The editor's note at the beginning of today's reading reminded me of the quotation "there are no new stories. Only new ways of telling them" (Clive Barker) because it seems as though Mary Shelly's novel is pieced together from existing thoughts and ideas from other works. I suppose you could say her novel is much like the monster that lives inside it: using the choicest pieces to create a horror.
I think the stories in the contextual documents sound sort of like scripture which makes them difficult to read. The second story we read seemed like it had no point. It was a small narrative on how terrible this young man's life was. Were we even told his name? (I just want to pause to mention that in this paragraph I have already used words associated with talking and not reading and writing like Manguel had written about in the reading out loud section.) And the next story talked of matrices so much, that I couldn't get the movie out of my head long enough to pay attention to what else what being said. Did anyone else have that problem? I even started to hear Laurence Fishburne (the actor that portrays Morpheus) narrate on page 202. I immediately tried to not hear him, but it just switched to James Earl Jones! I am glad we did not get such a deep discussion in The Lion King as we do in Paracelsus.
I think the reason I found this reading fairly boring is because it was written in a dialect that I just cannot relate to. No one talks this way anymore unless they are quoting some old written text. Shelley's writing was much easier to read and more enjoyable. I also found it difficult to find something to talk about in length. Do you agree?
1 comment:
I struggled with the contextual documents too, especially the one on chemistry. But I really enjoyed the short selections from Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. For me, the most difficult thing about Humphry Day's chemistry selection was that he seemed to keep talking and talking, but he was not really getting at anything substantial. I feel like the editor should have included more from Percy Shelley and Wollstonecraft while Humphry Day's piece should have been trimmed down a lot. Like you, I really struggled with how he wrote because we don't talk like that today.
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