Had a meeting with my English teacher today to discuss my Personal Study - a 4000 word dissertation on two books of our choice. The result was thus
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Stranger than fiction
anonymous
December 1 2005, 09:37:23 UTC
"A Study of the relationship between fiction and autobiography in 'Slaughterhouse 5' and 'Lanark'."
Sometimes it can seem that academic subject matter is so far removed from any tangible, meaninful process in practice that is studied as a thesis and left forever more as just this ...
The dissertation you describe, however, appears to carry some significant relevance to the situation we are in today. I don't know whether you've thought about it before - I expect not, it's a little abstract in itself - but the merging of fiction and autobiography applies as much to the post-modern corporate environment as well as it does the post-modern novel.
Entrepreneurs and politicians alike use the fine lines between fiction and autobiography to maximise publicity and attract capital and support to their causes all the time.
I'v always said - from my experience - that writing a novel is rather like telling an enormoous lie, in that you have to keep 'tweaking' the details to make them stack up convicingly.
If you can take the analytical process of this thesis and apply it to examining any type of news and current affairs (most of which is by necessity of human error and bias, spun) it seems to be that you might well really be onto something. Very powerful.
Sometimes it can seem that academic subject matter is so far removed from any tangible, meaninful process in practice that is studied as a thesis and left forever more as just this ...
The dissertation you describe, however, appears to carry some significant relevance to the situation we are in today. I don't know whether you've thought about it before - I expect not, it's a little abstract in itself - but the merging of fiction and autobiography applies as much to the post-modern corporate environment as well as it does the post-modern novel.
Entrepreneurs and politicians alike use the fine lines between fiction and autobiography to maximise publicity and attract capital and support to their causes all the time.
I'v always said - from my experience - that writing a novel is rather like telling an enormoous lie, in that you have to keep 'tweaking' the details to make them stack up convicingly.
If you can take the analytical process of this thesis and apply it to examining any type of news and current affairs (most of which is by necessity of human error and bias, spun) it seems to be that you might well really be onto something. Very powerful.
Daniel (http://danielmarkharrison.blogs.com)
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