(no subject)

[lollardfish]

Ok sci-fi fans, what are your favorite science-fiction utopias? I'm thinking about teaching a class on utopias next year, and want to use some reasonably contemporary fiction (as well as Plato, More, Bellamy, Lost Horizon, SimCity, and other stuff).

Comments

[neogrammarian.livejournal.com]

non-AP-worthy. Piffle. You know as well as I do that a clever essay about an out-of-the-ordinary novel stands out from the crowd and can attract positive notice to a student's college app.

"many of them have seen the musical"....sometimes I forget how culturally challenged much of the US is, simply on account of its isolation, and distance from major cities. Here I am, an English professor; yet I've never gotten to see the show, b/c it's never toured anywhere vaguely near anywhere I've lived. (Tho it did finally tour through a place I -used- to live, but I didn't have the time for the 16-hr roundtrip drive to go see it.)

Ah well. Perhaps someday.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

You know as well as I do that a clever essay about an out-of-the-ordinary novel stands out from the crowd and can attract positive notice to a student's college app.

You have no idea how many stupid and insecure and parochial and unimaginative and ignorant and bull-headed and canon-worshipping so-called "AP English teachers" there are on my list. For every three or four who do know this about student essays, there is one who thinks if it's not written on The Scarlet Letter, it won't get a top score.

And then there are those who believe that The Kite Runner is the literary achievement of the generation...

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Riffing on a related topic: my partner's daughter had to audition for entry to Houston's arts magnet school. As she was applying to the musical-theater program, her audition requirement was to perform a piece "from any published musical." Her choice? The opening number from the musical episode of BTVS, which had aired the previous season.

The judges loved it! One of them (himself a Buffy fan, as it turned out) nearly fell off his chair laughing when she announced what she'd be singing. And it most certainly was NOT something they'd already heard 6 or 8 times that day. We are convinced that her having the creativity to do that was part of the reason she got in.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Nice! This pleases me.