English vs. Proper English

Lately, I have been exploring what has been effective in general language acquisition. Especially as one learns to read proficiently. 

Further sparked by different perspectives on etymology; the spoken thinkers in the course provided me things to compare prior materials with. It has given me a new outlook on what it means to be a part of the English craft at CNU.  I would be completely a Lewis advocate, if you in another timeline, placed me as one of the students in Oxford in the 20th century. 

Last semester I exposed myself to Anglo-Saxon Literature. This semester I am touching on the theorists post 1950's and the works of Lewis here in 451. I will not lie I favor Narnia over work made in the 1300's. Therefore I support Lewis, but I suppose I will never know what qualities come with favoring newer work. I suppose I will find this out. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

McDermott The Social Ethic

  My final paper for my honors seminar was about how Americans form their moral compasses and one of the things I researched for it was called the “Social Ethic.” It describes the tendency to submit yourself, as an individual, to the whims of the group, such as religious organizations or political parties. I think that myth can be a tool of the social ethic – in this sense, reason can function as an organization or group. Reason relies on imagination (we perceive the senses through it), and while too much pure logic can be bad, so can too much imagination. For example, back when the pandemic hit there were a bunch of people who said that they were immune to covid because they didn’t have the right “waves” for it to transmit to them because their political party and the people within it told them so (a view relying almost entirely on imagination with very little science to back it up, if any at all). It was almost like mob mentality. We saw this happen in Big Fish . The son was affe...
Read more

Tyler van Opstal "Inklings Apart"

    In the 1968 Understanding Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings (alternatively titled The Tolkien Relation ) by William Ready, C.S. Lewis is mentioned more regularly than anyone but Tolkien himself. This itself is entirely rational, Lewis having been another member of the Inklings club to which Tolkien also belonged, but the treatment of Lewis by Ready is often strange or otherwise notable.     Lewis is first mentioned in Understanding Tolkien in the first chapter, after Ready discusses the Andrew Lang lecture by Tolkien that we read at the beginning of class to lay a framework for how myth and story can be understood. Ready takes umbrage with what he sees as an unfair treatment of Tolkien by scholars, blaming the fame of Lewis for coloring their opinions of him (Dr. Thompson states it is his recollection that Lewis was indeed more famous than Tolkien prior to the LotR movies). Ready complains that "Tolkien has been tarred by [Lewis'] brush" and that the resulting mi...
Read more

Tyler van Opstal "Here There Be Dragons"

     In Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet , when the protagonist has his revelation about the nature of Space and its true identity as the Heavens, he is realizing that the maps of the storytellers are more accurate than any map that science can produce. And if the storytellers can chart the stars better than the physicists, then perhaps the storytellers also charted the seas better than the satellites have.      Many older maps feature creatures and gods. Even when the explorers had discovered the world was a sphere and that there was not a giant cliff at the end of a flat world guarded by dragons, storytellers continued to etch their maps with "Here there be dragons." The winds remained portrayed by the four wind gods perched in the map corners, and the sketches of great serpents in the oceans were kept. The storytellers understood that it did not matter whether there were literal dragons and wyverns lurking in and above the ocean, the danger they represent...
Read more