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I'm curious if you have a sense of how CompLit people are viewed in academia. I've heard tell that a lot of the other humanities kind of look down on them, which I think is strange given the shift towards interdisciplinarianism (is that a word?). I doubt your school has a CompLit department since it seems that only larger/older schools do, but I thought you know what the general atmosphere is.
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May 15, 2009 03:58
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Cemetry Gator posted:
Sorry to interject before Brainworm has a chance to respond, but I'm curious about this part of your argument. You said that the fact that Shylock is a Jew would never be overlooked and so he could never convert and lead a normal life. So why do you think that a.) Bassanio is willing to marry her if she is Jewish and that, as you said, is an unwashable taint, and b.) she is able to convert and marry and suddenly is accepted despite having been Jewish? Your argument also seems to be that Shakespeare was separate and beyond the opinions and beliefs of his audience in that he was able to view discrimination of Shylock as a Jew in a more modern way. Do you think that's true or am I reading you entirely incorrectly?
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Jun 4, 2009 02:22
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LactoseO.D.'d posted:Sorry if this has already been asked: I always thought it was because if a teacher said what they actually wanted - "Your paper should be as long as it needs to be to state and explore your topic/thesis." - they would get a huge amount of two page papers and piss off way more students when they get bad grades. I never had a professor who would significantly mark down for a paper that was under the page minimum if they felt I had properly done what I set out to do. And also, in my experience, the thought of communication in the business world being clear and concise is pretty funny.
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Jun 29, 2009 00:59
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PrinceofLowLight posted:You disagree with the idea that fictional characters exist in a world where minor details are usually put there intentionally in order to convey a certain message? Does this mean that you think that interpreting things in anything other than only their most literal sense means someone shows signs of schizophrenia? Edit: Or does it mean that you took too many undergrad-level lit courses where the professor entertained any and all textual interpretations from students without requiring sufficient thought and evidence to back them up? z0331 fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jul 1, 2009 |
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Jul 1, 2009 05:24
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Trakke posted:I'm asking him for help because, guess why - he wants to - hence this thread. What I"m more leaning towards is that I've never learned how to write a story before. I know they are loosely related to grammatically correct essays, but there are so many rules that appear to be broken when writing a story that I'm not used to. You are overthinking this and assuming that anytime an author starts writing they have some sort of encompassing point or purpose to their writing. This is sometimes true, but sometimes the only point is that they have a story they want to tell about a world and characters they want to explore. What Brainworm is trying to tell you (correct me if I'm wrong) is that to start, all you need to do is start with a prompt. That is, one or two sentences that set a scene. It could be as average as you waking up late for class. Then, you go from there - imagine what might happen and write about it. Brainworm's strategy is to think of the worst possible thing that might happen each time because that creates conflict and distress which are more interesting to read about. Which would you rather read about? "I woke up late late for class, struggled into my clothes and ran there. I arrived a couple minutes late but no one really noticed and my day continued as usual." or "I woke up late for class and smashed my eye into the corner of my dresser while hopping around putting my socks on. I couldn't open my eye very well so I accidentally hit someone on my bike on the way there. The person I hit was a key witness on his way to court to testify on the innocence of a man arrested for murdering and eating seventeen babies." I'd rather read the second one, myself. Anyway, my point is stop thinking about having some weighty purpose and just write a story you think seems interesting. The meaning flows from a good story, not the other way around.
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Sep 11, 2009 04:31
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I have a similar question that I keep starting to type up and then stop because I'm not sure how to word it. Basically I'm wondering if, within academia, what sort of movement there's been towards an internationalization of literature programs. That is, a de-dead white guy-ification of what people study. To give an example that may help explain what I mean, I graduated undergrad with an English degree and am now looking at graduate school for Japanese literature. I'm currently trying to write my statement of purpose, and one argument I had for why I was interested in Japanese lit. was that I felt it was grossly underappreciated in the west and that western students aren't exposed to Japanese - or East Asian in general - authors despite there being an enormous body of work over there. When I wrote it out, though, the thought occurred to me that I'm not sure if that's even correct. Is there really such a lack of study of this kind of literature, or is it just that the study of regional work is compartmentalized to each literature department? If that's the case, do you see a necessity or move towards less departmental insularity and greater exposure to each other's study and research? Is this the job of something like Comparative Literature or do you think there needs to be a change of how we organize literature departments in general (or maybe not?)? Hopefully that made sense. For some reason I was having trouble actually wording my question.
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Sep 30, 2009 01:35
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Thanks for the answer. I don't know how many other undergraduate programs operate, but mine had no non-anglo literature requirement. It based it's requirements on time periods of English literature and had a minority or post-colonial requirement, but that was basically something like Asian-American, African-American, etc. It also had a miscellaneous requirement that could be filled with a foreign language literature class, in translation or not. Would you see any value in universities adding requirements for non-English literature courses (either in translation or not)? So, for example, a student might have 2-3 required courses and could take a Russian literature course, a South American course, and an Asian literature course all taught by their respective departments. Or do you think this would only worsen already muddy GenEd requirements? (And perhaps piss off those foreign language departments by giving them an influx of English majors they may not be able to fit into their classes.) Edit: I think my thought process has basically gone from 'students studying literature should be exposed to works from non-Anglo cultures', to 'if we can barely solidify a canon of Anglo works how could we hope to throw in stuff from the rest of the world,' to 'there should still be an effort at greater exposure but hopefully not at the risk of just confusing everything even more'. z0331 fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Oct 1, 2009 |
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Oct 1, 2009 05:26
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Brainworm posted:The thing is, once you have an immediate future tense to use, you can't stop. It's so goddamn useful. That is a pretty great way of looking at it, but is it possible for someone not from the south to use it without sounding ridiculous?
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Jan 15, 2010 02:30
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I don't know how much exposure you have to other humanities, but does the same hold true for, for example, foreign literature PhDs? For example, I'm planning on doing Japanese Literature through a Japanese L&L department. In my mind I generally equate this with an English Literature degree except that it's in a different language. Do you have any idea if those kind of PhDs have greater luck in the job market or is it all pretty much the same?
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Feb 23, 2010 01:36
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I wasn't aware there still was an otaku fad. Even if there is I doubt it'll last for the next 7 years or so so I won't have to say goodbye to a job since I'll probably never get to say hello.
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Feb 23, 2010 04:59
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Thanks. I skimmed the MLA JIL 2008/09 report and it actually listed the number of JIL ads by discipline, stating Japanese had something like 35 ads in the foreign language edition. I'm not sure if I'm understanding that correctly, but to be honest it's a bit more than I would have expected. Although, it doesn't specifically say how many of those were TT positions, etc. I was also surprised at how many Comparative Lit-related ads there have been; around 200 each year for the past decade.
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Feb 25, 2010 04:01
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I know you don't do contemporary literature but since you probably work with people who do, I wanted to ask if you knew who the current authors are who seem to be the big ones. In the future I want to study the contemporary novel, but it made me think about how people go about choosing what to put effort into studying since so often it seems like an author's value isn't really discovered until years after their publication (perhaps it takes that long to figure out where to place them in the literature continuum?). Are there any authors now who seem destined for literature course syllabi everywhere?
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Jul 16, 2010 01:07
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Why is using what works 'despoiling'? No one starts from zero. Just because you may use things that other writers have used and build off them doesn't mean you're a terrible writer. In fact, Brainworm has said several times he thinks good works are those that communicate with past ones.
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Sep 2, 2010 02:22
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Maybe it's cause I'm not a writer, but I'd be pretty impressed if you could actually truly copy or take another writer's narrative style unless it's a really overly simplistic one. Instead I think you'd be doing what many writers do and what I think (maybe I'm wrong) Brainworm is saying - imitating/taking/stealing/using elements of a narrative style that you find effective or interesting and mixing them with things that come from you or from other styles to create a voice that you feel expresses what you want to say how you want to say it. Again, possibly because I'm not a writer, let alone a good one, but I can't imagine how you'd say to yourself 'I'm going to come up with a totally unique narrative voice!'. At the very least you'd be influenced by the things you've read in the past.
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Sep 2, 2010 03:36
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An rear end in a top hat?
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Nov 10, 2010 00:45
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Word 2007 has a citation generator also where you input various fields and it'll make it for you.
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Dec 5, 2010 10:13
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Brainworm posted:Waiting for the Barbarians is mind-numbingly well-crafted. It's a hard book to read, but tremendous. Sorry for the incredibly vague question, but is there any way you could expand on this a little? I read it somewhat recently and, while I enjoyed it, I remember having the distinct feeling that it's the kind of book that requires multiple readings to appreciate. (Of course, what good book isn't like that?) Also, what's your favorite Vonnegut? I just read Cat's Cradle and felt a little underwhelmed. I felt like it was a string of wonderful statements that encapsulate what it is to be human connected by boring characters and rather flat prose. To clarify, that was my first Vonnegut. I plan on giving him another try at some point and was wondering if you had an opinion on what to try. Edit: To add another question, are there any works you would recommend to read along with Waiting for Barbarians? z0331 fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Feb 23, 2011 |
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Feb 23, 2011 01:37
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Brainworm posted:Kindle Do you see a big future for e-reader devices within the academic humanities world? So far I know it's a little tougher for sciences/anything that uses diagrams since formatting gets a little weird on e-readers, but it seems like a natural trend for humanities to shift towards electronic texts. Would you be okay with a student citing an e-book edition for a paper, etc.? I'd love some sort of service where my Kindle could connect directly to journal databases and download them seamlessly.
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Jun 20, 2011 13:28
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Brainworm posted:In my mind, it's really a matter of whether a reader like the kindle brings something to the table that e.g. a laptop doesn't. I mean, I think it does, but I don't know whether I would have thought so as an undergrad. Now that you say that I think that's pretty true - I can see it catching on well for MA/PhD students who do more journal reading and would have use for a device that can hold all the papers they need to read. Undergraduates probably not so much. quote:But what I'd really like to see are databases like JSTOR licensing or using Amazon's Kindle store or similar to distribute articles. Or at least building kindle-friendly web pages. One can dream.  Also I'd like more robust note-writing features but I'm not sure how feasible this is for anything short of an iPad or similar device.
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Jun 22, 2011 14:32
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Do you happen to listen to This American Life? It had a show following a group of prison inmates as they rehearsed and performed the final act of Hamlet. It was kind of interesting since, as the narrator points out, these are people who actually have killed playing the role of a man trying to decide if he should kill someone so they have a rather unique take on the whole story.
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Jul 7, 2011 14:07
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