Hi,
Summer reading...what came immediately to mind was as a precocious 4th grader
I read A Tree grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith...was the first time I saw a
swear word in print heh heh...
But onto other more science-fictional pursuits...sometimes people slap on the
label SCI FI when they come across something they do not understand, and for
me my slapping of the label has been in the realm of critical
theory...yesterday I attended my independent study for my Octavia Butler
research project and I asked a very general question about the whole spectrum
of literary criticism and discovered from my mentoring prof that there was a
time when critical theory was such that the works that the theories were to
be applied to became secondary if not unneeded in order to apply a theory of
criticism??? That the critical field became a genre in itself to a degree by
which you studied theory simple pure theory and found little need for the
texts aka the novels, the writer's creations et. al...? I was toying with
the idea of including a thorough critical backround with my doctoral work, as
in choosing critical theory for one of my interests, but silly me, <his words
in facetious fun :)> wanted to actually apply approaches to particular works
of fiction, which I thought was the basic idea of analysis in literature...so
I throw the question out there, why have theory if you are not applying it to
works, I thought this was the basic idea of analysing literature in general??
silly me, asking rhetorical questions....heh heh
Jo Ann :)
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