Literature: October 2007 Archive Page

Structure, Sign, and Play

An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida

"There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: "Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an 'event', if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect."

The concept is clever, though the implementation is a bit shaky... for example, one room mentions a spiral staircase, but when you type "climb staircase" the game says "You don't see any such thing."

I created a new handout that focuses on the efficient use of quoted material in MLA-style papers. Some of this material used to be part of a more general handout on using sources, but I think it will be more useful if I pull it out and create a new handout.

An MLA-style paper does not ask you to give the full name and credentials of your sources in the body of your paper, or even the full title of your source. (Save that information for the Works Cited list.)

In high school, where you might write a whole paper using only one or two sources, you got points for calling attention to the fact that you found a good source and were able to use it successfully in a paper. But in a paper you write for college, you may use three or four different sources in the same paragraph, and you may refer to several additional sources without actually quoting from them. If you bring your essay to a screeching halt in order to introduce the full name and credentials of each author, you will bury whatever argument you were trying to make.