Why do people pay no attention at all to the context of quotes!! My dash just threw up a perfectly fine sentence about entropy and human endeavors -- from Camille Paglia. Ughhh.
Because people seem to never pay any attention to the context of anything ever--students are trained to just toss quotes in without paying any attention to the context or engagement with the larger argument (context!) around them. Why yes, I am bitter, cynical, and jaded.....
What is it that's so wrong with the way that we, culturally, think of quotation, that we fall so easily into such lazy ways? The whole point of quotation is engagement. To quote a quote that you don't fully understand ... why do it?
(the one place where I cannot handle adaptations of beloved texts is when the Internet starts attributing movie lines to authors that those authors absolutely would positively never have written, see Tolkien and that wretched "something worth fighting for" bit)
Of course I deal mostly with students, but I will say that it's often refreshing to read internet stuff because it makes me look more kindly on my students because people are so bad at engaging with ideas!
I'm not sure that it's a new phenomenon -- or that the internet makes it much more visible (as it makes so much else much more visible!), but there is some excellent work being done by a composition scholar on how students handle quoting, attribution, etc. in their first-year essays.
Here's an article by a journalist (the title says it all) that I have my students read and summarize as an introduction to all the work I try to do with them on summarizing in their own words, contextualizing the source, etc:
the Internet starts attributing movie lines to authors that those authors absolutely would positively never have written, see Tolkien and that wretched "something worth fighting for" bit)
Heh, don't get me started on how students identify character dialogue as the personal opinions of the author....there's a lot of grumpiness (totally valid) among Tolkien scholars who are incensed by the reviews of Jackson's films that slide into blaming Tolkien for the racism--which is not to that there aren't problem areas in Tolkien, but Jackson's are his own problem areas. So yeah, sloppy.
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lotesse
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Date: 2018-12-23 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-30 05:12 am (UTC)(the one place where I cannot handle adaptations of beloved texts is when the Internet starts attributing movie lines to authors that those authors absolutely would positively never have written, see Tolkien and that wretched "something worth fighting for" bit)
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Date: 2018-12-31 10:30 pm (UTC)I'm not sure that it's a new phenomenon -- or that the internet makes it much more visible (as it makes so much else much more visible!), but there is some excellent work being done by a composition scholar on how students handle quoting, attribution, etc. in their first-year essays.
Here's an article by a journalist (the title says it all) that I have my students read and summarize as an introduction to all the work I try to do with them on summarizing in their own words, contextualizing the source, etc:
Skimming the Surface.
the Internet starts attributing movie lines to authors that those authors absolutely would positively never have written, see Tolkien and that wretched "something worth fighting for" bit)
Heh, don't get me started on how students identify character dialogue as the personal opinions of the author....there's a lot of grumpiness (totally valid) among Tolkien scholars who are incensed by the reviews of Jackson's films that slide into blaming Tolkien for the racism--which is not to that there aren't problem areas in Tolkien, but Jackson's are his own problem areas. So yeah, sloppy.