so, I flunked my English comps

[xfer]

i dunno if i posted this yet or not, but i wrote an analysis of wallace stevens' "the plain sense of things" and the grader said it was good analysis but based on an "indefencible premise" because i had said that "turban" was synecdoche for an elderly woman instead of a prince. (I wrote about how the poem was an expression of someone at the end of her life trying desperately to achieve oblivion/senility, but the power of imagination and the working of the mind is too strong) i thought poetry was supposed to be infinitely interpretable.

the good news is that i was allowed to retake it today and i am pretty sure i passed (i did a phillip larkin poem, "talking in bed"). 'course, i was pretty sure i passed the last time, too.

 

[minxnim]

wtf if anyone should pass it should be you. maybe they're player haters?

 

[azal]

Alex is like being oppressed by "the man," except in his gay world of british lit and poetry the man is really effeminate and wears tube socks.

 

[xfer]

also, "the man" was a chick.

 

[mindspell]

Does she wear tube socks?

 

[xfer]

i dunno, generally she is pretty cool tho! and she was really good about the re-test and even stopped to read what i wrote halfway through to see if i was on the right track (she was like "totally!&quot.

 

[goatschool]

did she really say synecdoche?

because i would have been all "she said okie-dokie!" and did a sort of flapping seal-clap thing right there in the middle of the gym.

 

[xfer]

I said synecdoche in my analysis. She said it was actually a metonymy. Metonymy and synecdoche are verrrry close but if it were an old woman I would have been right (part for the whole, turban as in the head wrap an old woman wears along with a tattered dressing-down and beat-up slippers as she crosses a floor in a ruined once-great house that represents her mind:

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.)

whereas if it was a prince, it would have been metonymy (turban as a symbol of his authority somehow. I didn't know turban connotes authority/royalty).

 

[lizard]

good luck. and don't forget you can be oppressed by the female jackboot as easily as "the man's." and probably easier as she wends her feminine wiles about you and lures you onto the lorelei rocks of the Rhine.

 

[Helm]

i thought poetry was supposed to be infinitely interpretable.

Yes, I like that idea. People who have invested a big part of their life in excelling in a completely fabricated field of academia have reasons not to.

 

[minxnim]

what helm said. this is why i was too terrified to be an english major.

 

[xfer]

well, the point of an English degree is that you know enough about how language and imagery and stuff works that you CAN legitimately infinitely interpret something. people without training in English are the ones who get stuck having to give the "right"/"obvious" answer, because they cannot effectively justify and explain other interpretations.

 

[Helm]

artistic interpretations can be reduced to absurd

 

[xfer]

passed! my response was "quite good"!

now i have to wait five weeks to see if i passed the MTEL which i took saturday (the state licensing exam)

 

[FuSoYa]

the Ultimate MTEL