A (Slightly) New Direction

After class last week, I was talking with Annalee about our topic/working theses. Annalee is writing about The Count of Monte Cristo, and how existentiality and loss of identity were prevalent themes in both Count of Monte Cristo and Alice in Wonderland as a result of their respective historical contexts, which sounds really interesting. I proposed my thesis idea to her—how I wanted to talk about how language affects the characters in both Anthem and Alice—and she expressed enthusiasm in my topic as well and agreed that it would be a paper worth writing.

I received some helpful comments when I posted my “tweethis” on the blog as well. Although Sophie is discussing childhood and authority figures in As I Lay Dying, she still recognized that language affects things within her story, too. My professor provided a useful external source discussing the relationship between thought and language, and Adam suggested narrowing my thesis to focus on how the language affects the different contextual mediums (governmental opposition vs. imagination), which is also a possible angle I could take on this paper.

Then I proposed my working tweethis to my friend Alyssa, and she suggested a different direction. She asked me how language affects the story in Alice in Wonderland, and I realized that the language seems to distort reality in Wonderland more than it affects Alice’s thoughts, and that the same could be said about language distorting reality in Anthem. But then again, reality is just how we perceive things, so that ties into thought as well.

So then I went back and read a comment on a former post and saw a comment that Annalee had posted that I'd previously overlooked--a suggestion to look at the language from the lens of identity. This seems to have more relevance to both novels and I think this would be a really interesting direction for my paper.