Does reading great books make you a better person?

Does reading great books make you a better person?

How "Ghost World" made me brave

How "Ghost World" made me brave

End of Semester

Thanks everyone for a great semester!  As I told you all in class, I was very impressed with the breadth of your research and depth of your analysis.  These are two things that put a smile on the face of an old English major and make a class like ours insightful and enjoyable.  Keep practicing your writing and keep reading, slowly, critically, with an eye to best practices.  And while everything a culture produces by way of discourse and ideology will reward thoughtful analysis, popular genre fiction will always provide insight into a culture's primary concerns, deepest fears, greatest, most widely considered mysteries.  All the best.

"Scream 4": More meta than ever! And almost as much fun

"Scream 4": More meta than ever! And almost as much fun

Reading Exercise for Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train"

Have these lists ready for class discussion:

1) First make a list of the elements of the story that are directly filmable, i.e. action, setting, dialogue, etc.

2) Then make a list of those elements of the story that are indirectly filmable, i.e. internal monologue, emotional or psychological states, subjective perceptions, elements such as Leon's fascination with the city, that require some kind of filmic interpretation or projection.

3) Make a list of all the literary devices and genre elements you observe in the narrative.  This means symbolism and characterization (i.e. how a character is described in the text) along with all the narrative tropes you have come to associate with the horror story: violence, suspense, mystery, supernatural occurrences, uncanny moments, Freudian elements, etc.