College achieved
Feb. 1st, 2012 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI went to college. I missed a bus yet arrived there on time by whole numbers of seconds. I thought of a topic area for my dissertation (well, Doctor Who, and compare two stories) and teach only warned it might be hard to find relevant secondary sources compared to Shakespeare. Which I can live with. Can take theory and apply it my own self. Be smart thinking.
... my brain is no smart by this end of the day. I only just got back. How can it take until 4pm to get back after lessons finish at 1pm?
I picked up the new green thing that HE students are supposed to use to display their student cards, now there are rooms only HE students are supposed to be in. Green is annoying, Blue is for studying. I have both so I can secretly keep the blue on me.
I forgot to put any stories in my headphones and I left my phone at home.
Not my best day, but I turned up and contributed to lessons out loud, so I win.
Now I have to miss the pub so I can sleep. Sulk.
oh, thing: The Short Story lesson said we can bring short stories we like and we'll study them. What F&SF stories should I bring?
This teacher does the Modernism unit and started off the semester with a short story called My Oedipus Complex. I sort of strongly suspect I'm not going to like much of the reader. But I haven't looked yet.
I don't think I could persuade her that fanfic is for sharing with the class. But it would be fun trying.
Also the theory of what makes short stories a genre is not quite convincing me yet. Apparently it isn't length, because the boundaries are fuzzy. It is something about outsiders, both the characters being outsiders and the writers. Writers are struggling outsiders. And countries that are outsiders produce the best short stories. Like the USA in C19. Also a story has an epiphany. Or possibly lots of epiphanies, but there's a big one that is what the story is about, like a volta. This is different from novels because. Short stories are also frontier stories, where someone is stuck between two states and can either go forward or go back or possibly stay exactly where they are. Which makes short stories different. From all the other lengths. Loneliness and isolation are key themes. And stories are about a change of state from one thing to another. Characters move between states & will often fail to reach the other side.
And those things are the short story as a genre.
Unless I've misunderstood already.
We have to write a short story that fits these genre criteria.
So I want to find stories that are about resolving a technical problem or figuring out why a spaceship crashed or thinking of a good trick to stop a demon or zombie or vampire or, you know, all sorts of things that don't seem to be about outsider isolation loneliness at all. Except I'm pretty sure they would be once the teacher got hold of them.
Other things I learned today: We cannot do a dissertation on The Lord of the Rings. Because there are only so many dissertations on The Lord of the Rings that one human should have to live through, apparently.
There's other texts on the banned list, but it is secret. Except for, no doing the same thing over again.
And while we can do creative writing for our dissertation, the assessment criteria are all about the analytical side, so all we would really be doing is writing a text to analyse and then giving ourselves half as many words to analyse it in. It is difficult therefore to do any well at all.
There were other things but that was most of today.
... my brain is no smart by this end of the day. I only just got back. How can it take until 4pm to get back after lessons finish at 1pm?
I picked up the new green thing that HE students are supposed to use to display their student cards, now there are rooms only HE students are supposed to be in. Green is annoying, Blue is for studying. I have both so I can secretly keep the blue on me.
I forgot to put any stories in my headphones and I left my phone at home.
Not my best day, but I turned up and contributed to lessons out loud, so I win.
Now I have to miss the pub so I can sleep. Sulk.
oh, thing: The Short Story lesson said we can bring short stories we like and we'll study them. What F&SF stories should I bring?
This teacher does the Modernism unit and started off the semester with a short story called My Oedipus Complex. I sort of strongly suspect I'm not going to like much of the reader. But I haven't looked yet.
I don't think I could persuade her that fanfic is for sharing with the class. But it would be fun trying.
Also the theory of what makes short stories a genre is not quite convincing me yet. Apparently it isn't length, because the boundaries are fuzzy. It is something about outsiders, both the characters being outsiders and the writers. Writers are struggling outsiders. And countries that are outsiders produce the best short stories. Like the USA in C19. Also a story has an epiphany. Or possibly lots of epiphanies, but there's a big one that is what the story is about, like a volta. This is different from novels because. Short stories are also frontier stories, where someone is stuck between two states and can either go forward or go back or possibly stay exactly where they are. Which makes short stories different. From all the other lengths. Loneliness and isolation are key themes. And stories are about a change of state from one thing to another. Characters move between states & will often fail to reach the other side.
And those things are the short story as a genre.
Unless I've misunderstood already.
We have to write a short story that fits these genre criteria.
So I want to find stories that are about resolving a technical problem or figuring out why a spaceship crashed or thinking of a good trick to stop a demon or zombie or vampire or, you know, all sorts of things that don't seem to be about outsider isolation loneliness at all. Except I'm pretty sure they would be once the teacher got hold of them.
Other things I learned today: We cannot do a dissertation on The Lord of the Rings. Because there are only so many dissertations on The Lord of the Rings that one human should have to live through, apparently.
There's other texts on the banned list, but it is secret. Except for, no doing the same thing over again.
And while we can do creative writing for our dissertation, the assessment criteria are all about the analytical side, so all we would really be doing is writing a text to analyse and then giving ourselves half as many words to analyse it in. It is difficult therefore to do any well at all.
There were other things but that was most of today.