English 67

So this isn’t too academic a post, but I couldn’t resist with V for Vendetta still under discussion. Ick This link leads to an article about an auction for a book bound in the skin in one the Guy Fawkes conspirators. Seems like it would inflict quite the psychical wound to anyone who commiserated with [...]

I figured that rather than respond to Sean I’d open up a longer post on this reading. I thought it was cool that “Happiness After September 11” included a lot of familiar concepts that you wouldn’t typically expect to see in a formal essay.  I read it over Thanksgiving Break and stopped several times to [...]

When I started reading Indecision I expected it to be another novel with dystopian themes and ideas about terrorism. However, I found this book to be less about terror and more about our ignorance to its existence. It seems like the main character Dwight is immune to the terrorism around him. 9/11 is an event [...]

We have all been brought up in unique ways that shape our interests, and it is those subtle environmental distinctions that form how we interpret literature. “Deconstruction aims to remind us of the arbitrary and unstable nature of language by taking text apart.” This type of theoretical stance helps in weeding out the works that [...]

There has been some discussion about Baudrillard’s “Spirit . . .” as perhaps excusing terror; the idea has been floated that Baudrillard would have that America “asked for” 9/11. As I mentioned in class, I don’t think that reading is “wrong,” but that’s not how I’ve read him. He does say that it is was [...]

Baudrillard lays out a scary picture of terrorism in The Spirit of Terrorism. Terrorism is presented as something intangible and undetectable, something that can’t be stopped by force. Since 9/11 terrorism has taken on a new face. Everyday we are bombarded by ideas of terrorism in the media—from constant images of the twin towers falling [...]

John’s presentation definitely affected my reading of The Children of Men. I saw the movie first.  I saw it this summer and hated it.  But I love the novel.  I was pretty blown away by the two main themes I took out of just the first few pages–themes which remain significant throughout, in my opinion.  [...]

The subject of “race” plays an interesting and largely unacknowledged role in the novel Children of Men. The term gets used without explanation or explication, but runs like a thread throughout the narrative, and I think plays an unexpectedly central role in the novel (which is overtly centralized in the film – but deflected from [...]

Since the Omegas were grouped together and treated as gods among men they did form a very distinct clique. Like the book says the Omegas were the most studied and revered generation of all time. The intrigue was almost too great for society to handle all at once. I think the book “Children of Men,” [...]

The struggle for social control through economic and political manipulation has been a problem that all great civilizations have had to deal with. To gain a level of control sometimes the legitimacy of some regulations or policies have to exaggerated a little bit by those in power for the “benefit” of society. This is where [...]