BF2S Forums Ideas for Literature Project?

DonFck wrote:

Your post is off topic. Please try to talk about the topic at hand. {quote}

See? One line of text wins over a whole wall of e-masturbation.

And reading the posts instead of sitting on your self-righteous throne works wonders too.

Discussing literature and easily-readable short stories in a topic that asks for easy, quickly readable stories isn't off topic. Aussie took the nature of the discourse into the realms of the completely irrelevant and pointless.

What I do see is that typing one line of text certainly greases your pole-of-self-satisfaction just as well as a wall of text supposedly does for mine.

It just means your curriculum is more traditional, perhaps excessively so. As a student of the English language, you should of all people understand the role that the visual medium has played in shaping the English language in a social and academic context, or at least be open to its adoption. (Or not, I don't get you Arts degree people). In our study of the Crime Fiction genre, we looked at traditional drawing room and noir novels; noir films and even Stoppard's satirical play The Real Inspector Hound. I'm sure you have your reservations about an English curriculum with intertextuality as one theme, but like you said, since you know nothing factual about our English course and can only make assumptions, then you are in no position to criticise. Again as an English scholar, you should know that.

Now, if all you meant was 'get moving, it isn't that hard', then I believe we have misunderstood one another. However, and this can't be the first time it has been said to you, your self righteous tone does make it difficult for others to interpret your comments.

And for Jenspm's sake, look into texts such as War of the Worlds, 1984 and Brave New World for a dystopic view of the future.

In my experience literature types prefer to look backward than forward, anything sci-fi/futuristic/fantasy gets marked down.
Orwell and a few others just about get through, not much else.

Hrm, what about reading and comparing 1984 and Animal Farm?

They both seem interesting and comparable and Orwell seems like one of those "must read sometime in your life" authors.


Or is all of this far too complex for a mere High School student?

ok, 1984 (George Orwell), Farenheit 451 (Ray Vonnegut, Jr.), Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein)

Compare and contrast the futures hypothosized by these authors in regards to the political and sociological arenas.


EDIT:  Science fiction allows authors to play with extremes of human nature that no other genre can, and try to warn of possible outcomes.  They can allow us to think about topics that, in a modern setting, may be taboo or too close for us to observe objectively.  And some authors can get pretty scarily accurate.

Last edited by imortal (2009-07-13 13:31:52)

Uzique wrote:

imortal wrote:

ok, 1984 (George Orwell), Farenheit 451 (Ray Vonnegut, Jr.), Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein)

Compare and contrast the futures hypothosized by these authors in regards to the political and sociological arenas.


EDIT:  Science fiction allows authors to play with extremes of human nature that no other genre can, and try to warn of possible outcomes.  They can allow us to think about topics that, in a modern setting, may be taboo or too close for us to observe objectively.  And some authors can get pretty scarily accurate.

Swap out Starship Troopers for Brave New World (some more academically credible sci-fi, of sorts) and you'll have yourself a good thesis.

Looks very interesting. I'm not at all a fan of Sci-Fi (I have read very little of it, though, so I don't have a lot to base this on), but I'll give this a try. I'll probably read one of them and see if I like it enough to carry on with the other two. Any one of them I should read first, to get an idea of the genre and how the others will be?


Thanks guys

Fahrenheit 451 was written by Ray Bradbury, not Ray Vonnegut (you were combining Ray Bradbury and Kirk Vonnegut, I presume.)

Since we're now talking sci-fi, what about "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick?

And no, I haven't read the book. Yes, I saw Blade Runner. Yes, I'm a lazy reader and a film fanatic.

Flaming_Maniac wrote:

Haven't read Starship Troopers. Don't read 1984 first. Shit sci fi if I ever read any.

I would read The Worthing Saga in there somewhere instead/as well, though it doesn't fit so obviously into the thesis it definitely fits.

Uzique I'll paypal you $10 if you can make it through the next lit/poetry thread with <5 blatant name drops. User title counts.

I'm not contrivedly trying to name-drop anything or anyone; I'm only giving advice pertinent to Jen's needs and questions.

What the fuck do you want me to do, recommend a high-school student to read some esoteric academics-only text so that he can showoff to his teacher what an irrelevant smartarse he is? It's for high-school English class - Orwell, Huxley and Vonnegut are 'high-brow' compared to the pointless majority of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings projects that will no doubt be shat out by his classmates. I don't really need to prove or show off anything to you, do I? You're an absolute rastaquouere, a complete pseudo, and everyone that knows it. Self-admiring and precocious.

Don't try War and Peace. I gave up after a few chapters. lol

Jenspm wrote:

Gawwad wrote:

Learn to express your thoughts in less than 1000 words.

It takes what? 15 seconds to read?

Go!

Factually disprove what you said? How can I factually prove something about an education system I am not involved in? If your English assignments involve cross-references to TV and other insipid, worthless mediums, then I can only draw assumptive conclusions about the overall quality of the course. Factually, my own personal experience of my own countries' English curriculum leads me to believe that, by all purposes, it is more intensive and more geared towards actual academic analysis, rather than poor 'modern media'-type study.

As I see it, my initial contribution to this thread was stating, to put it simply, that a literature project involving 3-4 books is not a mammoth task. Yes, hypothetically it all depends on what you read and choose to study - but read the tone and purpose of his post - he clearly needs a quick solution to complete an assignment that he has neglected for several months (perhaps the deadline-scheduling shows that, yes, someone could compare the works of Homer to Virgil with a Marxist interpretation, if they did so care). The answer I provided was to get on with it, and to remember that an 'open' literature project could basically boil down to comparing 4 short-stories, if he wanted to minimize the amount of time he would have to devote to reading and research. I provided a list of authors that each have literary oeuvres that are ripe with material to discuss and analyse, all in the more digestable format of short stories and prose. Despite my incredulous and dismissive tone, I don't think my posts "aren't worth it", so you can kindly dismiss and ignore the butthurt-ego comments from our local resident no-lifer.

Aussie, are you trying to make my laugh with your "Shakespeare made up words" statement? There's a difference between pioneering thousands of new words for the English vocabulary, and misspelling a commonly used and simple word in a poor mistake. Absolutely dire attempt at arguing, I must say. Also, if you weren't butthurt and had your actual reading-glasses on, you would see that my posts contain more than paragraph-upon-paragraph of "Lolol you can't speel" comments. It was a sarcastic opening comment, nothing more, drop your personal agenda and go back to the murky swampland that you more suitably inhabit.

Last edited by Gawwad (2009-07-14 09:18:11)

DrunkFace wrote:

Uzique wrote:

I argue that one could write 20,000 words on 3-4 short modernist stories by the above-listed authors.

And 19,000 of those words would be useless bunk.

Writing concise, informative and to the point is a much more useful skill then blabbering on about waffle.

If you're considering Animal farm... Might I propose an alternative to the novel, or even as a secondary source.

Also if you are considering doing as imortal suggests.

Compare and contrast the futures hypothosized by these authors in regards to the political and sociological arenas.

Blade Runner is something worth looking into.

I don't think the idea of a 20,000 word academic essay is to essentially write 1,000 words of mark-able material, and then fill the rest out with "blabbering waffle". One could write 20,000 words of decent and to-the-point material-- and that was my point: that short books don't necessarily have a shortage of things to say about them - it wasn't a passing comment on my writing style I've done more than my fair share of concise 1,000-2,500 word essays, almost all of which were marked 1:1, thank ye very much!

Last edited by Uzique (2009-07-14 09:47:19)

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

Flaming_Maniac wrote:

Haven't read Starship Troopers. Don't read 1984 first. Shit sci fi if I ever read any.

I would read The Worthing Saga in there somewhere instead/as well, though it doesn't fit so obviously into the thesis it definitely fits.

Uzique I'll paypal you $10 if you can make it through the next lit/poetry thread with <5 blatant name drops. User title counts.

1984 is sci-fi?  I don't know if you could call it shit...elementary maybe, but I've read far shittier books (and far shittier sci-fi, unfortunately).

Don't worry, Ken. Flaming is such an erudite little high-school kid that he can easily look down upon the works of meagre and struggling authors such as George Orwell. 1984? Poor sci-fi, doesn't compare to Hitchhiker's Guide. Animal Farm? What is that, a children's nursery tale? Puh-leez. Flaming only accepts and reads the most elite and underground of contemporary post-modernist literature.