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AmericanExile
Joined: 04 May 2009
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 Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:34 am Post subject: |
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| peppermint wrote: |
| AmericanExile wrote: |
| peppermint wrote: |
| Moby Dick's not for everyone, and I prefer Benito Cereno, if we're talking Melville, but I still think you overreacted. |
You seem determined to make this about me not liking Moby Dick. All I said was I didn't like the opening line. The rest is flawed assumption on your part.
My issue has nothing to do with Moby Dick which is an inanimate object, and being such hurts noone. My issue has everything to do with people not thinking for themselves which causes no end of problems.
Overreacted - hardly. |
I'd call pitching a hissy fit over this overreacting, yeah, but then I'm not a drama queen.
Not thinking for themselves? I've never been inside an American classroom, but Melville is not considered nearly as iconic an author elsewhere, I assure you. I was studying Atwood, and Orwell and Shakespeare and Golding in high school, along with a few more local authors. No Melville during my English degree either, and a very bare minimum of American lit, mostly poetry. Comparing Melville to Beethoven is a bit rich, don't you think? I'd speculate that only Shakespeare or perhaps Chaucer would be fitting equivalents.
I happen to be reading the book now is the thing, and really loving it. With that bit of background info, do you care to explain how I'm a conformist? |
That's just silly. I disagreed. Strongly? Yes. I do disagree strongly. However, I made a reasoned argument. You may disagree strongly. It might have bothered you. I may have hurt your feelings. You might want an apology. You might think I'm full of it.
Any of that I could understand. I might disagree, but I could understand. However, "hissy fit" makes no sense to me. That characterization makes it clear you and I are not communicating well in this format. This is the third such moment in this series of posts. These constant misunderstandings disincentivize attempting to have a conversation with you.
I wish you well. |
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.38 Special
Joined: 08 Jul 2009
Location: Pennsylvania
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| Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 4:09 pm Post subject: Re: A response to peppermint |
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[quote="AmericanExile"]
| peppermint wrote: |
| AmericanExile wrote: |
| ThingsComeAround wrote: |
| Call me Ishmael |
Absolutely not. No. It's terrible. I tend to believe people say this because their teacher said so in High School, but it's boring. This gets my vote for worst opening line ever, and anyone who thinks it is great should be nominated for the conformist of the year award. |
Someone's got issues when it comes to Moby Dick apparently. |
Your response was ad hominem. Ad hominem responses are inappropriate in civilized conversation. Therefore, your reaction was inappropriate, and so an overreaction.
"Call me Ishmael" was a very unorthodox first line in a novel at that time. Particularly, Melville wrote in the Gothic period contemporary to the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Poe, and others. In the Gothic tradition (and the British novel, as American literature was still quite wedded to it at that time), novels typically began dramatically or poetically. Moby Dick defied this convention and the gentle mystery in the words (as aforementioned, "call me" v. "my name is") exacerbated the effect the line and the novel had upon successive fictions.
So there you go. Do with that information as you will. If you still want to insist that Moby Dick isn't obscure enough for reference on an irrelevant internet forum, then God bless, but please be civil. |
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