One Student's blog

And another thing:

Genre is not the same as structure. Genres usually have a structure, though there is a certain amount of malleability in the structure for the particular works in a given genre: less for a sonnet than a novel, more for a comedy than a tragedy (and at one point does something stop being a novel and become something else which is novel-like? Difficult.) What distinguishes structure from genre? Do particular genres have a particular kind of content? No. What is there to a piece of writing besides structure and content?

Ok, got bogged down last time.

My overall topic is: how does humor function in Uncle Tom's Cabin? I'm not theorizing on the difference between characters in comedies and characters with comedic attributes in serious works. 

One principle of the theory of humor which I am constructing is that a work may be humorous in nature, or a work may be non-humorous ('serious', is too value-laden a term) but with comedic elements. (Likewise, there are tragic works and tragic elements in non-tragic works; adventure stories can have tragic and comedic elements without being either comic or tragic overall).

So, I'm reading "Get Out of Gaol Free, or: How to Read a Comic Plot" by John Bruns (Journal of Narrative Theory, v.35 no.1, Winter 2005, pg. 25-60).

OFMG, Melville basically tells us straight out what he's doing on goddamn page 4-5! Look:

"…meditation and water are wedded forever … Narcisuss, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."

And of course everyone drowns except Ishmael, whatever that means, though I suppose if I think about it then I'll just drown in Moby Dick myself. Scholarship as suicide, as another alternative to pistol and ball, heh.

I'm posting a bunch of what I'm going to call associative-sound poems here, now. I might refer to them later in order to make a point about Moby Dick and Picasso and Gertrude Stein and my hypertext collage (linked to in a previous entry), but I don't have time now. Such a tease, I know ; )

Cross-posted to my livejournal. Nothing to do with Moby Dick, but the sort of thing I blog about.

Speculative Fiction Writers Considered As High School Students.

http://granades.com/2007/07/25/sff-authors-as-hs-students/

Though I definitely wouldn't consider Bujold to be going in the romance direction, given how much time is spent on battles, politics, and mysteries. Character-driven, reall, and the thing with characters is that many of them are involved in romantic relationships. Also, as someone comments, both Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams were left out. Though I consider Pratchett to be more a satirist who uses fantasy as his vehicle.

See Minotaur

Or, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Minotaur

CHAPTER ONE

herm

the mutilation of the corpus which bore me

Livejournal entry, 11:26 pm 09/10/2007

I very quietly freaked out when I saw a preview of a show about transsexuals in America at the beginning of freshman year - I happened to be wearing a skirt, and I really wanted to get *out* of the skirt. And now I'm plowing through readings on trans/intersex issues in recent American history and googling all kinds of things, and I'm very quietly freaking out again. And I don't know why. My hypothesis is because I lack a vocabulary to describe my own gender identity, and this sort of thing gets it all stirred up. I suppose the best term is genderqueer, but … I guess I don’t know what I mean by that. I’m not transsexual. I don’t feel like my body is wrong, or that … I mean, I don’t think of myself as a woman, and I don’t like the word woman, but I certainly don’t think of myself as a man, either.