Informal, Online, Or Multimedia Sources
The book, Sea of Rust, is fairly recent, so it was difficult to find a lot of actual conversation about it online. Much of the informal resources I relied on had to do with my school of literary criticism, LDS Criticism. I used lesson plans from the Churchofjesuschrist.org website and institute manuals to inform my discussions of Restored Church of Christ doctrine. I couldn't site it since I don't have it, but I did also use the introduction to Asmiov's I, Robot to inform some of my understanding of robot fiction. Not a lot of that actually made it into the paper though.
Literary Theory
The main focus of my paper was LDS Criticism, which was a really interesting way to read a book that was largely focused on something I can only term atheistic concepts of deity. It was interesting to see how the various aspects of LDS doctrine and philosophy could be applied to a (probably) completely disconnected work of fiction. I also focused pretty heavily on genre criticism. One of the main points of my paper was how this book both utilizes and strays from the traditional conventions of robot fiction, and how those choices connect to the LDS concepts I was focusing on
Writing Process
It's really easy for me to write about things I get excited about. I was so excited for the Ozymandias paper, and even though it still needs improvement, I felt like each part of the process was much more natural. I had a much harder time getting started and moving forward with this paper, and I think that also affected how well it came out. I wasn't as motivated, so I didn't put in the work I should have to really make it polished. So that's something I need to focus on going forward, making sure I force myself to put in the right amount of work regardless of my motivation, because there are some projects I just won't enjoy as much as others. I'm also really struggling with actual formalist criticism. I have a lot of fun talking about overall concepts expressed within novels, but smaller-scale things that happen on a more formal level are really hard to reach for me.
I totally understand your struggle with motivation for writing about the smaller scale things. One thing that has really helped me is looking at those small things that prove the concepts. I then can get excited about the small things because without them, my enthusiasm about the larger concepts is not as founded.
ReplyDeleteI like how you were able to connect LDS criticism into a book about sci-fi/robots, despite the challenges of atheistic concepts the story had. It's much easier to talk about something like race (like comparing robots to humans, robot segregation and mistreatment if any, etc.) in a robot fiction, but it sounds like it would be an interesting essay to take a certain religion's views and compare the two.
ReplyDeleteThis is so cool! It's really neat how you took something with an atheistic view of deity, and used a literary theory about a religion that is arguably polytheistic. I agree with you that each step in the writing process got easier and easier. I feel like writing in this way, with different pre-writing steps, allows us to get so familiar, and excited as you said, about the topic we are writing about, that when the time comes to actually write a paper, it's almost easy!
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