We've got a tie! So use this to break the tie!
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
The Power of Language (Satanic Verses)
I am way behind with the club and just finished The Satanic Verses! I thought I'd post since I haven't been able to make it to the meetings lately.
One of my favorite quotations was this:
"Jumpy en route to his mistress tried to convince himself that his resentments of Hanif, his friend Hanif, were primarily - how to put it? - linguistic. Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power... Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true." (281)
This passage is just one of many in the book dealing with the power of language - there are the poets who speak their poems aloud, the prophets who change the course of history through their words, the voice-over artists who can portray so many different characters. It is ironic (or perhaps appropriate?), then, that the novel itself caused so much protest and violence. A novel about the power of language, whose author is hated and threatened by many in real life. I am appalled and fascinated that the protesters allowed the language in this book to have such power over them, and to cause them such fear.
One of my favorite quotations was this:
"Jumpy en route to his mistress tried to convince himself that his resentments of Hanif, his friend Hanif, were primarily - how to put it? - linguistic. Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power... Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true." (281)
This passage is just one of many in the book dealing with the power of language - there are the poets who speak their poems aloud, the prophets who change the course of history through their words, the voice-over artists who can portray so many different characters. It is ironic (or perhaps appropriate?), then, that the novel itself caused so much protest and violence. A novel about the power of language, whose author is hated and threatened by many in real life. I am appalled and fascinated that the protesters allowed the language in this book to have such power over them, and to cause them such fear.
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