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Oct. 1st, 2009 01:01 amI just finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray for my British Literature class, which is specifically about Oscar Wilde and the fin de siécle. (It's entirely possible that I've said so before, but I seriously don't expect you to remember.) This would be pretty awesome anyway, since it's such a fun book, but it's like a reward after having slogged through (most of) Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as blah blah blah. And yes, I have had a hard time keeping the titles separate in my head.
So anyway, I went to Google it once I was done, and I have this great plug-in in my Firefox that grins up the Wikipedia article for anything I Google. (Googlepedia, if you're interested. God, I'm parenthetical today.) One of the fun things about Wikipedia is that you can judge by the various notations just how psychotically anal the people who take interest in that particular subject are.
Fans of aesthetic literature do not, as it turns out, disappoint.
Attribution needed? Really? How about every single person who has ever read the fucking book? Because I'm not sure how that aspect of that competition could have been LESS obvious.
One of the essays I've been assigned to read along with the book is titled "Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray." As a slasher, I find this hilarious. I'm pretty confident that it won't teach me anything new about gay subtext (or, in this case, gay text, because DAMN) and the implications thereof. Much like how the essay discussing the obsession with "decoding" Walter Pater's work in search of evidence about his sexuality was a whole bunch of nothin' new. I wasn't exactly expecting a class centered on Oscar Wilde to be the straightest thing in the world, but I didn't really anticipate that a decade of slasherdom would give me a head start on reading the academic essays, either.
(And yes, I am in fact having fun with the Grab function Macs come equipped with. I may or may not stop capping things on the internet to mock any time soon.)
So anyway, I went to Google it once I was done, and I have this great plug-in in my Firefox that grins up the Wikipedia article for anything I Google. (Googlepedia, if you're interested. God, I'm parenthetical today.) One of the fun things about Wikipedia is that you can judge by the various notations just how psychotically anal the people who take interest in that particular subject are.
Fans of aesthetic literature do not, as it turns out, disappoint.
Attribution needed? Really? How about every single person who has ever read the fucking book? Because I'm not sure how that aspect of that competition could have been LESS obvious.
One of the essays I've been assigned to read along with the book is titled "Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray." As a slasher, I find this hilarious. I'm pretty confident that it won't teach me anything new about gay subtext (or, in this case, gay text, because DAMN) and the implications thereof. Much like how the essay discussing the obsession with "decoding" Walter Pater's work in search of evidence about his sexuality was a whole bunch of nothin' new. I wasn't exactly expecting a class centered on Oscar Wilde to be the straightest thing in the world, but I didn't really anticipate that a decade of slasherdom would give me a head start on reading the academic essays, either.
(And yes, I am in fact having fun with the Grab function Macs come equipped with. I may or may not stop capping things on the internet to mock any time soon.)