are a few knee-jerk reactions, and they may sound a little cranky. That's not you, or your questions. It's really all me, and my relationship to the field. What I'm saying is, grad school won't need to trample your newfound idealism because I'm about to do it here. For reasons I don't fully understand, English programs perpetuate this myth that criticism is activism. That myth, in turn, puts students like you in the bind that you're in now. Will I be able to accomplish such-and-such social goal with my work? Will my work be socially responsible? Will I have to sell out to be successful? Me, I think literary criticism can be, and is, a lot of things. What it isn't is politically, ethically, or morally significant. This doesn't mean that you can't be both a critic and an activist. It just means you can't be an activist by being a critic. I mean, a criticism of Chaucer that focuses on differences and injustices along race, class, or gender lines may (or may not) be good criticism, but it is almost certainly ineffective politics. It's not going to free a slave or make poor people wealthier or convince anyone that these are worthy ends. And that's perfectly fine. I mean, I'm a political person. I'm in my community every week coordinating volunteers, giving talks, and generally trying to make my world (and specifically my town) a better, fairer, and more just place to live. But I do that because my reading of Hamlet isn't going to do it for me. And I shouldn't expect it to. The most I can reasonably expect from my work is that it will interest people, and change the ways they think about reading or writing or teaching. If I'm really, really good, there might be political and social fallout from that -- someone who reads this thread goes to college (or to what I think is the right kind of college), thinks better of English as a discipline, or otherwise lives better in a small but measurable way. Those are important to me, but they're not really social justice issues. Point is, I think a good graduate program will help you be a better critic, and help you write better criticism. It may help you become a teacher, or a better teacher. And it may do these things by suggesting critical methods or theories that do not address the social issues that you rightly think need redressed, and may do so in an environment you find unpleasant or unjust. That's not going to present a conflict unless you think that you have to be a good person in order to be a good scholar. So what am I saying? There will be a kind of careerism in grad school, because grad school is largely career training (even though it is not often good career training because it pretends not to be). There won't be any kind of programmatic activism, excepting what I think is the totally disingenuous equation of criticism with the pursuit of social justice. There will be room for you to engage more practical forms of activism, but probably not as part of your program of study. There won't be pressure for you to to study a certain set of texts in a certain way as a function of the market, since most programs are too disorganized to act on market trends even if they could identify them.
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Sep 20, 2010 18:51
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A Violence Gang posted:Asked this in the linguistics thread, no one came up with an answer, maybe you'll know something: what's the history of the practice of substituting a "z" for an "s" on plural nouns? First examples off the top of my head come from hip-hop culture -- N.W.A ("Niggaz with Attitudes"), Boyz n the Hood. Does it go back further than that? A short page through the OED doesn't suggest specifically when the practice began. I can tell you that the use of "z" to form a plural seems to have been uncommon practice in some Middle English texts -- Langland does it a few times in Piers, for example. But I think this is sort of like Chaucer's use of "axe" for "ask." There might be some vector for its persistence -- people argue for it with "ax/ask" -- but I suspect (based on no evidence of any kind) that the plural "z" is a recent innovation more than the latest instance of a continuous and complex tradition.
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Sep 21, 2010 16:15
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emys posted:OK, Brainworm, one of the themes of this thread has been the importance of understanding literary works as responses to other literary works, as part of a tradition. If you were going to argue against this position, what would you say? Why doesn't everyone take your line? Good question. I was going to call the way of thinking I'm about to describe the "most common argument against my position," but on thinking I decided that would be a bit dishonest -- it sort of puts my position at the center of everything when, really, it's not. The center of everything, what you could call the direction of most scholarship and teaching in English, is really a kind of Cultural Studies. Basically, it sees a text as both a product of and a participant in a set of cultural relationships, and consequently reasons that understanding the culture that produced a text is a necessary part of understanding the text itself. So recent criticism -- I mean post-1970 criticism -- has really focused on culture. Feminist critics, for instance, locate a text among a set of cultural relationships that define gender and sexual orientation. Marxists locate a text in a similar set of relationships: class definitions, class conflicts, and (more astutely) the ways a culture of capital shapes the ways that people think and act. Likewise, Postcolonial critics read their texts as the both the cause and consequence of the social and political situations peculiar to former colonies, and to formerly colonized peoples. So if one of each of these types of critics were looking at, say, Ellison's Invisible Man, each would make a connection between that text and the culture in which they see it implicated. A Feminist critic might ask how, say, Ellison's experience as a merchant mariner influenced the ideas about masculinity that Invisible Man presents; a Marxist might ask how the same experience shaped Ellison's ideas about social and economic divisions, and how these come across in his writing. A Postcolonial critic would see Ellison as part of a larger class of recently-but-not-entirely liberated American blacks, and make some claims about the ways Invisible Man represents that experience. More commonly, a critic would use some aggregate of these and similar approaches to craft a reading of the text. This is implicitly an argument against the ways I read because it assumes that the relationships between text and culture has first mortgage on interpretation. A sort of concomitant idea is that engaging a text is a way of engaging a culture by proxy; that talking about Heart of Darkness or The Tempest is a way of talking about colonialism. This usually becomes an argument for Cultural Studies reading methods as well: instead of just reading the text, we're examining political and social issues of some great importance, and consequently doing important work. In the past, and partly because of this, I've been accused of dodging "political" issues -- most notably antisemitism in Merchant of Venice and colonialism and racism in The Tempest and Othello. The assumption informing those accusations is that if I cared about these issues it would naturally be a matter of the highest importance to connect them to my reading and criticism. That's another way of saying that one argument against my way of reading is that it is not politically or socially efficacious, does not teach a moral history (e.g. that antisemitism, racism, sexism, and colonial practices are tragic and wrong), and is deliberately apolitical (i.e. makes a statement of political consent by not amking a statement of opposition).
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Sep 23, 2010 15:16
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Betazoid posted:Does this [minimal marking] really work? Just marking mistakes and not telling the student what the mistakes are? I teach junior college English (woo, temporary full-time adjunct!) in a town that is 95% Hispanic/Latino and have a lot of difficulty with students who speak Spanish at home exclusively. The only time they practice their English is with me. I find myself explaining, at the whiteboard, what a period is and what it is for. I guess your students are just on a different level than mine, but I would absolutely love to see a paper without a sentence fragment in it, just once. My experience has been that marking, but not identifying, errors (like with the marginal "X") works well for students who are already somewhat trained in the language -- I'd attach a TOEFL score of something like 500(PBT)/200(CBT/75(IBT) to that, but that's a lousy way to peg language proficiency. A better descriptor might be "someone who can speak halting English and read well enough to plagiarize and Engineering thesis." But it sounds like your students are both remedial and ESL writers -- at least based on what you're doing with periods -- so proofreading in English may be beyond what you can expect them to do well. At that point, the usual approach is to bring them up to writing proficiency in their native language as you improve their facility with spoken English, then mainstream them into an ESL classroom. What that means for you in your class, man, I don't know. Were I in your position, or at least the position I'd imagine you're in, I'd start by "gridding" or classifying the types of grammatical or syntactic errors that each student makes, then conferencing with each one of them to work out which types of errors are characteristic of his or her writing. That way, proofreading becomes a hunt for three or four kinds of statistically probable errors rather than, well, everything. Also, you get a baseline from which you can track improvements and regressions. But that's also (1) a fuckton of work to throw into grammatical issues when your students may have more important writing problems, and (2) beyond the level of commitment I'd expect from an adjunct. I mean, what I would do in your case is try that (or a similar) sample solution with a small group of students one semester, bring the results to whoever's immediately above you, and try to work that into a better job description -- get yourself some paid time in the writing center (if they have one), get permission to charge students a nominal hourly rate for tutoring, or try to build a position.
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Sep 28, 2010 15:48
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Whats your opinion of Emerson? We've just covered him (briefly) in my American Lit class and while some of his work is interesting, I find it hard to get past his style, which in my opinion is just plain bad.
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Oct 11, 2010 13:03
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Welp, truly killed this thread. Sorry for my brutish ways
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Oct 23, 2010 19:49
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theunderwaterbear posted:Welp, truly killed this thread. Sorry for my brutish ways Sorry about that. I haven't checked in on this thread in a while and didn;t realize I'd missed a question. So hopefully it's not too late here. I'm not an Emerson person, meaning that I haven;t had call to read Emerson in years and years and years, either as part of my graduate work, as part of my research, or as part of a class. But my knee-jerk response to Emerson as a writer about matches yours. There is something about his style that puts me off. Successions of loose sentences, half-baked tropes, and huge gaps between sentences and ideas are only a few of these. I mean, look at this bit from Circles: Emerson posted:You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand, and nimbler, was the invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. So a hand is better than a wall or a tower because things that build other things are necessarily better than the things that get built. Also, it is easier to destroy things than make them. Also, for not clear reason, thoughts are better than hands because they make hands do things, but those thoughts are less god than some unnamed X factor that causes them to happen. Right. This prose isn't remarkable for its clarity -- I'm not sure what throwing in the idea that it is easier to destroy than create does for this paragraph, which is really about which kinds of things are better than which other kinds or, more specifically, about why causes are better than effects in the Aristotelian sense. And this piece is certainly not remarkable for the integrity of its ideas. A clever third grader could probably think of a dozen examples of effects that are better than their causes. There are some great movies about the Holocaust. But the party line about Emerson is that he is the first distinctively American intellectual, meaning that he is the first speaker and writer of international significance to not just live in the United States, but to approach intellectual problems from a distinctively American perspective. And there are some places where I think his influence is still felt. If you read anything about the history and mission of a Liberal Arts college, for instance, you're likely to see something Emersonian at work in there, since the LAC is a distinctively American institution that emerged at a time when Emerson was the American intellectual. But for the most part, what we think of as distinctively American has eclipsed Emerson. The best example I can think of in the form of a person is Hemingway, whose prose was at the time distinctive, revolutionary, and a clear contrast to the styles characteristic of, say, any 19th century movement you'd care to name. Likewise, I think if someone were to name a particularly American form of higher education, they'd probably say "business school" ahead of "Liberal Arts College," and for good reason. What it means to be American, and what the rest of the world thinks of as distinctively American, has changed tremendously since the early 19th century. Hell, it changed tremendously during and after the Civil War. So it's tough to get a hold of Emerson, since I think he's been sort of deprecated by later thinkers. Of course you can make cases for his continuing relevance -- the most common is Emerson's influence on Ghandi -- but I think that what's left of Emerson is more a pile of trivia than a strong, distinct, and continuing influence (like the influences of Jefferson Kant, or Hemingway, for example).
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Nov 1, 2010 13:48
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Hi Brainworm. I've read this whole thread, and consequently been inspired to read some Shakespeare -- starting with Hamlet. It's left me with a load of questions. Could you offer some possible answers? Why isn't Hamlet king after his father's death? Presumably his mother would want him to be king more than her brother-in-law, and would argue on his behalf. Why are Hamlet and Old Hamlet's Ghost the only characters who see Claudius as a drunken, incestuous idiot? He comes across as sane (albeit a scheming bastard) to me and, seemingly, the rest of the court. Why does Shakespeare bother with the Fortinbras subplot? It is mentioned at the beginning and only pops up at the end as a neat way to tie-off the play. It just adds to the weight of the backstory at the beginning but then sits idly in the background doing nothing throughout the rest of the play. Do you think Hamlet is genuinely mad, or acts mad to aid him in avenging his father's death? What's the point in Reynaldo? What's the deal with Polonius instructing him to discredit Laertes' character? Why did Ophelia become such a popular character? (Consider the number of paintings about her and essays on her role in the play.) She doesn't strike me as the most interesting character in the play -- she spends most of the time as a gibbering idiot. Why did Hamlet show no remorse for accidentally killing Polonius? Hamlet is thirty years old. Why does he act like a big whinging baby? It doesn't strike me as princely, let alone as potential kingship material. How is almost every cast member dying at some point in the play not farce? Can you recommend any interesting secondary literature? I don't care what school of interpretation/criticism it's from -- just whatever you think is interesting. How do you rank the film versions (that you've seen)? Last, I've read the last couple acts a few times now and still can't figure out how Hamlet escapes the pirates. Could you please clear it up for me? Cheers! Umbriago fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Nov 2, 2010 |
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Nov 2, 2010 16:59
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Umbriago posted:Hi Brainworm. I've read this whole thread, and consequently been inspired to read some Shakespeare -- starting with Hamlet. It's left me with a load of questions. Could you offer some possible answers? This is definitely a load of good questions. I'll do my best with them, but I'm going to have to break this into two parts. quote:Why isn't Hamlet king after his father's death? Presumably his mother would want him to be king more than her brother-in-law, and would argue on his behalf. The High School teacher answer here is that Denmark is an elective monarchy -- that is, there's apparently some process by which the new king is chosen by ballot. The interesting thing is that we as an audience don't find this out until late in the play (I think until Act V). So what's really interesting about this is that the design of the play keeps us wondering about why Hamlet isn't king or, more specifically, what kinds of moves Claudius has had to make to gain the throne even though Hamlet seems to be the rightful heir to it. Learning that Denmark is an elective monarchy makes this question even more complicated. I'm going to talk a bit later about how Hamlet infers that there is a sort of conspiracy surrounding his father's death, and how one of Hamlet's goals early in the play is finding out exactly who might have been involved in that conspiracy and how. His chief suspects in that investigation are Polonius and Gertrude, and as a consequence we as an audience are particularly concerned with the guilt and innocence of those characters. But learning that Claudius was voted into the throne by a group of unnamed nobles suggests that any conspiracies surrounding Old Hamlet's death may have been more extensive, and perhaps more justified, than the early play leads us to believe. It's one thing for Claudius and Gertrude and Polonius to conspire in Old Hamlet's death, since all three of them arguably have something to gain by it. It's another thing if the consensus in Denmark was that Old Hamlet had to go, since it reactivates some of the evidence that Old Hamlet wasn't a particularly great king. I mean, he wagers the kingdom on a fight with Fortinbras's father, which seems at once brave, inspiring, and deeply irresponsible. If that's what's going on, then the elective choice of Claudius over Hamlet makes a lot of sense. Claudius is probably capable of the political maneuvering that would trade a convenient assassination for the throne, and the electors might rightly assume that Hamlet would be more inclined to avenge the murder of his father than Claudius would be to avenge his murder of his brother. Gertrude's motivations in arguing for Claudius over Hamlet, if she were in a position to do so, hinge on how much you as a reader think she knows about Old Hamlet's murder. If she's part of this conspiracy, I think her motives are clear. If she's not, she could very well argue for Claudius over Hamlet because she's attached to the trappings of the throne, because she loves Claudius somewhat more or somewhat differently than Hamlet, or because she does not think Hamlet a capable ruler. quote:Why are Hamlet and Old Hamlet's Ghost the only characters who see Claudius as a drunken, incestuous idiot? He comes across as sane (albeit a scheming bastard) to me and, seemingly, the rest of the court. The easy answer here is that Hamlet and Old Hamlet have clear reasons to dislike Claudius, and so might see his vices magnified over his virtues. A second, and I think more interesting answer, is that the rest of the kingdom is in bed with Claudius, and might be in bed with him because he's a drunken idiot. If you read Denmark as a sort of political vipers' nest, there isn't a single person who has something to lose by putting an idiot on the throne. So Hamlet and Old Hamlet might be the only ones with the motivation to point out Claudius's vices, even if they're widely known. quote:Why does Shakespeare bother with the Fortinbras subplot? It is mentioned at the beginning and only pops up at the end as a neat way to tie-off the play. It just adds to the weight of the backstory at the beginning but then sits idly in the background doing nothing throughout the rest of the play. It's true that we get a bit about the Fortinbras situation right at the beginning of the play (where we learn he wants to invade Denmark) and again at the end (when he actually invades, storming the castle just as Hamlet dies), but we also get a bit of the Fortinbras situation the first time we see Claudius. When we first see Claudius, we learn that he's come up with a solution to Fortinbras's threatened invasion. He's sent ambassadors to Fortinbras's uncle, Norway, who's been funding Fortinbras's military outings, and they've returned with a sort of deal: Fortinbras will invade Poland instead of Denmark, but Denmark has to allow Fortinbras's army safe passage through to Poland. In short, Denmark has to agree to stand down their guard in exchange for Fortinbras and Norway promising not to invade. Claudius is, of course, pleased that they've been able to reach an agreement. Early in the play, we don't get much that suggests whether Claudius's diplomatic agreement is clever or foolhardy, but the end of the play delivers the verdict. Turns out, Fortinbras really was planning on invading Denmark, and so Denmark might have been better off with a viking-style warrior king like Old Hamlet than a politician like Claudius. From there, the dominoes of judgment fall rapidly. If Claudius was an idiot, the conspirators who put him on the throne were wrong to do so, and Hamlet's revenge is more justifiable than it would be if he were compromising the political health of Denmark to kill his father's murderer. quote:Do you think Hamlet is genuinely mad, or acts mad to aid him in avenging his father's death? Both. I think it's clear that Hamlet starts off feigning madness -- in Act I, he says he's going to "put an antic disposition on," presumably so he has a bit more freedom of movement than he would be if he were a sane, and therefore threatening, conspirator against the throne. But I think Hamlet really goes mad, and that we discover this in Act III when Old Hamlet's ghost appears to him in Gertrude's bedroom. She can't see it, which suggests to me that the Ghost is a sort of hallucination, and that Hamlet's therefore gone insane at some earlier point that's difficult to pinpoint because, well, he was also pretending to be crazy. It's one of a bunch of really cool plot twists in Act III; we find out that Claudius is really guilty of Old Hamlet's murder, Hamlet's gone off the rails, and he has also (bafflingly) let Claudius live. All that promises new kinds of suspense. quote:What's the point in Reynaldo? What's the deal with Polonius instructing him to discredit Laertes' character? This is a really good question. This opening part of Act II gets cut frequently, and that's a huge mistake. The conversation between Polonius and Reynaldo tells us who Polonius is and what he does. Reynaldo is a spy, and Polonius is his boss, which suggests that Polonius is something like the king's chief intelligence officer. Hamlet presumably knows this, and it's important to us because it suggests what Hamlet might be thinking. If Old Hamlet were murdered, how was it that Polonius didn't sniff out the plot to murder him? And why is Polonius now working for the murderer? Did he know about Old Hamlet's murder or conspire to help cover it up? Second, Hamlet knows that it's Polonius's job to watch him. It's no secret that Hamlet doesn't like Claudius: his first interaction with him is public and short of respectful, so it would make sense for Polonius to keep an eye on him -- especially if he knows that Claudius murdered Hamlet's father. So Hamlet's first job is to distract Polonius, and he does this by upsetting Ophelia, probably figuring that her new coldness to him was at Polonius's suggestion, and inferring that Polonius might think himself responsible for Hamlet's new (feigned) madness. So with Polonius preoccupied (and maybe a little scared to admit that he's accidentally driven the prince of Denmark insane), Hamlet has more room to discover whether he (Polonius) was party to Old Hamlet's murder, to investigate Claudius's guilt, and plot Claudius's murder. Point is, none of those things make sense of Polonius is just some guy. We need to know that he's the King's master of spies, that he's an intelligence officer and therefore a threat, in order to understand why Hamlet does what he does in Act II. quote:Why did Ophelia become such a popular character? (Consider the number of paintings about her and essays on her role in the play.) She doesn't strike me as the most interesting character in the play -- she spends most of the time as a gibbering idiot. Well, we rarely see Ophelia when she's not acting under orders, terrified, or insane. That's not flattering. But there's a lot to her character. The first thing to know about Ophelia is that there's a tension between what she seems to want and what Polonius wants for her. She has what Desdemona calls a "divided duty" between her father and her lover, but unlike Desdemona, Ophelia follows her father's orders (probably), and this choice leads her to all kinds of disasters. The simplest reading of her goes something like this: Ophelia obeys her father and stops communicating with Hamlet, and the next thing that happens is that Hamlet starts acting crazy. In her mind, this is her fault, right? She had a choice between loyalty to dad and loyalty to boyfriend, and choosing dad drove boyfriend insane. But it gets worse. Polonius decides to use Ophelia as bait to test Hamlet's insanity in front of Claudius -- this is where Hamlet give us "to be or not to be," and stumbles on Ophelia, who's been planted to intercept him, give him back his gifts and love tokens, and bait Hamlet into some kind of response that will prove to Claudius Polonius's theory that Hamlet's gone mad for love. The result? Hamlet flips the gently caress out, calls her a whore, and says he never loved her. So, again, Ophelia chose dad over boyfriend, and now boyfriend isn't just insane, but dangerously angry. But it gets worse. Ophelia has a chance to open up to Hamlet during the play within a play, and does a little bit -- I'll talk more about this in a second. So she starts thinking, probably, that things could be OK. The Hamlet she loves isn't entirely gone. And what happens next? Hamlet kills her father. So how does Ophelia put these pieces together? She's let her father stand in the way of her relationship with Hamlet, driving Hamlet insane and making him violent and angry. And then she's let Hamlet know, or think, that they could still have a nice relationship. So when Hamlet kills her father, there's really only one way Ophelia can make sense of it, since her actions toward Hamlet have suggested to him what she already knows: Polonius is the reason they can't be together, and Hamlet has therefore murdered Polonius thinking, insanely, that with him out of the way he and Ophelia can finally get together again. So now Polonius is dead, Hamlet is violent, insane, and likely to die at the hands of her hothead brother, Laertes (who's also likely to suffer for murdering the prince), and this is all her fault. If she'd chosen loyalty to Hamlet over loyalty to her father, Hamlet would be sane, they'd be married, she'd probably soon be queen, dad would still be alive, and her brother would be less likely to murder his way to the gallows. Guilt over this is what drives Ophelia insane, and this depth of character is part of what makes her interesting. Second, we get a window into Ophelia's character during her conversation with Hamlet during the play within a play. After she warms up to Hamlet a bit, they have a bit of back and forth that's really fun and clever: Hamlet posted:OPHELIA: You are as good as a chorus, my lord. The Ophelia we get to see here is less deferential, more of a match for Hamlet, and I think we've got to assume that this is a kind of sample of their private life -- a little sarcasm, a little needling, some dirty jokes, and a kind of playfulness. It gives us a sense of the value of their relationship, of what Hamlet has to sacrifice for his revenge, and what Ophelia thinks she loses by listening to her father. quote:Why did Hamlet show no remorse for accidentally killing Polonius? I think two reasons. One is that Hamlet's insane by this point. The second is that Hamlet probably thinks that Polonius was implicated in his father's death, or is at least close enough to Claudius to be guilty by association. quote:Hamlet is thirty years old. Why does he act like a big whinging baby? It doesn't strike me as princely, let alone as potential kingship material. Everyone points to thirty because of the way the Yorick scene maths out. But Hamlet's also a student at Wittenberg, which makes him maybe twenty at the oldest. I'm inclined to fix his age at the student end and assume that the Yorick math is either a widespread typo or an artifact of bad revision of the play, since a younger Hamlet presents fewer and more comfortable interpretive problems; if Hamlet's thirty, we need to explain why he's not married, why he's so close to his mother, why he's not elected king, why he resents his stepfather, and why all his friends are college students. Those are answerable questions, but they're more answerable if Hamlet's student age (16-20).
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Nov 3, 2010 14:27
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Brainworm posted:The Ophelia we get to see here is less deferential, more of a match for Hamlet, and I think we've got to assume that this is a kind of sample of their private life -- a little sarcasm, a little needling, some dirty jokes, and a kind of playfulness. It gives us a sense of the value of their relationship, of what Hamlet has to sacrifice for his revenge, and what Ophelia thinks she loses by listening to her father. Ophelia was quite the darling of the Victorian movement (paintings and poems) for just that reason. Here you have an intelligent, hard-working, obedient girl who suffers tragically, yet continues her work unwaveringly. Obviously, the thing to do, then, is paint her as an ideal of Victorian Womanhood. While I can understand their devotion to their ideals, but I think they expressed them in a wonky way with their choice of heroes. But then, I am also approaching it from the point of view of a 20th-21st century female. Brainworm posted:I'm inclined to fix his age at the student end and assume that the Yorick math is either a widespread typo or an artifact of bad revision of the play, since a younger Hamlet presents fewer and more comfortable interpretive problems; if Hamlet's thirty, we need to explain why he's not married, why he's so close to his mother, why he's not elected king, why he resents his stepfather, and why all his friends are college students. Those are answerable questions, but they're more answerable if Hamlet's student age (16-20). But, if Hamlet's 30 with those problems, it might also help explain why he's still a student, why he wasn't elected King, and why he eventually goes insane. His mind wouldn't be the most firm of territories. :-)
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Nov 3, 2010 15:43
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Hey thanks for the answers so far. I watched a film version tonight (Branagh's; I thought it was incredible) and it's definitely made the difference in my understanding of the play and in my appreciation of certain characters. In particular Ophelia -- I don't know how I failed to notice just how tragic her own story was within the play. I've a couple more questions now, though: Do you think Hamlet knew Ophelia was in the room/within earshot when he gives his 'to be or not to be' soliloquy? Is this part of his early feigned madness? Why does the dying Hamlet elect Young Fontinbras King of Denmark? You'd think he would be pretty pissed off that Fontinbras lied about invading Poland and invaded Denmark instead. Were the alternative choices of King really that bad? Perhaps Hamlet's comments on the futility of the death of soldiers as he passed the Norweigen army made him reluctant to leave Denmark in a civil war over the kingship. I read Macbeth yesterday, too, and have some questions about that. Why does Macbeth feel embittered that Banquo's heirs will be kings of Scotland? Does Macbeth have children? Macduff has a line when he finds out that his wife and children have been murdered that is ambiguous. If the Weird Sisters were correct in all of their predictions, why wasn't Fleance made King after Macbeth was killed? Thanks for any answers you can offer, and I look forward to the second lot of answers from my earlier questions!
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Nov 5, 2010 01:33
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So did you ever find a way to work this thread into your CV? You mentioned that offhand, months back. I'd be impressed if you did.
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Nov 7, 2010 22:05
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Did you know what you were going to do with your bachelor's when you first graduated? Like, did you have a rigid plan of action to go by from the start that got you to where you are now, teaching at a college with a fancy doctorate? I'll graduate next year with a degree in English Literature and I'm beginning to worry that, as much as my classes interest me, there is no work that would hold my interest. And sorry if that's too E/N for this thread.
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Nov 9, 2010 07:03
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reposting this from another thread. I'm sure you have the answers. What's that word you can use to describe someone who tries very hard to sound smart, mostly by using words he found in a thesaurus. The only words I can think of on top of my head are obfuscation, prolix and garrulous but that's not it. there's a better word. edit: pleonasm gets close. oh jesus i haven't even thought of tautology. but you can't say that someone is a tautologist. edit2: logorrhoea? bloviate? Pr0phecy fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Nov 10, 2010 |
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Nov 10, 2010 00:19
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An rear end in a top hat?
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Nov 10, 2010 00:45
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A postmodernist. http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824
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Nov 10, 2010 01:36
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Pr0phecy posted:reposting this from another thread. I'm sure you have the answers. How about... Pedant (noun) or grandiloquent (adjective). Sophist (noun) implies the play with language and lack of substance (even more so than pedant, which may indicate actual knowledge) but can be more varied in context. Sesquipedalian (adjective) means something similar to grandiloquent but with less of a negative connotation.
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Nov 10, 2010 05:34
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Pr0phecy posted:What's that word you can use to describe someone who tries very hard to sound smart, mostly by using words he found in a thesaurus. The only words I can think of on top of my head are obfuscation, prolix and garrulous but that's not it. there's a better word. I'ma leap ahead to answer this one. Pretentious. I would call such a person pretentious. If this is coupled with their talking too much or constantly at length, they could be a gasbag. If I wanted to skirt the edge on that, I'd press "bloviate" into service as a noun, the same way you'd use "ruminant" to describe an animal that ruminates. If you're criticizing someone who is trying to sound smart by dressing up his language, there's an irony in trotting out words you'd never normally use and likely cannot use comfortably. Better to be inventive.
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Nov 10, 2010 15:23
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I have a really hard time workshopping essays. I'm supposed to write a page with about a quarter of a page about what I like and 3/4 of what can improve the essay. I like almost everything I read though and I don't know what to say most of the time. Any tips for giving people tips about their essays? The class is creative non-fiction but I have trouble with this in general.
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Nov 11, 2010 12:29
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This is maybe not the correct thread but I didn't want to create a whole new one -- I'm writing an essay on antiheroes, and particularly the type of vigilante antihero in American fiction who is ostensibly necessary, but cannot be publicly accepted or legitimized (think: Jack Nicholson in 'A Few Good Men'). I've identified a character in an early penny western, Seth Jones, who is a good candidate for the progenitor of this archetype. However, one part of his background in particular stands out to me, and I've seen it echoed in other texts: In the book, it's made clear that the character is a vicious Indian Fighter, and he only became one after Natives murdered his wife and daughter. Despite getting his revenge, he continues to fight the Indians in perpetuity. Similar characters that immediately jump to mind are Batman, Conan the Barbarian and The Punisher, which makes me wonder if this is a uniquely pulp fictional trope. Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone here can think of similar characters from earlier or later fiction. I can remember some examples where a character is freed from the shackles of familial responsibility and is thus able to realize their full potential - and the reverse of this, such as Oliver Twist - but I can think of very few where the character is violently dispossessed of their family (and I'm reluctant to include slave narratives). Any thoughts? just another fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Nov 13, 2010 |
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Nov 13, 2010 22:57
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