A Little Paper Story

When we were asked to bring a favorite book to class, I didn't fully realize that those would be the books that we wrote our papers on.  So I just brought my favorite book, A Little Princess.  I wasn't very pleased when I realized that I would have to compare that book to Alice in Wonderland in a paper, because it didn't seem like the type of book that would work very well for a paper.  I also couldn't see anything those two books had in common.  Fortunately, I discovered along the way that it is very possible to write a paper on A Little Princess and that both books do have things in common.

Unexpected Benefits of English Symposium

Creative Commons License 2.0 / tripu

 When I went to English Symposium, I didn't expect it to be very helpful for my paper, especially considering that the panel I attended was entitled "Teaching Harry Potter."  I'm not an English teaching major and Harry Potter didn't seem to have much to do with A Little Princess or Alice in Wonderland.  I just went because they were talking about Harry Potter.  I thought that maybe I could get some tips on using a seemingly non-academic book for an academic paper.  I also thought it might be somewhat helpful to see how they used their sources in analyzing the text.  While attending the panel was helpful in that respect, it was helpful in other ways that were more specific to my paper as well.

Why Tell Stories?

In A Little Princess, Sara Crewe is always imagining something and often tells stories about what she imagines. She even sometimes seems to see the things she imagines as being real in a way. Although many of the other students are fascinated by her stories, many people also say that this tendency is strange. My question is what exactly is the good of fictional stories? Clearly there is a good to them. They help Sara survive her hardest times, and they help real people too. There are people who would say that a belief in impossible things can even be unhealthy. So, are stories, especially the truly unrealistic ones such as Sara’s fancy of rats being people or Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole, unhealthy or do they do a lot of good? Why?

I plan to circulate this mostly through Goodreads, but I may also give Facebook a try. I also have a couple of past English teachers that it might be good to contact.

In Which a Princess Goes Down the Rabbit Hole

For my paper, I will be comparing Alice in Wonderland and A Little Princess. I never would have even tried to compare these two books before, because they seem extremely different at first glance. However, after thinking it over a bit, I think I can see a bit of similarity between the main characters, Alice and Sara. So that’s kind of what my thesis will be about. It will probably change a bit, but here it is so far:

Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Sara, from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, are both little girls with active imaginations and a way of looking at things that others might consider strange. Sara uses these traits to escape her world while Alice must use them to accept the world she’s in, but they both need these traits in order to cope with their situations.

Here We See the Self Conscious Writer in her Natural Habitat

I am a perfectionist. Generally, that’s not really so bad, but it gets to be a problem when I have a paper to write. You see, I hate to read what I've written, because I know that it will never be good enough to satisfy me. Of course, I force myself to read over it a few times before turning it in, but it can be hard.

If I don’t like to read my own writing, then I like the idea of someone else reading it even less. However, when I really can’t force myself to read it yet or just don’t trust my own opinion, there are a few people I will allow to read my very imperfect paper. Those people are my parents, my roommate, and my brother.

My Family:  my Mom, me, my Dad, my older brother, my sister, and my younger brother