Looking at Web Sites

Here are some links to resources on recent events in Australia that we can look at in class.

Bringing Them Home

Text of Australian Prime Minister’s 2008 Speech

Responses to the 2008 Apology

Australian Slang

How do you know if a website is a good one for research? Ask yourself these questions:

• Who is responsible for creating this website?
• When was this website created?
• What is its primary focus?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What are the strengths of this website?
• How even-handed is this website? Does it have any potential for bias?
• Does this website provide evidence to back up what it says?

When citing a website, you will need to ask many of the same questions.

• Does this work have an author? If so, list the last name first and end with a period. If no author is given, begin with the title.
• What is the title of this page? Enclose the title in question marks if it is one page within a larger site. Otherwise italicize the title of the site.
• What is the title of the site? Italicize the title. If there is no clear title, simply write Home page without italicizing it.
• What is the name of the publisher or sponsoring organization? This can be tricky to determine. If no publisher or organization is available, write N.p. followed by a comma.
• When was it published? This may be the date created or the date updated. If no date is available, use n.d.
• Medium? Put Web.
• Include the date you looked at the site, followed by a period.
• Include the URL in angle brackets if your professor asks you to.

Example of a citation:  “Aboriginal Mourning Ceremonies.” Indigenous Austraila. FrogandToad Travel, 2009. Web. 9 Nov. 2009.

 

Finally Fall

I am loving this weather! I was kind of upset that we seemed to just skip the fall season and move right into the cold, but I was happy to see some nicer weather this week . I thought for this blog, I would share some of my reactions to the play on Thursday. It was, as many people have earlier mentioned, VERY confusing; The first play was especially hard to follow. However, as confusing as they were, I was still able to somewhat understand what the author was trying to convey to the audience. The plays were very well put together, and I thought the actors did a fantastic job. I was really able to feel the emotions of the characters. The plays were very haunting, and were very thought-provoking. I spent a good deal of time thinking about the plays afterwards, and the more I thought about them, the more I was able to understood. I enjoyed the plays, and even thought I wasn’t always able to follow everything, they successfully conveyed strong emotions to help the audience feel as thought they were a part of the performance.

 

Read Any Good Places Lately?

Here are the locations of the mysteries you all read as your “personal choice” book. If you click on the image, it will take you to a map that lists the authors and titles of the books – in case you heard about one you’d really like to read in your spare time. (Hahahahahaha!)

 

Back on Topic

I just read an article in a British newspaper, The Independent, about a publishing phenomenon from Sweden. A Swede named Stieg Larsson delivered three manuscripts to his publisher that became The Millennium Trilogy, but before they were published he died of a heart attack. They’ve become bestsellers around the world and are a critique of modern society – Swedish society in particular. They were something Larsson wrote in his spare time; during the workday, he was a journalist who wrote about racism and neo-Nazi movements, exposing things he was strongly against. The first mystery in the series had a blunt title in the original – “Men Who Hate Women.” There’s a strong theme about violence against women in the story. In English it was made more palatable by calling it The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. (The third book in the trilogy has just been published in England but won’t be available in the US for months – though maybe sooner in our library, as I’ve ordered a copy from the UK.)  In this article, Nick Frazier talks about what is basically the subject of this course.

As they were in the age of Dickens and Victor Hugo, blockbusters with a social message are fashionable. They’ve become the way we adults, wearied by health reforms, or banking crashes, formulate our views about the world.

We may not grasp the niceties of Obama’s health care reform; but we can comprehend the crazed behaviour of Sergeant McNulty in The Wire, who invents a serial killer to draw attention to his police unit, so starved of cash are Baltimore’s finest. Spoilsports will say that there is a price to be paid if you immerse yourself in popular fiction, entering its delusory worlds. But why do we bother reading (or watching) such copious inventions if they don’t in some not always definable way alter the world around us?

These thoughts are prompted by weeks of immersion in the contemporary Sweden depicted by Stieg Larsson in the course of his three best-selling 600-page novels. These books have sold many millions of copies, and recently, after due silence on the part of highbrow critics, received the accolade of the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, who said they reminded him of the moment when as a child he sat down to read books like The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas. Good novels, Vargas Llosa suggested, needn’t always be perfect. This was a tactful, literary man’s way of saying that Stieg’s work wasn’t exactly literature, but nonetheless something better than a good read. . . .

In his own life Stieg Larsson believed that we could be nudged into activism by journalism. His books show that he also thought that entertaining people was a way of bringing them over to his side.

I’m not sure that either of these propositions are entirely correct, but they did enable him to become a convincing writer as well as a popular one. Everyone should read Stieg for the quality of decency that he evokes on every page, as Orwell once did. . . . Maybe popular fiction can indeed change the world.

 

Talking about Genres

Today I want to define some terms in class and was thinking about all the different subgenres that exist in crime fiction. “Crime Fiction” is a catch-all phrase used more commonly in Britain than in the US and it includes mysteries, thrillers, and other books that focus on a crime, induce some kind of suspense in the reader, and are generally more focused on entertaining the reader than on literary quality and high originality (though for crime fiction to provide a good reading experience it has to be well written  and original).

Anyway, I did a little “mind map” as a way to think about it. This is not by any means an exhaustive list of kinds of crime fiction, but might illustrate that there are many sub-genres for which readers have different expectations.

 

First blog yo!

Hey so not really sure what we’re supposed to be writing… Woo!

 

First Post

Hopefully this works

 

My Pretend Post :)

I am seeing if I am technologically capable of posting a blog. I hope it works out

 

First Post of the Year!!

Hello all!! How is the first post going? Pretty exciting I must say!

 

First Post

Don’t know what to put.  Just hoping that everything works.