Need help on a paper...
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Topic: Need help on a paper...
Posted By: *Stealth*
Subject: Need help on a paper...
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 10:55pm
Alright, I just got issued a umbrella topic in my english class - for a research paper, due in one week.
The topic is "Literary controversy"
It can be about books, authors, anything surrounding literacy, the teacher "Wants dirt".
I can't write about "A million little pieces" - The Opra controversy, nor can I write about the Devinchi code.
Does any one have any interesting ideas to research concerning the topic?
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Replies:
Posted By: mbro
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 10:57pm
Lolita
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Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
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Posted By: Da Hui
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 10:58pm
Harry Potter.
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Posted By: unvolution
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 10:59pm
Posted By: bishopisback
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 11:06pm
The Turner Diaries.
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Posted By: choopie911
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 11:06pm
Posted By: ThatGuitarGuy
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 11:07pm
Hustler
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Skillet: I've never been terribly fond of the look of a vagina
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Posted By: *Stealth*
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 11:11pm
I'm hoping to find more topics on the authors themselves, like things they did in their lives that were controversial, or deaths, murders, things people don't know... etc etc
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Posted By: ThatGuitarGuy
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 11:12pm
Larry Flynt then. He was pretty controversial.
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Skillet: I've never been terribly fond of the look of a vagina
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Posted By: reifidom
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 11:45pm
Tennessee Williams was an interesting guy. He was gay in a less forgiving time, and in A Streetcar Named Desire a character was driven to suicide after a homosexual affair. The movie couldn't show this so it was altered to a "weakness."
His sister was given a lobotomy.
You should look into him.
There's also L. Ron Hubbard and his venture from sci-fi into creating Scientology. Can't get much more controversial.
Salmon Rusdie was condemned to death for his writings. The fatwa was lifted not that long ago but some still feel he should die for The Satanic Verses.
Lots to choose from.
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Posted By: Rambino
Date Posted: 29 July 2008 at 11:52pm
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Did_It - O.J. Simpson
Marquis de Sade
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[IMG]http://i38.tinypic.com/aag8s8.jpg">
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Posted By: carl_the_sniper
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 12:04am
<yeah, I don't think so>
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<just say no to unnecessarily sexualized sigs>
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Posted By: MeanMan
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 12:08am
 reifidom wrote:
Tennessee Williams was an interesting guy. He was
gay in a less forgiving time, and in A Streetcar Named Desire a character
was driven to suicide after a homosexual affair. The movie couldn't show
this so it was altered to a "weakness."
His sister was given a lobotomy.
You should look into him.
There's also L. Ron Hubbard and his venture from sci-fi into creating
Scientology. Can't get much more controversial.
Salmon Rusdie was condemned to death for his writings. The fatwa was
lifted not that long ago but some still feel he should die for The Satanic
Verses.
Lots to choose from.
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Didn't Williams die by choking on an eye drops cap and die?
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hybrid-sniper~"To be honest, if I see a player still using an Impulse I'm going to question their motives."
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Posted By: reifidom
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 12:14am
Yes, he did. They say he held it in his teeth while he was putting in the drops. In it went, and the rest is history.
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Posted By: Hades
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 11:41am
Stephen Ambrose was a plagiarist.
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Posted By: carl_the_sniper
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 11:55am
Rambino: What did I post that was wrong?
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<just say no to unnecessarily sexualized sigs>
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Posted By: Pariel
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 12:24pm
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Hemingway was pretty screwed up. But not really in any interesting ways, and everyone knows already.
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Posted By: PaiNTbALLfReNzY
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 1:56pm
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Stephen King is pretty screwed up...
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Posted By: oreomann33
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 2:06pm
Of Mice and Men.
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Posted By: tallen702
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 3:32pm
Robert Anson Heinlein.
For him you will need 3 works that are fairly easy to get through.
1) Stranger in a Strange Land
2) Starship Troopers
3) Expanded Universe
Stranger in a Strange Land was burned/banned for it's satirical take on organized religion, specifically Christianity and Roman Catholicism.
Starship Troopers has about as much to do with that crap-fest sci-fi flick with Denise Richards as an Uwe Boll film does with it's video-game subject matter. The HUGE factor in Starship Troopers is the fact that service to the public is what guarantees citizenship and the right to have a voice in government. Heinlein goes into great detail in the afterward of one of his essays in "Expanded Universe" about the misconceptions that so many people have about his message in S/T. He also covers some of the controversy over "Stranger in a Strange Land," but that novel has been the subject of so many inquests and papers itself that there should be no shortage of materiel.
Finally, "Expanded Universe" contains many of RAH's essays and speeches that were written between the 1950's and 1970's concerning government, economics, and the need for the US to gain ground in scientific matters. His essays are just as pertinent and inflammatory today as they were over 30 years ago. One simply need replace the USSR with the PRC, N. Korea, or Al Quaeda.
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Posted By: Rambino
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 3:54pm
I'm surprised bri didn't bring up RAH first...
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[IMG]http://i38.tinypic.com/aag8s8.jpg">
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Posted By: Pariel
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 4:19pm
tallen702 wrote:
Robert Anson Heinlein.
For him you will need 3 works that are fairly easy to get through.
1) Stranger in a Strange Land
2) Starship Troopers
3) Expanded Universe
Stranger in a Strange Land was burned/banned for it's satirical take on organized religion, specifically Christianity and Roman Catholicism.
Starship Troopers has about as much to do with that crap-fest sci-fi flick with Denise Richards as an Uwe Boll film does with it's video-game subject matter. The HUGE factor in Starship Troopers is the fact that service to the public is what guarantees citizenship and the right to have a voice in government. Heinlein goes into great detail in the afterward of one of his essays in "Expanded Universe" about the misconceptions that so many people have about his message in S/T. He also covers some of the controversy over "Stranger in a Strange Land," but that novel has been the subject of so many inquests and papers itself that there should be no shortage of materiel.
Finally, "Expanded Universe" contains many of RAH's essays and speeches that were written between the 1950's and 1970's concerning government, economics, and the need for the US to gain ground in scientific matters. His essays are just as pertinent and inflammatory today as they were over 30 years ago. One simply need replace the USSR with the PRC, N. Korea, or Al Quaeda.
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That actually sounds interesting, I might read his stuff.
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Posted By: heliumman77
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 10:50pm
In cold blood?
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Posted By: rednekk98
Date Posted: 30 July 2008 at 11:41pm
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As for Stephen King, I believe Rage (As Richard Bachman) and Apt Pupil are both considered "banned books". Both are disturbing and worth a read. If you were to do Hemmingway, some of his short stories have to do with PTSD,(almost anything from the Nick Adam's stories+Soldier's Home) which is pretty relevant today, and some of his books on the lost generation don't seem that different from today's generation and good parallels can be drawn.
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Posted By: tallen702
Date Posted: 31 July 2008 at 1:40am
The RAH afterward that I was talking about earlier is reproduced in part here:
Robert A. Heinlein wrote:
The "Patrick Henry" ad shocked 'em. Starship Troopers outraged 'em. I still can't see how that book got a Hugo. It continues to get lots of nasty "fan" mail and not much favorable fan mail... but it sells and sells and sells and sells, in eleven languages. It doesn't slow down - four new contracts just this year. And yet I almost never hear of it save when someone wants to chew me out over it. I don't understand it.
The criticisms are usually based on a failure to understand simple indicative English sentences, couched in simple words - especially when the critics are professors of English, as they often are. (A shining counterexample, a professor who can read and understand English, is one at Colorado College - a professor of history.)
We have also some professors of English who write science fiction but I do not know of one who formally reviewed or criticized Starship Troopers. However, I have gathered a strong impression over the years that professors of English who write and sell science fiction average being much more grammatical and much more literate than their colleagues who do not (cannot?) write saleable fiction.
Their failures to understand English are usually these:
1) "Veteran" does not mean in English dictionaries or in this novel solely a person who has served in military forces. I concede that in commonest usage today it means a war veteran... but no one hesitates to speak of a veteran fireman or veteran school teacher: In Starship Troopers it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today "former members of federal civil service."
Addendum: the volunteer is not given a choice. He/she can't win a franchise by volunteering for what we call civil service. He volunteers ... then for two years plus-or-minus he goes where he is sent and does what he is told to do. If he is young, male, and healthy, he may wind up as cannon fodder. But there are long chances against it.
2) He/she can resign at any time other than during combat - i.e., 100% of the time for 19 out of 20; 99+% of the time for those in the military branches of federal service.
3) There is no conscription. (I am opposed to conscription for any reason at any time, war or peace, and have said so repeatedly in fiction, in nonfiction, from platforms, and in angry sessions in think tanks. I was sworn in first in 1923, and have not been off the hook since that time. My principal pride in my family is that I know of not one in over two centuries who was drafted; they all volunteered. But the draft is involuntary servitude, immoral, and unconstitutional no matter what the Supreme Court says.)
4) Criticism: "the government in Starship Troopers is militaristic." "Militaristic" is the adjective for the noun "militarism," a word of several definitions but not one of them can be correctly applied to the government described in this novel. No military or civil servant can vote or hold office until after he is discharged and is again a civilian. The military tend to be despised by most civilians and this is made explicit. A career military man is most unlikely ever to vote or hold office; he is more likely to be dead - and if he does live through it, he'll vote for the first time at 40 or older.
"That book glorifies the military!" Now we are getting somewhere. It does indeed. Specifically the P.B.I., the Poor Bloody Infantry, the mudfoot who places his frail body between his loved home and the war's desolation - but is rarely appreciated. "It's Tommy this and Tommy that and chuck him out, the brute! - but it's 'thin red line of heroes' when the guns begin to shoot."
My own service usually doesn't have too bad a time of it. Save for very special situations such as the rivers in Nam, a Navy man can get killed but he is unlikely to be wounded... and if he is killed, it is with hot food in his belly, clean clothes on his body, a recent hot bath, and sack time in a comfortable bunk not more than 24 hours earlier. The Air Force leads a comparable life. But think of Korea, of Guadalacanal, of Belleau Wood, of Viet Nam. The H-Bomb did not abolish the infantryman; it made him essential... and he has the toughest job of all and should be honored.
Glorify the military? Would I have picked it for my profession and stayed on the rolls the past 56 years were I not proud of it?
I think I know what offens most of my critics the most about Starship Troopers: It is the dismaying idea that a voice in governing the state should be earned instead of being handed to anyone who is 18 years old and has a body temperature near 37*C.
But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Democracies usually collapse not too long after the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses... for a while. Either read history or watch the daily papers; it is now happening here. Let's stipulate for discussion that some stabilizing qualification is needed (in addition to the body being war) for a voter to vote responsibly with proper consideration for the future of his children and grandchildren - and yours. The Founding Fathers never intended to extend the franchise to everyone; their debates and the early laws show it. A man had to be a stable figure in the community through owning land or employing others or engaged in a journeyman trade or something.
But few pay any attention to the Founding Fathers today - those ignorant, uneducated men - they didn't even have television (have you looked at Monticello lately?) - so let's try some other "poll taxes" to insure a responsible electorate.
a) Mark Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondour" - if you have not read it, do so.
b) A state where anyone can buy for cash (or lay away installment plan) one or more franchises, and this is the government's sole source of income other than services sold competitively and non-monopolistically. This would produce a new type of government with several rabbits tucked away in the hat. Rich people would take over the government? Would they, now? Is a wealthy man going to impoverish himself for the privilege of casting a couple of hundred votes? Buying an election today, under the warm-body (and tomb-stone) system is much cheaper than buying a controlling number of franchises would be. The arithmetic on this one becomes unsolvable... but I suspect that paying a stiff price (call it 20,000 Swiss francs) for a franchise would be even less popular than serving two years.
c) A state that required a bare minimum of intelligence and education - e.g., step into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on over that booth - and you slink out, face red, you having just proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of the grownups. Better luck next election! No(w) lower the age limit in this system - smart 12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers - and fathers - decline to be humiliated twice.
There are endless variations on this one. Here are tow: Improving the Breed - No red light, no bell... but the booth opens automatically - empty. Revenue - You don't risk your life, just some gelt. It costs you a 1/4oz troy of gold in local currency to enter the booth. Solve your quadratic and vote, and you get your money back. Flunk - and the state keeps it. With this one I guarantee that no one would vote who was not interested and would be most unlikely to vote if unsure of his ability to get that hundred bucks back.
I concede that I set the standards on both I.Q. and schooling too low in calling only for the solution of a quadratic since (if the programming limits the machine to integer roots) a person who deals with figures at all can solve that one with both hands behind him (her) and her-his eyes closed. But I just recently discovered that a person can graduate from high school in Santa Cruz with a straight-A record, be about to enter the University of California on a scholarship... but be totally unable to do simple arithmetic. Let's not make things too difficult at the transition.
d) I don't insist on any particular method of achieving a responsible electorate: I just think that we need to tighten up the present warm-body criterion before it destroys us. How about this? For almost a century and a half women were not allowed to vote. For the past sixty years they have voted... but we have not seen the enormous improvement in government that the suffragettes promised us.
Perhaps we did not go far enough. Perhaps men are still corrupting government... so let's try the next century and a half with males disenfranchised. (Fair is fair: My mother was past forty before she was permitted to vote.) But let's not stop there; at present men outnumber women in elective offices, on the bench, and in the legal profession by a proportion that is scandalous.
Make males ineligible to hold elective office, or to serve the judiciary, elective or appointed, and also reserve the profession of law for women.
Impossible? That was exactly the situation the year I was born, but male instead of female, even in the few states that had female suffrage before the XIXth Amendment, with so few exceptions as to be unnoticed. As for rooting male lawyers out of their cozy niches, this would give us a pool of unskilled manual laborers - and laborers are very hard to hire these days; I've been trying to hire one at any wages he wants for th epast three months, with no success.
The really good ones could stay on as law clerks to our present female lawyers, who will be overworked for a while. But not for long. Can you imagine female judges (with no male judges to reverse them) permitting attorneys to take six weeks to pick a jury? Or allowing a trial to ramble along for months?
Women are more practical than men. Biology forces it on them.
Speaking of that, let's go whole hog. Until a female bears a child her socio-economic function is male no matter how orthodox her sexual preference. But a woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future. So let's limit the franchise and eligibility for office and the practice of law to mothers.
The phasing over should be made gentle. Let males serve out their terms but not succeed themselves. Male lawyers might be given as long as four years to retire or find other jobs while not admitting any more males into law schools. I don't have a candidate for President but the events of the last fifty years prove that anybody can sit in the Oval Office; it's just that some are more impressive in appearance than others.
Brethren and Sistern, have you ever stopped to think that there has not been one rational decision out of the Oval Office for fifty years?
An all-female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been enduring. Let's try it!
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Heinlein, Robert Anson
Expanded Universe
pp482-488
2003 Baen Publishing Enterprises, NY
(original copyright, 1980)
That's just a smidgen of his controversial take on politics. The man was a political fireball. He personally chewed out Eisenhower for signing a ban on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Even if Stealth doesn't pick RAH as his author, I hope some of you got a good read out of it.
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<Removed overly wide sig. Tsk, you know better.>
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Posted By: Mack
Date Posted: 31 July 2008 at 1:51am
^^^ Wow. I didn't know about all of his views, but I always liked his ideas (espoused in Starship Troopers) about earning citizenship/the right to vote.
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Posted By: tallen702
Date Posted: 31 July 2008 at 2:06am
Mack, go to the library and pick up "Expanded Universe" I read almost everything he wrote in novel form, but had no idea of the scope and breadth of his eerily accurate vision of the future and his grasp of politics until I read his essays in "Expanded Universe"
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<Removed overly wide sig. Tsk, you know better.>
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Posted By: Tolgak
Date Posted: 31 July 2008 at 6:37am
Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooee
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Posted By: Pariel
Date Posted: 31 July 2008 at 8:42am
Mack wrote:
^^^ Wow. I didn't know about all of his views, but I always liked his ideas (espoused in Starship Troopers) about earning citizenship/the right to vote.
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I find them very interesting. I think he makes some good points, although I don't really agree with all his solutions. But he points out some serious flaws in our society.
I do like his idea (well, at least the one I'm getting from this) that all people be involved in civil service.
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Posted By: tallen702
Date Posted: 31 July 2008 at 10:11am
Tolgak wrote:
Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooee |
Seen Hobbes recently?
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<Removed overly wide sig. Tsk, you know better.>
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