As part of my
patronage toward all of you invisible readers, I have decided to give ONE FREE
POST, right here, right now. Hurry, before time runs out! This is a limited
time offer! I have already done my 6 required posts, but this one is free! Call
now and we’ll throw in a toothbrush cleaner…but wait! There’s more: get a
friend to read it and we’ll double your order! That’s right, two posts for the
price of one! All of this is yours for the price of $0.00*. This value package
is worth over $200, but now, it’s yours, FREE!
Yeah,
I decided I wanted to write another post on Mark Twain. Here are a few I want
to talk about:
Literature: (pg. 141)
Persons attempting to find a motive
in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it
will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
Civilization: (pg. 41)
Can we afford Civilization?
Get
it yet? Thinking about it still? Processing…? Okay, now you’ve got it! Oh how
these lines can be applied to our class, with a little bit of
misinterpretation. At the beginning of the year, we talked about the word
civilization and how it has often been used as a means of denigrating other
people groups. So when Mark Twain asks, “can we afford Civilization?”, he could
possibly have been thinking about this idea that we cannot say what is
“civilized” or “uncivilized”. BOOM. As for literature, one thing I have loved
about this class is that we don’t typically looks for too much meaning in the
books we’ve read. Obviously, books should be interpreted, but I sometimes feel
like English classes go too far by requiring the search for meaning. In my
opinion, the purpose of books was not for the reader to discover something for
him/herself, but for the author to transmit something to the audience. What if
every sentence you said was analyzed and interpreted however your audience
wanted to interpret it? Would you enjoy that? Absolutely not, I assume.
Anyway,
that was just a thought. I’ll leave you with another applicable piece of wit
and wisdom from Twain: “It is better to deserve honors and not have them than
to have them and not deserve them” (103). Go Honors students.
*Plus S&H-$500.00
I'm loving this free post, Michael!
ReplyDeleteBut, I completely agree with you about English classes. I feel like we always try to go so deep and find a specific meaning that the specific author meant. I would hate for each of my words to be analyzed and searched through for meaning. Sometimes I just want to take my own ideas from a story!