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enewbern's picture

Week 11

On the topic of the self designed course module for this course, I think it might be interesting to move bakwards in time. Not an entirely novel idea but maybe instead of focusing on something that is considered to be a work of literature if might be more interesting to see how something from a new genre of litterature might have come from. For example there has been a shocking amount of "vampire" novels and series that have come out over the last five years or so. I genre that was widely unexplored until recently. Where did this come from? Why did it come at all? What sort of links does it have with modern culture and ideas? What links does it provide to the pat progression of culture? I thint it could be interesting. Although a good deal of these novels are by no means brilliant works they all seem to have common themes and ideas and work towards a common end more or less effectively. It might me something a little more outside the box, or it might be an adventure into futility. Only implementing it could really be telling.

 I also really enjoyed Sorrows of an American, though I have to admit that much like the rest of the class I initially thought of the narrator as a female character and was very surprised to find out that she was in fact a he. I also found the mixture of unconscious thought and consciouness to be very interesting. By that I guess I mean that there is a great deal more conscious organized thought than there was in Leaves of Grass, but there is also a randomness of order. Chronological time doesn't really seem to pertain to how this book was organized because it jumps from a later entry into the father's diary to the narrators current time frame then back to the father's diary but to an even earlier time period within that time frame. It makes things a little more confused and jumbled, much like the initial impression of the unconscious thought.

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