Plan for the Day
- Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (Parts III, IV, & V)
- Who’s the narrator?
- Next Week and Beyond
Poetry and Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17
What’s the goal of poetry? What’s the purpose of poetry in this novel? What contrast do you see with computer languages and poetry?
- Perhaps we ought to read Ezra’s Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913)
You can’t judge a book by its cover (although this is a great cover+book), but you can read quite a bit from covers. Take a look at these Babel-17 covers:
- “Think galactic” (original???)
- 1978 version
- Vicente Segrelles’s Bantam edition, 1982
- Current Cover
- There are more at Amazing Stories
Part III Key Lines
After the crew gets captured, things get weird. Sure, they were weird before, but they just get weirder:
- p. 125: “If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it?”
- p. 143: “Simulate severe depression, non-communicative, with repressed hostility.”
- Propaganda?
- p. 151: “Once you learn it, it makes everything so easy.”
- p. 159: “…implanted below the level of hypnotics by many painful hours under the personafix.”
- indoctrination
- p. 169: “The best way to learn a language is by listening to it.”
- socialization
Next Week
We’re not going to be in class for the next three meetings. You have Fall Break on Monday (10/23), Inception (2010) on Wednesday, and Interstellar (2014) on Monday, (10/30). I’m moving your Essay #2 back to Wednesday, November 1st–not October 30th as the syllabus says. Canvas will have the submission open next week.
After we get back face to face, we’ll discuss Octavia Butler’s Dawn and then Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. Fit them into your schedule.