I hate "The Metamorphosis"

[Attman_Eci]

I just got back my essay on my interpretation of this stupid fucking book and got an F. Apparently relating this story to Kafka's life isn't valid. "Keep your report about the story," says Renzo who also put what appears to be a fucking booger on my cover page.

From wikipedia...
"The opening line of the book is famous in English:

As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect."

Famous line in English. Someone can write one sentence and everyone else can call it famous? Why?

I guess that means I'm gonna be famous:

"As I woke one morning from an easy wet dream I found myself with massive morning wood." -I am now self-declared famous. That's just pure, deep, virtuostic literature.

This book is stupid. So there can be 130+ different interpretations about it? Who fucking cares? I think we all just need to move on with our lives and not get hung up with it because it is nothing more than a Kafka acid trip. The story also speaks of Gregor's family locking him in his room to keep the "closet door" shit. Gregor tries to "break out" and "come out". Hello, it's obvious- Gregor is a fag and is just bitter about his father molesting him. That's what this whole thing about dad being abusive is about. At the very end daddy notices how hawt his daughter is. Now he will molest her, duh.

I know why my teacher analyzes things. We spent a whole class on "Why They Walked from Omela" or whatever it's called. It was like 5 pages long about a utopia and she asked the same questions over again like "Can utopia exist?" Well not with short-haired, fat ass, EMO glasses-wearing-dykes like you. Everytime she asks an 'intelumectual' question like that there's only one person out of 40 who want to answer it. A self-proclaimed 'revolutionist' EMO-listening lame-brain who wears a one of those fucking CCCP hats with the hammer and sickle. God, I just want to punch him in the throat.

Speaking of God, Renzo is just going to bust about God one of these days. She talks about creationism and God's purpose when that was the last person I needed to get an education from. I heard enough of it in my Presbyterian, Methodist, and cult rural town in South PA. If she thinks she has a friend in Jesus she's in for a rude awakening when her heart failure catches up with her.

She got a fucking booger on my cover page. With comments like "I didn't read past the first page," she doesn't need to rub it in by getting a booger on my cover page which I wasted a slice of paper on.

God, I hate cover pages. Like you can't read my name on the first-page heading. It's like going to some place and they ask you for two forms of ID. I hate that.

[Bralkan]

tissue?

A paper needs proof - how the hell you know anything on Kafka? Biographers can only make these guesses (who spend years studing a subject) and you think you know enough about his life that you can make arguments concerning its (his life) influence on the literature?

You have much better proof using the literature iteself to make an interpretation. If you didn't use the text, that is why you got an F. Stop calling it bullshit because you can't write a decent term paper.

[Millie]

Originally Posted by Attman_Eci

Apparently relating this story to Kafka's life isn't valid. "Keep your report about the story," says Renzo...

Hate to break it to you, but whoever this Renzo character is, she's right. If you're asked to analyze or discuss a work of fiction, you need to discuss the work on its own and in context.

Had you been asked to write a speculative biography of Kafka, then maybe your paper would have been on the right track.

[Cathan]

Shit like that makes me glad I'm an enginnering student. I'd much rather spend my time learning calculus or doing some material test on concrete, dirt, steel, wood or some traffic survey (fuck environmental lab!!!!) than reading some bullshit like that lol. Our labs sucked balls because we had about 20 pages of formatting on how to write lab reports that are 10 to 30 pages long of text and calculations where you have to figure out what the hell is going on with what you tested. At the end they always give you some spreadsheet with about 5000 data points and tell you to make sense of it and write about it. I'm glad I finished those labs. I took all the general classes at community college. I got gimped through them because my teacher was this liberal that wasn't awake at 8am so he'd ask me about politics and then we'd have a class discussion. At the end of the semester we'd dump 5 papers in his lap about some movies he had us watch in class and I'd end up with A's lol. Ah the good old days.

[Bralkan]

....Kafka is not bullshit. I'm not big on adding arbitrary numbers all day...but I don't think its bullshit. (Don't get me wrong, I love me some applied physics or engineering.)

This guy didn't get an F because Kafka is bullshit. He got an F because he doesn't know how to write a paper.

....and you blamed being "gimped" in class...because the guy is liberal? Jesus Christ.

[Intrinsic]

Upload the paper and let us tell you why it sucks!

[Vinen]

Originally Posted by Intrinsic

Upload the paper and let us tell you why it sucks!

.

[Cathan]

[quote=Bralkan.

....and you blamed being "gimped" in class...because the guy is liberal? Jesus Christ.[/QUOTE]


GOD I love it when people h8 on liberals!

[GaliemVaelant]

If you are asked to analyze a story, and you can't help but relate it to the author, then you need to do that by analyzing the story.

For example, if I were to write a story, you could say that the plot is dry, the characters seem fake, and the language is trite and boring. AFTER that you could say that I can't write.

Your teacher is right. Wait until you're forced to read something like "Sense and Sensibilities". My God, that thing is the worst stack of printed toilet paper ever made. When you're asked to write about it, you want to say that Jane Austen was the most boring old hag ever to live, and her vagina had more sand in it than Brothers Beach, but you can't.

[ValkyrieIsAboutToDie]

If there's one thing I've learned in my short writing career, it's to suppress the tangent. Quash those desires to slide from the assigned for the sake of creativity or philosophical musings. At the end of the day, when you hand in your paper, it doesn't matter how fucking deep you went down the rabbit hole, all that matters is if you did what the professor asked you to do or not. Sure, you might cop a pat on the back for your effort... but you'll also cop a flimsy grade.

[Millie]

Originally Posted by GaliemVaelant

Wait until you're forced to read something like "Sense and Sensibilities". My God, that thing is the worst stack of printed toilet paper ever made.

Obviously you've never read "Wuthering Heights."

[Duppin]

Originally Posted by Millie

Obviously you've never read "Wuthering Heights."

No, but I've seen the semaphore version!

[Zaniel]

Originally Posted by Cathan

Shit like that makes me glad I'm an enginnering student. I'd much rather spend my time learning calculus or doing some material test on concrete, dirt, steel, wood or some traffic survey (fuck environmental lab!!!!) than reading some bullshit like that lol.

Fuck that shit, a certain 20,000 word essay on the compressive strength of a concrete bar was one of the many contributing factors towards me never using my engineering degree and getting a job in another industry.

[Eomer]

I'd have to say that campus bars serving at 11:10AM and me having a break from 11:00 to 1:00 was probably the primary reason I never made it much past 1st year in engineering. Damn you 3 dollar pints of Big Rock, DAMN YOU.

[Metranon]

I started out in university as an English major...This reminds me of a paper i had to write on the Flaubert novel "Madame Bovary" arguing against the author's acceptance of suicide by the main character (emma bovary) at the end of the novel as an acceptable means/device of conflict and plot resolution.

Well I ended up getting a "D" on the paper because I said that while suicide isn't generally a good means of resolving problems, it was good for Emma and it works well in the novel because Emma is a useless, bourgeois waste of life. I used examples from the novel of her uselessness but noted that likewise, the author, Flaubert, hated life mostly and agreed that ideals like true love, justice, etc didn't exist in real life but were only engendered in our own fantasy-laden minds by what we read in books and our own imaginations. The professor said that my paper used too much historical analysis and eluded the point of the assignment which was to refute Flaubert's negativism.

Anyway I ended up going to talk to the prof about my grade, he wasn't such a bad guy but he said that the point of the exercise was to attempt to refute the argument of the author throughout the novel by using his own words against him. I told him basically that I thought this was pointless, since the entire novel is constructed in a literary sense to explicate a cynical attitude, and since i personally agree with the author on a number of points, any attempt by me as a writer to refute his views would simply be contrived and well, bullshit. I told him that I had spoken to several other students in the class who agreed with me but tried to write a optimistic account of the novel anyway and got an "A" on their paper but agreed they they had in essence gotten this grade by contriving reasons from the story that really didn't make sense, i.e. they were bullshitting the professor.

After about an hour of arguing that he should re-evaluate my grade on the paper based on the fact that the assignment encourages students to bullshit, he finally said he had to go to a meeting or something and that he would not change my grade because he didn't have to, that was his perogative as a professor. He suggested that even if I thought some of his assignments forced students to write insincerely in order to fufill the essay requirements, I should get used to this being in the English department and basically be in his words, "not so adamant about writing only pieces i personally agreed with", because that wouldn't be condusive to my getting good grades from he and other profs in the department.

Well the end result of all this is that I am now a History major (4th year finally...) with a somewhat vicious grudge against english students, professors, and solely literary analysis of writing. Last semester we had to write another paper on Madame Bovary for my 19th century gender history course, I got an "A" this time for my work analyzing Flaubert's life, middle class-life in 19th century rural france, and how it relates to the character of Emma. My thesis was that her suicide presents an excellent literary and historical counterpoint to the romantic movement's idyllic depiction of this lifestyle, and thus was a fitting end to the book.

So I guess my advice is if you find yourself hating English courses because of their myopic view of literature, consider a history major. You still get to read quite a bit of great English literature, and you can snub English majors by offering both plot/character analysis of these novels as well as a functional historical understanding of the author's life and the circumstances that led him to take up writing. Without understanding the history surrounding a novel, I find that nearly any attempt at a deep analysis of a novel's plot or characters is usually doomed to rely upon contrivance...