Plant blogging

It's wet, cold & snowing outside, but inside my aeschynanthus is blooming. The full delight is in the contrast: true for the literary as well as the horticultural voluptuary.

"Clockwork Orange" Links

Anthony Burgess wrote a reflection on A Clockwork Orange in 1986 which you may enjoy reading: it is titled "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

Now there is, as you all almost certainly have found out, a rash of Nadsat-English dictionaries on-line, such as this one. I didn't link to one earlier because Burgess meant for the novella to be read without one, & I remember how much I enjoyed in pre-internet days working things out for myself and sharing with friends. However, as Mr. King would say, tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis, so use the title link if you havn't found a translation page already....

On the Mid-Term

I love this Bizarro cartoon on the ever-more degraded state of language use!

A word about the mid-term essay project now well underway. The TAs are currently marking the first version of the essay and will return it to you by March 8th.

As you know, the objective of compulsory Writing Intensive Courses like ours is to provide an excellent opportunity for improved student writing ability. To that end, this first version of your essay is worth only five percent of the twenty percent that the Mid-Term represents in the ultimate course grade. Accordingly, your TAs have a mandate of marking to strict criteria for your greatest benefit.

Expect, then, this five percent grade to be an effective and accurate guidepost for you to improve your writing -- and, one hopes, your grade -- on the final version worth the remaining fifteen percent of the assignment grade.

So, for example, first versions which ignore the criteria set in the Mid-Term Topics -- say, failing to ground the essay in textual quotation, and using mere personal reflection instead following the instruction to argue -- can receive a first-version grade of less than 50%.

Study the first version carefully when it is returned to you, as it is a practical means of, for one, becoming a much better writer, and, for another, getting a significantly higher grade on your heavily-weighted final version.

Here's to good writing!

Why are These Models Scowling?

I am not sure exactly how this blog post is as relevant to our background understanding as it seems to be, but it is more than worth reading and doing the quiz.

"Bildungsroman"

There is a helpful webpage on bildungsroman -- 'novel of development' -- at the reliable online resource The Victorian Web at this link. In fact, I gave today's specific arrangement to assist your effective follow-up study of this important concept for the lecture approach to A Clockwork Orange.

The Victorian Web is a reliable internet resource in contrast to the Wikipedia website which is an un-reliable -- and, here, unacceptable -- internet resource for academic purposes.

A literary rephrasing of the term 'bildungsroman' (if my word 'development' is already not a re-phrasing of the German 'formation') could be "novel of apprenticeship": apprenticeship, i.e., to Life.)