I have some serious concerns about one of the books I have to read this semester, and by extension the essay that is related to it, and by further extension the entire subject.
The book, Bliss, is written by someone who is not a good writer. Technically, he uses contractions in prose when it can be confusing (like ‘he’d’, which is more confusing when the author bounces between past and present tense); he starts a new section of text with ‘he’ or ‘she’ which has followed on from a conversation featuring multiple speakers, and then the author doesn’t identify who this ‘he’ or ‘she’ is for several paragraphs (so I have no idea who is doing what, and because he’s not a good writer, I don’t care who is doing it either). The author also loves his adverbs after dialogue… he said menacingly, she said frightfully. He slips into 2nd person perspective, but doesn’t do it enough to make it seem as though it’s on purpose, but more likely that he just didn’t know any better. And the most severe error is that he tells the reader what the character is like without ever showing us what they are like. And then he never tells us how the character reacts or feels about whatever he’s describing. So, we are told that a girl is always pursued by lots of guys, but we never see the guys pursuing her nor do we find out how she feels about that, what the guys are like, or anything of interest other than she’s pursued by lots of guys. (I’ll also mention that a 17 year old who wants to go into business is dealing drugs on the side and frequently gets his 15 year old sister to give him a blow job so that he’ll give her weed - so the whole family is fucked up to such an extreme that it lost its credibility just 10 pages in).
It’s sloppy, it’s lazy, and worse still it won the Miles Franklin Award. I had to read My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin for this same subject, and hated it. I hate Bliss as well.
I have to do an essay on Bliss, which isn’t easy, because I am forced to skip over sections due to sheer boredom. It’s 400 pages of trash. I was willing to give up on page 20, but can’t. So, my essay could very well be doomed.
This subject as well could be doomed. The lecturer has chosen 2 books which I hate, and which she thinks are brilliant, so clearly we’re not seeing eye-to-eye. She also has had us do an analytical skills presentation and report worth 50%, which has nothing to do with our literature subject, and should be a 1st year subject, not a 3rd year subject. If someone doesn’t understand analytical skills by their very last semester at uni, they should have failed a long time ago. She’s also grading us as if we were education students, whereas I’m a linguistics student doing a literature subject. Go figure.
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2 comments:
Do what I did in high school. When I hated a book and had to do an analytical piece on it, I would go through it with a fine tooth comb and explain - with proof - why it is the worst piece of literature ever composed. If you can prove it, you'll get a good mark. Case in point: The English Patient. My teacher loved it, I thought it sucked BIG TIME! (Think Elaine from Seinfeld!) I turned my distaste for it into a beautifully written essay filled with Ondaatje's flaws. Just brilliant!
Hm, I see a lot of the same editing marks I would have made reading this. Once again, I see why we work well for each other as editors.
(Which leads me to feel more guilty because I'm totally slacking in my editing duties right now...)
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