Some Things Have Changed, But Can't You Tell?

[rionaleonhart]

Here's a scientific experiment I'd like to see: give a group of literature students at university a novel to study. Have the tutor tell them it's generally considered a great work of literature and hand out pretentious critical essays on it. Ask the students what they think of its style, its themes, the book as a whole and so on. Tell them only afterwards that in fact it is generally considered not to be a great or even a particularly good work of literature: a Mills & Boon novel, perhaps?

You'd also need a control group of students who were given the book to read without the 'we're studying this; it's a highly respected work of literature' aspect, of course, and perhaps a third group who do hear that it's a respected work but don't receive the critical essays. I think the results could be genuinely interesting, or at least mildly amusing. Really, this is a concept born of how deeply dubious I was about some of the pretentious literary criticism we had to read on my course.

On a mostly unrelated note, although I suppose he is an English teacher:




(I've just realised that Josh Stevenson's Eevee represents not only his sexual confusion but the fact that he's easily influenced; an Eevee can be led down many different paths, after all. Yes.)

I was listening to 'Elle's Theme'* from Silent Hill: Homecoming when I was uploading this image, which, naturally, made me start thinking about how Tom would fare in Silent Hill. Perhaps that's why he's matured so much by the third series: he spent the summer holidays in Silent Hill, haunted by the entire tragic Lorna arc, and emerged determined never to hurt anyone like that again. There's one to add to the frustratingly long list of Waterloo Road Fics That Won't Exist Unless I Write Them Myself, then.

* The title of this entry - some things have changed, but can't you tell? - is how I hear the lyrics at 2.30. I can't find any online transcriptions of the lyrics that share this perception - some say some things have changed, what can't be new to them and some some things have changed, what can't be mortal - but I like my interpretation more, whether it's a mishearing or not.

Comments

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I get that with mondegreens a lot. There's a line in Going Underground that I misheard and preferred.

[rionaleonhart]

Ooh, what was the line?

(I'm sure there are many song lines that broke my heart by turning out not to be the line I thought they were. I'm cursing myself for not keeping a record of my mishearings anywhere.)

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

"Braying sheep on my TV screen
Make this boy shout, make this boy scream!"

For some reason I thought it was "until we turn to the TV screen, at this point shout, at this point scream" - a comment on the cynically manufactured faux rebellion. But no. Just being a stroppy teenager.

[rionaleonhart]

Well, I personally prefer the actual line, but only because I initially misinterpreted it as referring to actual sheep. I GET SO ANGRY ABOUT ALL THE TELEVISED SHEEP WHO THINK THEY ARE DONKEYS. SO ANGRY.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

The moral of the story is that neither of us are fit to be left alone with the radio.

[thrennion.livejournal.com]

I once misheard a line in 'Desire' by U2 as "like a pizza-stealing horse at a travelling show". The original line was "like a preacher stealing hearts at a travelling show", which I like an' all, but-but pizza-stealing horses.

[jekesta]

Whenever you talk about Silent Hill in my head you are setting things in Sun Hill, where The Bill was set. I might have told you so before, but I have been reading your journal for ages now, and it still takes me ages to remember that you're not for some reason really attached to a slightly boring bit of . . . London? Is Sun Hill in London? I don't know. In my head you will know, because in my head you're desperately in love with it and populate it with pokemon.

Also I think your student book experiment would be both brilliant and hilarious. I half think Mills and Boon would be a bit too obvious, the absolute strict formula/pacing/length is really obvious to anyone who's read a few. But some of the romantic fiction that isn't published as mills and boon and is pretending to be better than that would be excellent.

[rionaleonhart]

Your Sun Hill belief is making me giggle a lot. I have never watched The Bill, but in my head it is now a police drama set in Silent Hill. This is probably equally inaccurate.

You have a good point about Mills & Boon perhaps being a bit too transparent. Hmmm. (...I'm thinking about this as if I'm actually planning to carry it out, but I don't think that's going to happen.)

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

You would be an incredibly interesting teacher. Not necessarily a good one, but a fascinating one.

I'm fairly sure that one of these days I will write the Sherlock/Silent Hill crossover of doom, and it will be all your fault. (Also, it's really hard. I'm up to two things that actually bother Sherlock - boredom, and John being hurt, but that's not something you can base an entire town around, and for it to be a proper interesting Silent Hill, it has to be psychologically unique. John has more obvious stuff, but it's all too obvious, and I want something a bit more profound than "He was in a war, and then he came back and got kidnapped a lot."

[rionaleonhart]

I look forward to this day and will happily accept the blame! (Have you read thebaconfat's wonderful Silent Hill crossover with the original Holmes and Watson, by the way? It's over here if you haven't.)

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

Well, if you're going to accept the blame, you have to help me by answering this question!

Would it work for the two of them to be in Silent Hill together, and the town to veer between being really nasty to Watson and really fascinating for Sherlock (who meant to be keeping an eye on John, really he did, but there were so many clues) until finally John was both in rather nasty peril and not mentally together enough to handle himself, and Sherlock who'd been chasing clues was too far away and suddenly realized it, and it was this "You dragged your friend into danger, and spent the whole time trying to entertain yourself with a mystery instead of keeping a decent eye on him, and now he's going to die because of you!" guilt-moment that the town had been orchestrating the whole time?

Or has someone already done that? I'm going to read thebaconfat's fic, and it's going to turn out to have that exact plot, isn't it?

[rionaleonhart]

That sounds brilliant and I would read such a fic until it somehow fell apart despite being digital.

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

Now all I have to do is work out how to really break John, and not just disturb him, and I'll have something.

He sometimes gets disturbed by the war-murder-and-general-peril stuff, but he's shown that he can cope with all of that, so that doesn't work for the big guns. It'd have to be something a fair bit nastier, and there's so much surface-level stuff that it's hard to get a grip on what's underneath, if that makes any sense.

ETA: I've had an idea!

So, the whole place is quiet. Like spooky quiet. And neither one of them deals with the quiet and lack of action that well (monsters would be almost too easy). And there's this missing kid - no one they know, just a kid. And they're looking, and there are these screams that they hear from quite a long way away, and go chasing after. But they keep turning up too late, and there's bits of hair, and sometimes blood, and maybe, every once in a while, a finger.

Sherlock thinks it's fascinating. So many clues. So much evidence that's on the verge of adding up.

John knows that there's a kid, and he keeps being too late, and the kid's being hurt worse and worse because he's not fast enough. And he cares.

And it ties in with all of this other stuff, relating to kids he saw in the war who he couldn't help, and kids who were killed by his side as collateral damage, and people he couldn't save as a doctor, and basically all of the times he couldn't save people. And there are the usual spooky-supernatural Silent Hill coincidences, where I haven't filled in the details yet, so it all builds up to one big bundle of "People get hurt and you can't help them nearly enough, and you hurt people, because that's what you're good at" (he is an extremely good marksman, among other things), and then Sherlock's all "I'll go check the hotel, you go check down by the lake" and it all comes to a head.

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

That DOES sound like it could work, do the analytical versus the emotionally invested thing.

You can do SO MANY things with doctors in Silent Hill. It's no wonder that James Wilson from House MD didn't make it out of all James Silent Hill I did.

That, and Wilson was being an arse on the show.

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm trying to fill in bits so that there's at least some degree of supernatural creepiness. Bits that don't quite add up, so that Sherlock's looking for an even bigger and more complicated trick, and everything John sees stings just a little bit harder.

There will be monsters at some point, but not until they've been broken down enough. Put them in too early, and I think giving them something to fight would act as a release for the pressure I'm trying to build.

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

True, the monsters were built up slowly in the game as well.

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

And I think it would be quite hard to break John Watson in an obvious "There are monsters trying to kill you and Sherlock, you can help by fighting back, and if you break and lose it, you both might get killed" situation. He seems good at survival-mode.

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

Exactly, he's already been through a war. Probably not in a close combat situation, but still.

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

They've done a very similar thing with wines and wine-tasters!

a blog describing the experiments. (http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/11/the_subjectivity_of_wine.php)

Basically, wine experts were offered a glass of white wine and red wine, and were asked to describe it, EXCEPT that both glasses were the same white wine, but one glass had food colouring added. The second experiment involved pouring the same decent wine into two different bottles, one looking cheap and one looking fancy, and then asking the experts for their opinion. The results are hilarious.

[rionaleonhart]

Ooh, yes, I'd forgotten about that! I think I read about it in Boese's Elephants on Acid, which I purchased on your recommendation (and very much enjoyed, so thanks!).

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

:D

It is an AMAZING read, I loved it and kept spouting the ridiculous factoids to friends. I still love the turkey mating experiment bit that was interspersed with 'oh, by the way, this young man in the 17th century was sentenced for shagging a turkey'.

But I expect that your idea would probably have a similar result, in that people go 'oh yes, interesting themes bla bla bla pretentious literary criticism' over a book that they've been told is prestigious and go 'pff, it was shite' over one they've been told isn't proper literature.

[yumiboo.livejournal.com]

asdfghjkl, i love that experiment idea! Though the ethics form that i would need to fill in for it would kill me ;~~;

[rionaleonhart]

I was wondering about the ethical obstacles; it's very tricky to perform experiments without informing participants beforehand that they'll be taking part in an experiment, and obviously that might make them suspicious. Oh, dear.

[yumiboo.livejournal.com]

Well, there's that, the deception factor, and the fact that it could disrupt a student's education - that'd be a large factor in this, so if you were going to do this, you'd have to make sure that there were no ramifications on important grades :/ *le sob*

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

Do it on alumni instead? That way, you don't get in the way of their education, at least.

You could always introduce the thing by saying that you're merely studying the way alumni of English Lit respond to literature versus alumni of other areas, with a lot of 'bla bla we want to know how much knowing about English literature beforehand influences the response', something like that.

[yumiboo.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a plan :)

[hold-onhope.livejournal.com]

That would be an awesome experiment. We discuss in some of my classes what constitutes the literature canon, and often the students agree that most of the classics? Boring. Now, that's of course because we live in this post-modern era where popular culture is just plain different, and we study the classics to see where we've come from, etc. But still, I see a lot of academics - one of my professors in particular, who I don't like for many reasons, and this is only one of them - who rarely consider anything from today's popular culture to be "literary", whatever the hell that even means.

So yeah, your experiment would be really interesting, and it could also be done the other way around: tell a bunch of students that the work they're reading is crap even though it's (secretly) critically acclaimed, and then see their reactions. Personally I think people tend to be more likely to criticize something than defend it, even if they do think it's good, because they want to fit in with a society who tells them it's bad.

[saaski-moql.livejournal.com]

Judging from my past responses in my (way too many) English classes, I feel I can safely say that, were I in the first group and I disliked the book, many of my papers would be written in a very thinly veiled WHY IS THIS CONSIDERED A CLASSIC tone. That's how I'd probably also lead my discussions.

[spencerpine.livejournal.com]

That's a wonderful idea. They've done experiments like this with wine tasting.

[ladyofshallnot.livejournal.com]

Any lit student worth their salt would want to know why something written in 20th century romance novel-ese is showing up in their classical lit course, and possibly demand whether or not the professor is smoking something.

It would be sort of hilarious in a 101 class, though.

[rionaleonhart]

Well, it wouldn't necessarily have to be a classical literature course; one of my modules for my degree was English Literature 1919-Present. (There was a great moment in a lecture towards the end of the course; we'd been talking about modernism and postmodernism for weeks, and then:

Lecturer: Does anyone here feel confident that they know what postmodernism means?
Entire Lecture Hall: (silence)

An entire year's worth of literature students, just bluffing their way through.)

[ladyofshallnot.livejournal.com]

You could totally analyze a modern romance novel for the overarching themes and character choices in modern women's lit, though. :D

[suthnoli.livejournal.com]

Yes! Yes! I would like this experiment also! My dissertation advisor did her PhD on Reader Response theory, so I'm pretty sure she would actually go for it.

My mum thinks this experiment is basically being done on us in reverse, since one of my courses for this year has set The French Lieutenant's Woman.

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