What are your favorite lines from student papers this semester? Mine: “Everyone loves pirates, and that is not a generalization.” Runner-up: “Cannibalism was an awful thing, even back then.”
Posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 under Biscuits | RSS
Not a line from a paper, but an office hour conversation yesterday:
Student: “So in comparing these two theorists, I’m writing about how Hassan is completely neutral and nonjudgmental in his approach, while Woolf is really harsh and critical of other writers, sort of forcing her viewpoint on the reader. So in my paper I decided to compare their methodologies to Ghandi and Hitler.”
Me: “Um. Okay . . . uh, do you really think that writing something critical about three 19th-century novelists is analagous to killing six million Jews?”
Not a line from a paper, but an office hour conversation yesterday:
Student: “So in comparing these two theorists, I’m writing about how Hassan is completely neutral and nonjudgmental in his approach, while Woolf is really harsh and critical of other writers, sort of forcing her viewpoint on the reader. So in my paper I decided to compare their methodologies to Ghandi and Hitler.”
Me: “Um. Okay . . . uh, do you really think that writing something critical about three 19th-century novelists is analagous to killing six million Jews?”
Him: “Too much?”
Excellent. I love how arguing a thesis becomes forcing one’s viewpoint on others.
Two more for ya:
“Another literary device used by DeLillo is the Lyotard, which is a way to
break down metanarratives.”
“This was written during the Vietnam War, which is when post-modernism was barely beginning to crown from modernism’s vagina.”
I understand it was a breach birth.