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Ccs posted:I’m reading Phillip Pullman’s “The Secret Commonwealth” and so far it’s very good. He writes so clearly that it confuses a lot of fantasy fans into thinking his work is for children, but it was never intended to have any particular target age group. Listen man, I wrote a MA thesis on Harry Potter, and I'll still read stories from Wayside High from time to time because they are adorable and hilarious. It's totally okay to be an adult and still enjoy and appreciate art that's explicitly made for children.
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Dec 9, 2019 18:59
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chernobyl kinsman posted:*takes a long hard look at the academic job market* im gonna study gender roles in slytherin I wish it was that interesting. Eugene V. Dubstep posted:I'm gonna spend a bunch of money and 1-2 years of my life studying boy wizards, and if you think that's dumb that just proves you're a reactionary stemlord like my DAD Hey! It wasn't my dissertation. (That was on time travel fiction.)
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Dec 9, 2019 20:07
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chernobyl kinsman posted:so now that you’ve got your doctorate are the benefits at Starbucks as good as they say Better than the ones I received as an adjunct and GTA.
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Dec 9, 2019 20:54
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Strom Cuzewon posted:This seems rad - feel like hitting us with an effortpost? I'm probably gonna catch some well deserved flack for this, but I'd rather not right now because I'm working on the book.  Ccs posted:it’s just Phillip Pullman says in an interview he wrote his books for a general audience. Yeah, I'm just gonna call Pullman a liar here. chernobyl kinsman posted:shaemful that unis dont offer better packages to the adjuncts who slave all semester to teach Intro to Eragon Especially these days when the high schools aren't properly covering Star Wars like they should.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:58
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A human heart posted:it's insanely sick how academia has been thoroughly coopted by market forces so that literature departments now have to have courses like 'YA 101' or whatever I've never been a part of an English department that has offered more than the occasional YA-centric course. At my current school, one of the senior Ed faculty teaches a YA lit course like the one Doctor Faustine had to take, but like that course, it's just for Ed majors. I wrote that thesis at a conservative Catholic university where The Canon is still held dear, and an undergrad is lucky if they get to read something written in the last hundred years.
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Dec 10, 2019 00:45
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:I went to one of those for undergrad. I had a great time, but I'd never recommend it to anyone. I wasn't suggesting it was subversive, just pointing out that I wrote it at a school that wasn't basing any of its English curriculum on market forces.
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Dec 10, 2019 03:09
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Apologies for derailing the thread. I really was just backing up the point that nobody needs to pretend Pullman or w/e isn't for kids. I'm not gonna judge someone for digging atheist Narnia.Antivehicular posted:I'm reserving judgement on the Harry Potter MA thesis until I hear what it was actually about It was about how most magic in Potter is essentially a language art, that the education and ethical concerns around it are drawn largely from the rhetorical tradition, and this is all part of its didactic scheme of lessons about relationships. The central part looked at how the episode with Tom Riddle's diary embodies Booth's books-as-friends metaphor and argued that it was a significant didactic move for Rowling to invite her young readers to consider their ethical relationship with what they read.
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Dec 10, 2019 18:02
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chernobyl kinsman posted:nice. i learned two languages for my MA Cool. I only learned one.
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Dec 11, 2019 15:29
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:You don't have to read books written by assholes if you don't want to, even if people say they're good You should, though, because a lot of great books were written by huge assholes.
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Feb 7, 2020 15:46
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Clearly those people have just succumbed to the insidious lures of fascism lurking between the pages.
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Feb 7, 2020 16:16
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Black Panther, a "truly weird [and] wonderful sci-fi fantas[y]".
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Feb 7, 2020 17:32
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:which bits of fascist ideology do you agree with We should have more beautiful and inspiring public works.
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Feb 10, 2020 16:07
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I know, trap sprung and all, but I think thats a dude from Star Wars Nah, it clearly says, "This is me."
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Feb 11, 2020 17:19
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Mel Mudkiper posted:apparently William Gibson wrote a book about "what if Hillary won" and I dare any of you fuckers to tell me that sounds like a better book than "I hosed Hitler's wife and then time traveled" It doesn't sound better on its face, but the details make it worthwhile: Hillary won because some future sociopath intervened. He did so because he likes manipulating alternate timelines into forever wars. Hillary's victory brings the world to the cusp of a nuclear conflict. Only the emergence of an AI jumpstarted by different future people forestalls that war.
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Feb 13, 2020 18:43
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anilEhilated posted:IIRC it's a story about alternative timelines and Sci-fi AI that involves the 2016 election. Yeah, the election and world events it leads to are really just the backdrop to a technothriller about the emergence of AI with the assistance of the protagonists from The Peripheral. I just focused on it to explain how the novel isn't some #resistance fantasy. Antivehicular posted:The entire concept has the cloying smugness you see in reactionary SF sometimes of "oh, you imagined this alternate reality might be better? Well, it's actually worse than our lovely status quo, checkmate SFailures It's much more optimistic than that. What commentary it makes on the election is just that their timeline is still facing all the same existential crises as our own. chernobyl kinsman posted:that sounds terrible dude It's a disappointing followup to The Peripheral. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Feb 14, 2020 |
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Feb 14, 2020 01:56
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" I'd way rather read something bugfuck insane about Time SJWs making Vietnam invade the US, or sex pancake parasites, or whatever.
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Yeah, that does sound better than some future London snobs and a wunder AI.
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Feb 14, 2020 13:55
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Because they're trying to sell their books, and drawing a connection with popular, best-selling books is an effective marketing strategy.
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Oct 29, 2020 19:32
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This is a discussion forum. Questions will receive answers. Demonstrate some genre awareness. Now, obviously, these authors and writers don't find the comparisons as insulting as you think they should. If you listen to writers like Bob Salvatore, many genre writers don't see themselves as artists. They don't look at their writing as artistic expression so much as they look at it as the job they do to make a living. That doesn't mean they are not seriously-minded about their work. They understand that writing a work of genre fiction will invite comparisons, however shallow, to previous works. That is, after all, the basis for defining and establishing genres. A lot of them are probably quite happy to hear their work described as "X meets Y" because that's exactly what they set out to create. There are genre writers who speak out against this. Margaret Atwood is an example. And there are many works full of genre markers by *literary* authors that don't receive this treatment because the author does not publish and market their work as genre fiction. Consider Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, McCarthy's The Road, or Ballard's The Drowned World for examples.
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Oct 29, 2020 21:01
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