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Hey Brainworm two questions. A) Is there a good overview/handbook on different rhetorical tropes as used in prose and poetry? B) Outside of English literature which is your favourite 'literature', e.g. do you prefer Goethe over Dante or is Cervantes more your thing? Cheers
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Aug 1, 2014 17:14
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Boatswain posted:Hey Brainworm two questions. I'm Spain walking the Camino for about another two weeks. So I'm tapping this out on my phone at like 5:00 in the morning while I wait for my hiking partners to get their poo poo together. I don't know a good handbook of tropes, but Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory is truly an awesome and an engaging read -- cracking it open to random entries is still one of my favorite ways to spend an off hour. And Cervantes is loving hilarious, which is hard to say for Dante and Goethe. But my Spanish is way ahead of my German and Italian, so that might drive my preference and whether I get the jokes. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 05:01
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While we're on the subject of all-time great, tradition-defining literature, Rabelais should be read way more often than he seems to be these days.
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Aug 9, 2014 00:21
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What's the point of this redtext? I mean, I'm an English professor. Emotional wounds would just make me sexier. So thanks, I guess.
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Aug 16, 2014 21:16
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Props to the red text for saying what every liberal arts student is constantly silently screaming inside, I guess?
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Aug 16, 2014 21:55
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Brainworm posted:What's the point of this redtext? I mean, I'm an English professor. Emotional wounds would just make me sexier. It's alright Brainworm, we all like you.
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Aug 16, 2014 22:32
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Aw man I start compiling all the posts in this thread into separate Word documents with the plan of laying them out with InDesign and I find someone has already beaten me to it.
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Aug 26, 2014 04:32
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thehomemaster posted:Aw man I start compiling all the posts in this thread into separate Word documents with the plan of laying them out with InDesign and I find someone has already beaten me to it. This is probably a good time to say I'm still working on it. The beginning of the semester's got me doing a bunch of other things, though, like organizing the least important parts of my office and coming up with porn-version titles for the books closest to my desk.
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Aug 26, 2014 15:44
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Read any James Baldwin, Brainworm? edit; He's one of my favorite writers, though I never hear his name anywhere, in regard to anything. Even the Civil Right's Movement. Brother_Walken fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 01:53
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Brother_Walken posted:Read any James Baldwin, Brainworm? As an undergrad, I was supposed to read Notes of a Native Son, but I either didn't or don't remember doing it. In fact, the only thing I remember about Baldwin is his criticism, where he burns everybody: James Baldwin posted:Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts--and depressed that he has done so little with them. James Baldwin posted:[Harriet Beecher Stowe] was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer. James Baldwin posted:Below the surface of [Native Son] there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. And so on. As if that doesn't make him seem prickly enough, bottomless well of free-floating aggression and White Negro author Norman Mailer liked him. That, sadly, is likely complicated enough to keep Baldwin out of most undergraduate classes.
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Aug 29, 2014 15:53
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This thread is so wonderful. Brainworm - if you're still around, could I send you an email and pick your brain about a couple things related to grad admissions? I'm in the middle of applying right now and there's a few questions I could use some help on. Thanks
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Nov 13, 2014 02:43
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Circlewave posted:This thread is so wonderful. Brainworm - if you're still around, could I send you an email and pick your brain about a couple things related to grad admissions? I'm in the middle of applying right now and there's a few questions I could use some help on. Thanks Sure thing. I'll PM you with an email address.
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Nov 19, 2014 16:53
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Other than Lunar Park, have there been any other Hamlet rewritings that you found to be good? There's Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, but I can't quite think of any others off the top of my head. Also, in regards to Lunar Park, I thought that the fact that Ellis made the work seem so personal was interesting...made me wonder why he chose to rewrite Hamlet, especially since in my opinion his previous works weren't all that overtly Shakespearean. Akarshi fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Nov 21, 2014 |
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Nov 21, 2014 21:26
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Do you ever actually check sources on "Works Cited" pages? I ask because I've had some professors demand absolutely ridiculous amounts of sources (20/30+) for say a 14-page undergrad paper and have thus sometimes completely fabricated sources in the past that sounded professional (usually journal sources) to pad my bibliography. I haven't been caught yet so I wonder whether any English professor actually do check sources. I hate it when there's a mandatory source requirement. It seems a little pedantic, especially when I only use seven or eight in the actual paper.
Captain Mog fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Nov 22, 2014 |
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Nov 22, 2014 20:45
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Captain Mog posted:Do you ever actually check sources on "Works Cited" pages? I ask because I've had some professors demand absolutely ridiculous amounts of sources (20/30+) for say a 14-page undergrad paper and have thus sometimes completely fabricated sources in the past that sounded professional (usually journal sources) to pad my bibliography. I haven't been caught yet so I wonder whether any English professor actually do check sources. I hate it when there's a mandatory source requirement. It seems a little pedantic, especially when I only use seven or eight in the actual paper. This really depends on what field you are in, but it would be very weird to me if I wasn't citing ~2 papers/page just in order to do a good job.
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Nov 22, 2014 22:58
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semicolonsrock posted:This really depends on what field you are in, but it would be very weird to me if I wasn't citing ~2 papers/page just in order to do a good job. Citing - and using - more sources is a great way to turn a middling paper (or even a good paper) into a great paper. If you're only using four or five sources you're basically writing a book report. If you're using seven or eight sources you're probably saying: here's a source that says something, here're some people that disagree with that source, and the disagreers are right. That can be a good paper, but it gets even better if you can layer on another piece of the discussion. Here's a source, here's one interpretation, here's another interpretation, here's some criticism of each interpretation, here's where I think that one/both interpretation is right and why, and here's the nuanced view of the source that I take from that. Have three sources for each of those points and you can easily get to 15-20 sources without any trouble. But yeah, as semicolonsrock said, part of that depends on the field and how much development of each source you're doing.
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Nov 24, 2014 20:03
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Akarshi posted:Other than Lunar Park, have there been any other Hamlet rewritings that you found to be good? There's Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, but I can't quite think of any others off the top of my head. It depends on what you call a "rewrite." Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Atwood's "Gertrude Talks Back," and Lisa Klein's Ophelia all work through Hamlet from the perspectives of other characters (more or less) and are at least clever if not outright good. They're not full-scale rewritings the way Lunar Park is, though. On that end -- the "comprehensive rewrite that explicitly invites comparisons to Hamlet" end -- you've got Mill on the Floss, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Melville's Pierre, and Dickens's Great Expectations. Of those, Pierre is in dialogue with Lunar Park in ways that I'd love to ask Ellis about. The eponymous Pierre is the same kind of crashing, hallucinating, sexually confused writer as Ellis's, in a community of crazies like Ellis's, and so on. And the most famous review of Pierre was headlined something like "Herman Melville Crazy." So the similarities between the books go pretty deep.
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Dec 6, 2014 21:51
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Captain Mog posted:Do you ever actually check sources on "Works Cited" pages? I ask because I've had some professors demand absolutely ridiculous amounts of sources (20/30+) for say a 14-page undergrad paper and have thus sometimes completely fabricated sources in the past that sounded professional (usually journal sources) to pad my bibliography. I haven't been caught yet so I wonder whether any English professor actually do check sources. I hate it when there's a mandatory source requirement. It seems a little pedantic, especially when I only use seven or eight in the actual paper. I can't get behind fabricating sources -- that's what tanked Lehrer's career -- but I also think the source requirements you're talking about are generally bad teaching. More on that in a moment. I spot check sources. It's easy to check against that, copy-and-paste style plagiarism, and the like with a shell script (run "strings", pipe the output to Google through a browser like lynx, and generate a list of pages that produce string-literal hits). That'll indicate whether a source exists and sniff out other bullshit, too (like pulling primary source quotes from a secondary source like Wikipedia). But I can understand not checking sources, sort of. Checking lots of sources manually uses time better spent on other things. When that's stacked up against numbered source requirements, though, the situation smells a bit more like lazy teaching or incompetence. Here's what I mean: Good source use is really about discerning the prevailing lines of thought about a particular issue -- you know "critics have long considered Hamlet the greatest of Shakespeare's works, but for a variety of ever-changing and often baffling reasons..." And there, source quality and source framing matter more than the number of sources somebody consults, which I'm tempted to say is irrelevant. So when I evaluate source use, it's about that kind of engagement. That's hard to write into the minutia of assignment requirements, but easy to demonstrate with models of successful writing. And that's enough. Good assignments show students what the project should aspire to in order to be good, not what it's required to do in order to pass. I mean, holy poo poo. If the discussion I'm framing is "here is what you need to do," instead of "here's what something great does," I don't know how I'd reasonably expect anything other than mediocrity. Anyway. Numbered source requirements also encourage (if not reward) interpretive idiocy. You know: "Hamlet is [whatever], and here's an avalanche of supporting evidence [source 1, source 2, source 3...]." After all, that's the easiest way to use a lot of sources, and the job frankly gets easier the more agreed-upon (and therefore useless) the supported claim happens to be. Put differently, the whole point of writing is insight. And source-heavy claim/support writing, like most students are trained to do in High School and most colleges ("here's what I think and here's evidence in the form of sources") emphasizes something like the opposite -- after all, insight is really about either constructive disagreement or perceptive extension of a useful idea, both of which require a specific use of sources rather than a specific number. But if that's the road you choose to go down as an instructor, I guess that's fine. But you ought actually check sources; otherwise you're not only allowing academic dishonesty, but sending the message that academic honesty isn't important enough to actually police.
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Dec 6, 2014 22:42
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Also, thanks for the avatar to whoever did it. Consider Duneolanus, for he was once as handsome and as tall as you.
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Dec 6, 2014 22:48
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My university relies on a paid Turnitin license for copy-and-paste style plagiarism, and a faculty member was so frustrated with it not catching what seemed to her obvious plagiarism (really jargon-heavy turns of phrase from English language learners) that she asked me to look into it. I hadn't thought about Turnitin before that, other than as something charging too much for the script functionality you described above (with the extra sauce of maintaining in its database anything that it's checked over, which gives it a little more power as well as allowing them to make sketchily ethical profits off of student work). So I'm only now aware that they also sell a service to students, allowing them to check their paper against the system without turning it in, so that they can abuse a thesaurus or whatever until it returns a negative result. For the resulting word-salad in the specific, very short paper I was looking at, I'd hope the failure to produce readable English alone would be enough to fail the student, without resorting to plagiarism charges, but apparently that's not quite the case. (This was a sophomore level literature class, not a remedial ESL type thing).
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Dec 6, 2014 23:03
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Stagger_Lee posted:[...] So I'm only now aware that they also sell a service to students, allowing them to check their paper against the system without turning it in, so that they can abuse a thesaurus or whatever until it returns a negative result.[...] I never thought of Turnitin as other than opportunistic, but that's just skeezy. But Turnitin is just one example of something I'm noticing more and more often: educational software sucks. Take course management systems. The open-source ones (e.g. Moodle) are feature-limited and have crackrock UIs -- I mean, that's what you get with OSS unless someone's willing to pay for development. But how is Blackboard the industry leader? Girlfriend's PhD program uses it, and while it's more polished-looking than it was seven or eight years ago (when I used it in my grad. program), it still has the design sensibility of a Chinese GPS. And I honestly don't understand most of the features: a calendar that doesn't sync with anything? Check. A messaging application that doesn't send messages to phones, tablets, or desktop clients? Included. An iPad app that lets you customize the colors of each course title but not take quizzes? Also there. And it's the same situation with everything from Banner to 25Live. Banner? I hope someone in your Registrar's office understands relational theory well enough to know when to run SELECT and when to run SELECT DISTINCT. And the first time I saw 25Live I thought I was looking at a CDE screenshot. Consider:  and  It's like the only colors they've ever seen are off of ruffled-front tuxedo shirts.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:20
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quote:sources This discussion reminds me of my rear end in a top hat political science professor who required 100 annotated sources for our term paper.
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Dec 9, 2014 09:08
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Blackboard is the industry leader because they have patents on the relevant software, so they don't actually have to do anything. Hell, the only reason Sakai and Moodle variants exist is that Blackboard has freely licensed the patents to open-source software.
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Dec 9, 2014 23:48
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Lore and piazza are doing some ok stuff!
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Dec 10, 2014 01:04
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I work in the registrar's office, no one has that ability. Honestly, not that many people in the IT department do, either. The awfulness of enterprise software for universities has been a hobby horse of mine for awhile. I think it comes down to pressure from two directions. 1) Universities never have people with the ability to evaluate software in positions to make purchasing decisions, which means software isn't being evaluated on any other measure than "what it says it will do". But this isn't quite enough, because I think a good solution, if it existed for anything, would be able to make a lot of headway through word of mouth. The 2) is that university enterprise software is almost always a really difficult problem to solve. You don't actually have that many clients, and every client has incredibly specific needs that inertia demands be met. Adapting to solve the individual problems posed by every institution's nonsense historical processes means elegance just isn't an option.
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Dec 10, 2014 03:32
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I'm part of a department workgroup building an online intro to comp course designed to run on a new LMS called Canvas. After years of Moodle (undergrad) and my institution's proprietary LMS that was apparently designed by a bunch of rogue geocities goblins (every semester of grad school up until now), I'm honestly surprised to encounter something that's not horrendous to look at, has some pretty diverse functionality, as well as a fairly low learning curve. I wasn't terribly fond of LMSes prior to starting this project, but I'm a little more optimistic about them not being absolute garbage.
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Dec 10, 2014 03:43
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At my school we switched over from Blackboard to Canvas last year, and use Piazza for certain class discussions. It's been great, Canvas is so much better than Blackboard. I didn't know of the existence of things worse than Blackboard though...
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Dec 10, 2014 03:55
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Stagger_Lee posted:I work in the registrar's office, no one has that ability. Honestly, not that many people in the IT department do, either. These software platforms are the best case of failing up. At my university we have so many freaking platforms, its ridiculous. D2l, gradesfirst, livetext, 2 different degree audit platforms... And its like "oh, your software is a piece of crap, user unfriendly mess? of course we will buy additional training and that tool that integrates it to the other piece of crap platform."
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Dec 10, 2014 06:21
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joepinetree posted:These software platforms are the best case of failing up. At my university we have so many freaking platforms, its ridiculous. D2l, gradesfirst, livetext, 2 different degree audit platforms... And its like "oh, your software is a piece of crap, user unfriendly mess? of course we will buy additional training and that tool that integrates it to the other piece of crap platform." Meanwhile: "Actually, we're going to have to cancel the search for [INSERT PARTICULAR GRIPE HERE]; we just don't have the funds to support that tenure line."
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Dec 10, 2014 15:45
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I'm reading a book titled "Learn to Write Badly", and the author charges social scientists with using "nominalizations" and "passivizations" to obscure agency and aggrandize their own work. To cite his example example, Freud moved quickly from using the verb "to press" to using the noun "repression" to send the message that his explanations were "properly scientific". The author argues that this trend causes social science to be written in less precise language -- questions about who/what is the actor in the repressing and what enables this repressing are dodged. It is also impossible to move from passive to active, whereas the reverse is quite possible. He goes on to liken these nominalizations and passivizations to the writing of advertisers and politicians. I wonder what is your take on this trend. I've always found it agonizing to read texts about psychology or economics that write about social phenomena using the passive voice, as if it is quite natural for things to be unfurling in such a mechanical way. Yet I can't honestly see the field moving away from this style of writing because it does lend that sense of scientific seriousness. I'm hardly an expert in writing or the social sciences though, so I'd like to hear what you think about all this.
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Jan 15, 2015 02:51
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Not Brainworm, but I did teach English comp for a bit. (And, because I feel like dropping experience for my e-cred like a prick, English was both my major and my MFA, and now the heart of my job.) Passive voice is the amateur move of the composition world. It's like quoting Bryan Adams lyrics to a girl you're trying to make out with in the back of your dad's minivan. It sounds good, there's a lot of room to maneuver, and maybe it even sometimes works, but if you try it on anyone that doesn't wear Uggs and isn't named Katelynn, you're going to wind up crying yourself to sleep. The real pros moved onto something a lot better. Everyone's written a lovely essay draped in passive voice, and pretty much for the same basic reasons everyone goes through a phase where they talk in Twitter-feed bursts like Robert Downey Jr.: because they've seen successful people do it, and they think it's the way to be taken seriously. The thing to remember is that most people aren't Tony Stark and most good scientists aren't good writers. The things that make good scientists and the things that make good writers are two entirely different skill-sets, and they don't tend to overlap in higher education, except in those classes everyone goes to either blazed as gently caress or painfully hung over (notably WAC courses). By the time you're actually aware enough of your field to add to the conversation in it, you've probably forgotten the fundamentals of good conversation altogether and you're instead relying on your own field-specific models. You look at someone who got something published in a prestigious journal, see that he or she used some pretty ropey passive voice, and you string together your own writing using similar braid. Then, because it copies a popular piece, your article gets accepted. You get drunk and order pizza and celebrate because your efforts (and maybe your entire education) feels vindicated. It worked. So your next piece, you write it the same way. And so does the next guy. It's a perpetuation of an old (but effective) approach. Passive voice has it's place--it's like Neo's bullet-time for politicians, and really can be kind of a marvel, watching those dickbarns linguistically juke n jive--but you're right. It's agonizing to read. It's a side effect of particular institutions that try to act as cameras, and which value (even forced) objectivity above good writing. But for what it's worth, I think it may be on the way out. I still use it in my field (I write tech manuals for the military, and they have a certain passive tone that's not so much a fundamental as it is a commandment), but for all of my undergraduate and graduate education, almost every one of my teachers said that passive was a bad way to write. I tend to agree with them. And, probably, so will the next wave of editors, publishers, and readers. They've wised up to Bryan Adams. Now its all about Drake. Asbury fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Jan 15, 2015 |
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Jan 15, 2015 04:57
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I'm in my second semester of a linguistics PhD; what do you think linguists consistently fail to "get" about the study of literature? There was an interesting exchange in my statistics for linguistics course last semester. It started when the professor said he wasn't sure how you could say interesting things about language without generalizing (which can be greatly aided by statistical analyses). I name dropped Haj Ross, who is indeed interested in the linguistics of the particular rather than only the generalized. I made a comparison to literary criticism, which at times seeks to explain why a single author invoked a specific concept in a particular passage - i.e., an individual instance, not something generalized or analyzable via statistics. (I could easily be wrong that lit crit does this.) edit: confusing, left out word edit2: thanks, very interesting answer below Mortley fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Jan 21, 2015 |
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Jan 15, 2015 05:40
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3Romeo posted:But for what it's worth, I think it may be on the way out. I still use it in my field (I write tech manuals for the military, and they have a certain passive tone that's not so much a fundamental as it is a commandment), but for all of my undergraduate and graduate education, almost every one of my teachers said that passive was a bad way to write. I tend to agree with them. And, probably, so will the next wave of editors, publishers, and readers. They've wised up to Bryan Adams. Now its all about Drake. I don't know about that. I've seen it excoriated by writing teachers and complained about by WordPerfect and Word's autocorrect for 20+ years, and it was of course one of Strunk's bugaboos in his Elements of Style a century ago. But I haven't seen its prevalence fall in my lifetime; if anything, the opposite.
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Jan 15, 2015 17:45
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William Bear posted:I'm not sure if asking about the history of a rhetorical device falls under this thread's rules, so please correct me if it isn't. Brainworm posted:I dug around on this for a while, and the bottom line is that it's really, really difficult to find phrases by meaning rather than syntax.
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Jan 16, 2015 23:06
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i like nice words
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I'm reading Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style and there is a great bit in there about how, in an effort to stamp out misuse of the passive voice, a lot of style guides go a bit overboard. Overall the book is a fun read if you're into that sort of thing, which you should be if you're in this thread. I haven't even got to the bit on zombie rules yet (though I'm not sure if that's what he calls them) and remain all atingle at what it will contain.
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Jan 18, 2015 09:52
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Paladin posted:Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style
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Jan 18, 2015 21:08
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Anne Whateley posted:I happened across it in A Study in Scarlet (1886) today! I still bet we can get it back further; it's just impossible to search for. The bit about Heliocentrism?
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Jan 19, 2015 18:17
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FightingMongoose posted:The bit about Heliocentrism? I imagine so. "That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it."
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Jan 20, 2015 17:42
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Vegetable posted:I'm reading a book titled "Learn to Write Badly", and the author charges social scientists with using "nominalizations" and "passivizations" to obscure agency and aggrandize their own work. To cite his example example, Freud moved quickly from using the verb "to press" to using the noun "repression" to send the message that his explanations were "properly scientific". The author argues that this trend causes social science to be written in less precise language -- questions about who/what is the actor in the repressing and what enables this repressing are dodged. It is also impossible to move from passive to active, whereas the reverse is quite possible. He goes on to liken these nominalizations and passivizations to the writing of advertisers and politicians. I can't add much to this that 3romeo hasn't already laid out, except that passive constructions are useful when causation is complicated. You know: "war was waged" avoids naming an aggressor, and there are times a writer needs to make that dodge. That said, I often find strings of passive constructions offensively evasive and self-aggrandizing. Late nights, I suspect the culprit is the High School teacher's age-old prohibition of writing "I" in academic pieces. But when I don't understand something I blame it for everything.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:32
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Mortley posted:I'm in my second semester of a linguistics PhD; what do you think linguists consistently fail to "get" about the study of literature? This is a tough one, mostly because I don't know much about linguistics and interact with few linguists. I think the most important thing is that literary criticism defies meaningful generalization, at least in the sense that the tools a literary critic uses to make sense of relationships between texts are generally specific to those relationships. For instance, I might develop a specialized vocabulary and process of inquiry for comparing one Revenge Tragedy to another, or Hieronymo's monologues to Hamlet's. That makes sense, but it's also likely that the grammar and processes I use for those comparison make little sense in the context of some other literary relationship -- say, among the novels of Louisa May Alcott. And that the tools I use for one comparison are completely inappropriate for another doesn't keep me up at night. It's not a problem. That gets complicated because there are schools of literary criticism that pretend toward something like universal -- or at least widely-generalizable -- method. Or that at least end up taking that form when they're wielded by someone on a mission. And it's sometimes hard to make the distinction between a tool or process that is good and one that is generalizable to someone whose training leads them to prefer consistency of approach.
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Jan 20, 2015 23:53
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