Monday, March 10, 2014

Anthem in Wonderland: A Linguistic Approach

We're writing a big paper in our writing literary criticism class, and I'm going to contrast Anthem by Ayn Rand with Through the Looking Glass and/or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. At first I was thinking about taking a generic approach--maybe trying to argue that Carroll's Wonderland is a dystopia, just as the world in Anthem is a dystopia, but let's be real. I love analyzing language way too much to pass up the opportunity to do so here.

So I'm thinking about writing something about how language controls thought in Anthem as well as in Carroll's works. What do you guys think?

5 comments:

  1. This would be interesting! It reminds me of the book I'm analyzing, As I Lay Dying. In that book, the language of the narrators is so different than the language they use in their dialogue. In this case, I see a disparity between language and thought, or that thought might affect language. However, you are taking the opposite stance, and I think that that would make for an arguable thesis. I'd love to see more detail and examples of how language controls thought!

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  2. That's a really interesting point, actually. It's like the whole "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" concept--which comes first, language or thought? Maybe they're codependent on one another. I'll have to think about that some more.

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  3. The language-thought correlation is a lively and contested concept. Check out the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" for one thing. I'm sure this has been applied to literary analysis and would be a good starting point, even if not about the works or authors you mention.

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  4. You're right, language plays a huge role in both of those books, which makes that subject ripe for the picking! Both of them are very dependent on the use of language to shape thought. Maybe you could emphasize the different mediums -- one being an oppressive government, the other a child's imagination -- to demonstrate the universal thought-molding power of words.

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