#aplit18research

[sophieaplang-blog]

Who thought the cave would come back?

Re-reading my criticisms I noticed that one of the dudes that wrote one was obsessed with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.  Like dude chill.  I went back to my trusty wnb (always there for you) and looked over my notes.  Since I did that I can say for sure that I have concluded two things. 1. My handwriting is getting progressively worse and 2. Fahrenheit 451 is a lot like Allegory of the Cave???  Shocked I didn’t notice the parallels sooner but wow.  Kinda wishing that I could be writing about my secondary sources right now because I could go ham on that paper.  I am going to bottle my sudden excitement about writing this, take a few notes on the main points I want to talk about later. And go to bed?

[kennedy-christl]

Walking....Debatable(R&W #3)

I hate annotating and it’s not even funny. I get that its a huge part of the process, but keep finishing part after part of this project and I feel like it's never going to end. I know that this assignment isn’t meant to be a walk in the park, but I’m getting frustrated with almost everything. Trying to connect my criticisms to one another, how they relate to Achebe’s writing, and what I’m getting from the novel itself. I just feel like I’m on overload, and I literally don’t want to deal with it anymore. But, I plan on walking so….guess I better get back to my paper.

Btw, the flute is supposed to represent my diploma.

[graciew18]

Writing My Paper

AHHHH PROJECT DUE TOMORROW LESS THAN 24 HOURS TO GO! 

For this project my research at first was hard. I wrote in an earlier post that I struggled at the OU library. My lucked changed when one of my teachers actually printed me out three sources. I ended up using at least one or two of those. Writing this project hasn’t been too bad. I had some struggles with my lit review, but I was able to smooth out the rough edges. My annotations and explications weren’t too bad to write either, hope I did them right. I found some good background sources that influenced my author, so that wasn’t too bad. 

Currently I am trying to write my general introduction. This is kinda hard. I started out pretty good with it but now I’m struggling to write more and go into depth with my thinking. To be completely honest I’m not really sure if I’m even doing it correctly, but guess we will see.

This project was horrible and stressful. I’m not even done yet, but almost. The more I think about it though, the more grateful I am to have done this project. It’s gonna feel so good when I turn it in. I think this project definitely helped me prepare for what college will be like next year. I even kinda liked exploring my thinking on this book and review it under a critical lens. Can’t say I loved it and I didn’t stress over it every single day, but it’s cool to write and explore your thinking and read other people’s tumblr blogs to see their thinking. I love our community of writers, our tribe that reads. It’s so interesting to see what everyone has to say and their thinking process.

Ok I need to get back to my general intro so peace out for now.

[kennedy-christl]

Research & Writing #2

So not going to lie, I’m getting really frustrated with the General Introduction. I know it might seem weird, but there’s just so much going on between my novel, Things Fall Apart, and what I’m seeing in my criticism. At first I was having a really hard time as to rather I should or shouldn’t focus on a few topics. But as I did my writing, I realised that many of the topics im seeing in Achebe and my criticisms writing, often intertwine of relate to one another.    

[kennedy-christl]

Research & Writing #1

During my research, I found that my criticism had a lot more to offer than what I expected. Rhona Cobham opened up debates to several topics I didn’t even think of when reading the book. While she did talk about topics within the novel, she talked about how readers may have different points of view, and that WHO is reading the novel affects what they get from it. And that if a reader is from let’s say the U.S., the U.K., or even Nigeria, it will greatly impact how the preserve the novel.

https://www.amherst.edu/news/specialevents/commencement/speeches_multimedia/2015/senior-assembly

[hearts4hartrick]

Research!

So I’ve realized finding background sources it hard like I know the influences but they’re suppose to vary. So what I’ve got it Fitzgerald lived on the Riviera when he was writing the book. This was the setting too. So I want to work with that. There was also Zelda his wife who had mental illness and one main character (Nicole) also has mental illness, but I don’t know what to do for that. And I think for the last one I would do the war or the twenties because they are “written” into the novel but I really don’t know what to do for this...

[wildmooseshark-blog]

This Influenced Sheep

Doing some research on the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick, I’ve learned that he does have some simple but significant influences. 

Primarily, Dick himself claims that without the book Fear, written by L. Ron Hubbard in 1940, “I would never have come up with what I do.” Fear is a horror novel generally written on the concept of fake reality. In the novel, the protagonist forgets what happened during part of his day, and he goes on  slowly noticing and recognizing demons and horror elements in the world around him. Being a non-believer in spiritual things, the protagonist dismisses the scary things he encounters until he learns that during the time when he forgot what he did, he had actually murdered his own wife. This type of material, especially during a less horror-centric time like the 1950′s, seems like it would have a profound effect on work of Philip K. Dick, and it is recognizable in his novel that I read.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, protagonist Rick Deckard at one point is arrested by a fake police officer which then takes Deckard in for questioning at a fake police station. During his arrest, both Deckard and the reader are clueless as to why the police officer doesn’t know Deckard, a police agent himself, and doesn’t know the station Deckard works out of. In addition to that, Dick also develops this false reality of the fake police officer/station by further implementing a simulated calling system for Rick Deckard’s free call which is then redirected to internal numbers. All of this is done by the escaped androids running the station to make Deckard question his own sanity, similarly to the protagonist of Fear.

[wildmooseshark-blog]

This Animal Sheep

The first long criticism that I have completed was quite the enlightening experience. “Speciesism and species being in Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?”, written by Sherryl Vint introduced to me a perspective on the book that I had not even thought of for a second: the fight for animal rights.

The author makes many extreme points about the book, how the main character is disconnected from nature due to his unhealthy relationship with animals, how the entire human perspective on animals both in the book and real life is unsafe, and how the connections and similarities between the human interpretation of androids and animals ultimately reduces our humanity.

She argues her points very effectively, and often supplements her logic with a Marxist lens (that is again, effectively argued), however I went through the entire paper disagreeing with the core principle upon which she was arguing: animals are worth more than a commodity. Sure, there are pets that humans grow close to, but in the current state of society, humans would be nowhere near as successful as we are if we did not find a way to exploit the other meaty creatures of this world for sustenance and materials, and that stays true in the book too, from what I can tell. After blaming humanity for its loss of humanity, Vint never answered an important question (in my opinion), “What more can we do?”

Ultimately, the read was very informative and well written with legitimate points, I just personally had some qualms with it.