Do your own homework!

Paraphrasing one of my college instructors, who was probably paraphrasing or quoting someone:

Every complex text folds in upon itself and provides its own contradictions.

I don't know if that's helpful, but for some reason that phrase got stuck in my head and made me hate Portrait of an Artist that much more.

I'd prefer Rose McGowen covering my glasses...

Without knowing your teacher it's really hard to offer suggestions on lit theory.

It's basically art, masquerading as "criticism."

Some teachers (and even college professors) understand the absurdity of criticism (whether it's lit, social theory or what not), and others believe that in order to find it absurd you first need to go through the motions of understanding it.

I'd say while the concepts of the theory is important, your writing style is more important. If you're able to make concise, well written arguments, then the actual substance isn't as important.

Also note that there's a difference between substance and concepts. I can write an essay on social theory involving post-modernism that discusses the "Elvis Costello" look of PoMos, but as long as I know the concepts involved in Social Theory and Post-Modernism, then the actual substance of the essay becomes less important.

High School is a bit different though, because teachers want you to be prepared (particularly in an AP class) for anything in college (I may be giving too much credit to HS teachers).

I think you should ignore the standard definitions of words like critique, analysis and criticism. Just completely erase them from your brain when dealing with Lit Theory. That should help, a bit.

This probably was absolutely of no help and everyone is now dumber for having read it.

I HAVE TO WRITE A 12-PAGE PAPER ABOUT MARXIST AND FREUDIAN CRITIQUES ON BORGES'S "THE TOWER OF BABEL" SO I'D APPRECIATE IT IF YOU'D KEEP THIS CRAP OFF MY SITE.

Also, today's post is canceled.

Since we're all being academics and nerds here and I have nothing to help our friend Slo, I shall instead toot my own horn. I got a 95 on my international relations midterm paper where I compared Sun Tzu's The Art of War to modern political realism. It is the highest grade I have ever recieved on a paper in college. Not since I got a 100 on my seventh grade essay on The Red Pony did I kick so much academic ass.

Basically what got me the A was pointing out how Tzu warns in the text about forming shaky alliances, and I compared that to the 1979 conflict between the USSR and Afghanistan and how the US provided Afghanistan with a ton of aid in the war. Yeah. That worked out so well.

For me writing papers is easy once I have my thesis figured out. I know where to find the info I need after that.

As for glasses, I have a pair of sexy librarian glasses with dark brown frames. I wear them every day because without them I cannot see a GD thing.

Would it be inappropriate to say that I am, in fact, a lit professor, and that I would love to help SLO out, but I can't just now because I HAVE TO READ THROUGH A STACK OF 12-PAGE ESSAYS AND TURN IN MY GRADES BY THE END OF THE DAY?

I bristle at the thought of teachers offering assignments that amount to: Deconstruct This!  That's basically asking for insanely reductive and ultimately unsatisfying analyses.

Grant, I assume you're referring to "The Library of Babel"?  Great story--love me some Borges.

My high school english teacher graded mostly on attendance.  I took her for 3.5 of the 4 years.  Now I regret it.  :-(

1. English major here.
   
2. Ex-high school English teacher, too.

I thought the AP classes were pretty much aimed at the tests, because the teachers are told at the start what the tests generally will cover. So I'd be both pretty stoked to have a teacher that gives students that much personal responsibility, but also a little wary because I'd worry that I'm not being prepared for the specific test at the end of the year.

Since everyone else is sharing stories about papers they wrote and whatnot, I once wrote a paper for a college course called The Psychology of Art in which I quoted my roommate as an expert on the works of Ludacris and added an appendix that included a burned CD of mashups and well known rap songs featuring samples (Ludacris vs. Kylie Minogue, Puff Daddy, Vanilla Ice).

I don't remember any papers I wrote in college.

I don't remember any good papers I wrote in high school.

OK, SLO, just riffing here, but I think you can exploit the play/text thing.  A dramatic script, in its very nature, is an incomplete text laden with absence and gaps; it's really only a roadmap for a live, embodied performance, something we would think of as characterized by presence and fullness.  And, from what I know of Stoppard, so much of the meaning in his plays is carried through non-verbal cues, ironic gestures, etc.  Stoppard's language (again, from what little I know) can verge on the nonsensical or inconsequential (I'm mostly drawing on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, b/c that's the one I know the best).  The deconstructive critic might say that to even read a play as a literary text is to willfully court misreading (even though, according to Derrida, we can never not misread), given that reading the mere words on the page is a poor substitute for a live performance.  It would seem that Stoppard's self-conscious use of language as something that folds in on itself, not always conveying "meaning" in the old-fashioned, Western metaphysics sense, is already aware of, and even exploits, the impossibility of conveying stable meaning at all.  Just find some moments in the play that  embody such gaps in meaning or linguistic self-consciousness, and you're there.  You could also probably make something of the play's title as well.

There's a reason why I haven't mentioned the specifics of the play--I honestly don't remember what it's about.  A Ph.D. means that you can talk with legitimate authority about a few things, and fradulent authority about ANYTHING. In other words, it's a license to bullshit.

You English majors are all silly. When us econ people bullshit, we just use equations.

. . . and deconstruction labors to undermine understanding and destroy meaning from in a text.