Michael Crichton's State of Fear is, in my opinion, the hardest book we're reading in this class—nevermind that it's written at about a fourth-grade reading level and the plot and characters are paint-by-numbers formulaic. I'm thinking instead of my consistent response: I'll be reading along through the action and data and 'footnotes,' and find myself thinking 'huh, maybe climate change is a big hoax; this winter was awfully cold after all.' Then I realize that I KNOW BETTER. I keep getting seduced by the story and plot; it bloody works.
Crichton has produced an extremely tight, often inscrutably knotted hybrid of research, rhetoric, ideology, history, publics, blackboxes, seeing devices...and a whole lot more. Our task, over the next three weeks, is to untangle it and figure out how it works. Here, we make the first step.
Your assignment: react to the book — or what you've read of it thus far.
(Try to get about 300-400 pages into it before responding, to get a decent grasp of the whole. It shouldn't take too long.)
Your reaction may take many forms, and go in many different directions, but it should include each of the following:
-- at least one passage from the front or back matter,
-- at least one passage from the text of the novel itself (see the work schedule for the passages I found most noteworthy),
-- at least one term/concept from science studies (hybrids, paradigms, seeing devices, public relations, economics, rhetoric, 'literature' and arguments, black boxes, etc.), and
-- at least one term/concept from literary studies (like, high school stuff: characters, tone, narrative/narrator, language, etc.--how the book works on us).
Don't-bore-your-friends (or your instructor) Prime Directive: when you post, do look at what's been posted already and try to add to the discussion, bringing in new passages and concepts and ideas, rather than rehashing points that've already been made. There's no shortage of material here -- be bold!
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