(no subject)
Feb. 5th, 2002 02:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishIt's days like this that I ask myself, "Why do I bother?"
I spent the last half hour tracking down two unrelated bugs. The reports have been filed to the "Nobody" account on the "bug-tracking" software, where they will languish until Doomsday.
It's hard to take pride in your work when the rest of the office would prefer that you suck at it.
I'd be less peeved about this if I weren't having difficulty in class as well. I mean, come on, it's Modern Drama, I ate this stuff for lunch in high school. Well, read it over lunch anyway. Stoppard, Beckett, Ionesco, I was all over those guys. So I get into class and the first paper (due a week from Thursday, pushed back from a week from today) is on Problems in Genre... "Explore major questions that changes in the genres of tragedy and comedy pose for modern drama." I find myself completely bemused by the jargon ("Explore major questions?") and unsure whether I know enough about the genres of tragedy and comedy to really write about them... I get the feeling that I'm lacking the necessary background. I really have absolutely no idea what went on in the theatre between, say, the English Civil War and about 1850 when the first of the class texts was published. Two hundred years worth of genre conventions that I know nothing about. For me, this paper is the equivalent of "Write a three to four page essay on the effects of Communism in China," to which my analogous response will be "It sucked."
Theoretically the professor is going to talk about what she actually expects out of the paper on Thursday, and it's not like I'll really have time between now and then to do much work on it.
---
Okay. According to the Web, in Britain we had John Dryden (in the late 1600s) and Oliver "She Stoops to Conquer" Goldsmith (1700s), along with Richard "School for Scandal" Sheridan in the late 1700s. These names mean almost nothing to me, but they're a starting point. Go me.
I spent the last half hour tracking down two unrelated bugs. The reports have been filed to the "Nobody" account on the "bug-tracking" software, where they will languish until Doomsday.
It's hard to take pride in your work when the rest of the office would prefer that you suck at it.
I'd be less peeved about this if I weren't having difficulty in class as well. I mean, come on, it's Modern Drama, I ate this stuff for lunch in high school. Well, read it over lunch anyway. Stoppard, Beckett, Ionesco, I was all over those guys. So I get into class and the first paper (due a week from Thursday, pushed back from a week from today) is on Problems in Genre... "Explore major questions that changes in the genres of tragedy and comedy pose for modern drama." I find myself completely bemused by the jargon ("Explore major questions?") and unsure whether I know enough about the genres of tragedy and comedy to really write about them... I get the feeling that I'm lacking the necessary background. I really have absolutely no idea what went on in the theatre between, say, the English Civil War and about 1850 when the first of the class texts was published. Two hundred years worth of genre conventions that I know nothing about. For me, this paper is the equivalent of "Write a three to four page essay on the effects of Communism in China," to which my analogous response will be "It sucked."
Theoretically the professor is going to talk about what she actually expects out of the paper on Thursday, and it's not like I'll really have time between now and then to do much work on it.
---
Okay. According to the Web, in Britain we had John Dryden (in the late 1600s) and Oliver "She Stoops to Conquer" Goldsmith (1700s), along with Richard "School for Scandal" Sheridan in the late 1700s. These names mean almost nothing to me, but they're a starting point. Go me.
no subject
Date: 2002-02-05 12:34 pm (UTC)'Modern'...
Date: 2002-02-05 01:25 pm (UTC)Besides, the term "Modern" is weird. In the Modern Poetry class I took, they told me that the Modern period was from about 1890 to 1950, or thereabouts. Anything later is "Contemporary." Of course, in this class we're starting with Buchner (d. 1830s) and finishing with Michael Frayn's Copenhagen (won a Tony in 1998), so it's all in your perspective, I guess.
Modernism?
Although post-modern is a perfectly valid title, explaining the fact that it occured after the modern movement, I think sub-modern would be a more valid title, to properly highlight the fact that it sucked larger donkey balls than most of what occured in the arts in modernism.
But what do I know, I'm just an engineer, and a stupid gaijin who does't use chopsticks when I eat chinese (food, I mean).
Wait a second... are you trying to tell me that you don't think you can BS your way through this paper? When in doubt, man, deconstruct! :-)
Be Seeing You,
Nathan
Re: 'Modern'...
Date: 2002-02-06 12:45 pm (UTC)Modern
Date: 2002-02-07 05:43 am (UTC)Re: Modern
Date: 2002-02-07 06:31 pm (UTC)