Fancy Old People Who were Important to Our parents.

For the last couple of days I have been reading a book called The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein. The book talks about how our generation is not capitalizing on learning with the many resources we have. It also stresses how technology is making us dumber. While I don’t agree with most of it, the book does bring up an excellent debatable question. Is technology making us dumber as a society? In our class discussions I frequently find myself clueless when Dr. Tiff asks about a famous person in history. But if she ever asked about anyone famous person in the last 30 years I could tell her something about them. Personally I don’t find many of the historical pieces appealing to read. On almost any day I would pick a magazine over a book. Not to say that the book isn’t good, but a magazine tells us about what is current and new, which makes me think more progressively instead of trying to figure out a complex plot. So my question to you is “Do you feel that technology has a negative effect on society? An also how does it affect literature?”

Archetypes and Subalterns...

In class yesterday, Dr. Tiff discussed the role of subalterns in the novel. I thought that it was interesting that throughout the novel, the main action was taken through these subalterns.

This discussion of subalterns made me think of another type of character analysis: the character archetypes. Archetypes are the "original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all." (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype). In The Calcutta Chromosome, none of the characters seem to take on the complete traits of any one archetype. Why is this? Could this have anything to do with why Ghosh uses mainly subaltern characters?