My little sister’s homework this week: come up with a solid thesis statement for George Orwell’s Animal Farm. As usual, she was given a prompt straight out of some crappy standard curriculum book: “Why did George Orwell choose to use satire when writing Animal Farm?” What a boring question. Why would Orwell use satire? Why [...]
Posts under ‘essays’
That which I do, I do for all mankind
I know I’ve been hating on Twilight for some time now. I read the first book and saw the first flick, and at first thought it was a harmless teenybopper phenomenon for chicks who wanted the plot of Wuthering Heights without all the big long words that are hard to read. But the continued popularity [...]
Poetry in “The Hobbit”
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a novel and not an anthology of poetry, yet it contains dozens of poems withing the text, supporting the plot, providing humor, and enriching the overall themes and mythos of the work. The text, poems, and illustrations are all Tolkien’s work and appeal particularly to young readers for their simplicity, [...]
The Court Jesters of Science Fiction
Reporters seem to serve as the dupes of the science fiction world. Why is it that the monster always eats the reporter first? Come to think of it, what has journalism got to do with sci-fi? It’s supposed to be about lasers and space monsters, right? The media are represented in various ways; as storytelling [...]
