TCD Renegade Rant and Rave - Issue 2

THE(RENeGADe)

RANT AND RAVE

Issue l, Hilary 20llIssue 2, MIchaelMas TerM 2011

Table of Contents

Featured Lecturer 3Dr. Jarlath Killeen

Letter from the Editors 2Natasha Calder and Kathleen Gallagher

1The Renegade Rant and Rave

Things to Consider 12The Original Ranters

Analysis 5FightClub and ExistentialismTorchwood and the Nature of Evil

‘Patience’ by the Pearl PoetRiver Song: from Badass to Clinger

9Reviews

Captin AmericaNever Say Never

How to be a Woman

The Renegade Rant and Rave

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Welcome back to another year or, indeed, welcome to your first ever year, at Trinity College

Dublin, the place that Joyce described as “the grey block ... set heavily in the city’s ignorance”. The world is looking pretty bleak and grey at the moment. Not to men-tion the horrors of war and the natural disasters, but there’s this god awful recession that seems to have been going on for so long now that we may as well call it a depression and just face up to being in the depths of bad times, but I’m sure a qualified economist could give you the details on this sort of nomenclature.

We all know, of course, that the very first cuts happen in the arts. Maybe this is fair. Maybe what we need is more engineers and fewer English graduates desperately prostituting their education as transferable skills in order to get any kind of work. Maybe philosophy and litera-ture really is only something you can only do when you’ve sorted out all those more pressing situations – a luxury that no one could really afford before the Athenians, and just look what happened to them. Maybe this is all fair and practical and above board.

Alternatively, maybe this is simply lacking in foresight. The arts can provide visionaries and great minds that can make a serious difference in the world, because never mind if we can build really great bridges; if we cannot, as a peoples, engage our heads with a whole num-ber of issues, then we’re really stuck, because progress is not just measured in the heights of skyscrapers and 0-60 stats of the latest cars, but in terms of what people think, what they’re interested in and what their personal opinions are.

ARTS STUDENTS, if nothing else, can think. If we’re talking about transferable skills, every single arts students is forced to learn self-expression, and should have the skill and ability to express thoughts and ideas in a whole range of situations. Caitlin Moran’s new book How to be a Woman is probably going to make more of an impact on the lives of more people this year than the work at CERN.

Here at The Rant and Rave, we want to encourage that kind of expression, we want to provide a place for students of all disciplines to get involved and say what they really think, from the last Harry Potter film to the state of the arts and education, away from the constraints of essays and formal assessment. Here at The Rant and Rave, we think it really matters that you have something to say.

Yours truly,

Natasha and Kathleen

(The ediTors)

Letter from the Editors

2

Dear Ranters and Ravers,


Featured Lecturer

The Renegade Rant and Rave3

We are in the middle of a culture war, and far too many of us in the humanities are sleepwalk-ing our way through it. Arts and Humanities are under attack. And I don’t mean simply that our funding is being undermined by politicians with little imagination, or the bureaucrats who intellectually sustain them. I don’t mean, either, under assault from the usual suspects; the pro-ponents of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, or whatever the political flavour of the day happens

to be. These are merely the guerrilla soldiers of a much more persistent and dangerous enemy who often comes in benign and reasonable looking guises, guises that many of us in the univer-sity have been persuaded to embrace as friendly. It is often said, as a defence of the university

itself, that one of the reasons for its existence is the pursuit of ‘TruTh’, however unpalatable that truth happens to be. This rather lofty and grandiose goal is a difficult one to argue against, but the problem is that very many believe that a specific kind of methodology is the only real and certain way we can gain any true or reliable knowledge of the world, that certain knowledge can only be gained through a conjunction of RATIONALISM AND EVIDENTIALISM. You know some of the names of those who have been making such an argument very loudly: ‘celeb’ academics and public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, A. C. Gray-ling, Sam Harris, and a host of others have dominated public discussion and say more or less exactly the same thing on this matter. It has become the default position in our public discussion.

A good example of the intellectual imperialism of proponents of the ‘scientific method’ can be seen in the writings of the former Professor of Chemistry at Oxford, Peter Atkins. He has belligerently argued that science is an omnicompetent discipline and that it has effectively rendered obsolete other activities such as poetry and philosophy and theology as serious endeav-ours to understand humanity, leaving them for enjoyment during our leisure hours. In a well-known and much admired 1995 essay, ominously entitled ‘The Limitless Power of Science’, Atkins claimed that “Although poets may aspire to understanding, their talents are more akin to entertaining self-deception. They may be able to emphasise delight in the world, but they are deluded if they and their admirers believe that their identification of the delights and their use of poignant language are enough for comprehension. Philosophers too, I am afraid, have contributed to the understanding little more than poets…They have not contributed much that is novel until after novelty has been discovered by scientists…While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates”. Take that, Immanuel Kant and John Keats.

The arts, philosophy, and especially theology are mere luxuries (indeed, for most of these ideologues of certainty, theology is less of a luxury and more of an intellectual pollutant), and science is the only really intellectual necessity. While rhetorically extreme, Atkins’ view is hardly an uncommon one, and can be heard lurking behind the more banal questions asked of academ-ics and students of the Humanities every day: What do you do? What for? What purpose does it serve? Why should anyone care? Why should you be funded by the hard-pressed tax payer? It is important to note that Atkins and his fellow travellers are not ques-tioning the good of the humanities in general terms.

More Rant than Rave


Featured Lecturer


These are cultured men and women. Hobbies, however, should not be confused with the seri-ous business of life. The implication of Atkins’ rhetoric is that philosophers, poets, dramatists, perhaps even literary critics, can sometimes say things in a very beautiful way, but that if their statements are not capable of being supported by the ‘scientific method’, then it would be better if they not say it at all; the things that theologians say, of course, should be discounted completely. Accompanying this despair at the intellectual sloppiness of poetry, theology and philosophy is a conviction that science could do the things poets, theologians and philosophers do, only so much better. In a startling chapter of his book Dreams of a Final Theory (1992), the Nobel Prize win-ning physicist Steven Weinberg proclaims himself ‘against philosophy’, and announces that soon science will be able to take over and answer with certainty the kinds of questions that had, until now, been left to the likes of Plato and Aristotle. He must now be relieved to know that this has happened. Last year Atkins published the book that answers all the questions you might have thought needed a bit of pondering. His On Being, modestly subtitled, A scientist’s exploration of the great questions of existence, is effectively a P45 to academically employed philosophers all over the world and reduces, as far as he can see, the discipline of philosophy to a branch of His-tory (the history of obscurantism and superstition).

I should say here that the problem is neither science nor scientists but a certain view of the scientific method that appears to have seeped into the intellectual ether. Not only are the writings of these very articulate and rhetorically persuasive ideologues wildly popular, but more importantly they articulate the often inchoate and impressionistic sense of those with more power and authority than wisdom, that the Humanities are a problem that need to be solved. We are confronted with a coherent and powerful world view that will not be dissuaded by claims that the Humanities teach something called ‘critical thinking’ (since this suggests that our colleagues in other faculties are incapable of real thought), or, to be honest, the argument that we impart something called ‘active citizenship’ to our students (since this implies that the poor slobs who didn’t read Middlemarch and listen to me lecture on its metaphor of the ‘web’ will inevitably vote for the wrong crowd). Not only are these claims regrettably, unfortunately un-true, they fail to confront the kind of thinking consciously or unconsciously animating the hostil-ity: the conviction that the Humanities are doing something that doesn’t make any sense because in the pursuit of truth they are cul de sacs (sometimes charming and whimsical, but more often resembling Wisteria Lane). Until we at least begin to articulate what is wrong with the animating principles of this way of thinking, our defences of Arts and Humanities will continue to sound hollow and self-serving. And if we retreat behind our disciplinary walls and allow the public attacks on theology and philosophy to continue unchallenged because it is ‘none of our

business’, then be warned: first theology, then philosophy… Lit.Crit next.

Dr. Jarlath Killeen

Analysis


FightClub (1999) and Existentialism“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we

don’t need. We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place.” Tyler Durken, FightClub (1999)

Tyler Durken seeks purpose in a world degraded by materialism. He wants to strip away the clothing of conventional reality to find what is concrete in human identity, to find the foundations, and not the mere decorations of a

man’s identity. Tyler wants more. He wants to answer NO to the ques-tion “If you wake up at a different time in a different place could you wake up a different person?”, but how can he find such identity in a contingent world governed by chance? His answer is to look at the free choices a man makes at the most basic level common to all humanity. It is here that the existentialism of the film is seen.

Existentialism maintains the belief that existence precedes essence. That we first exist and then exercise our free will in order to become the per-son we want to be. As much as genes or environment may influence us, ulti-mately, we do still have a choice.

Tyler wants to scrape away the dictums of an infected society from his thought process in order to experience this free will in its pure state. He wants a primordial encounter with himself. He cannot find this in making choices about clothes and cars where fashion trends pull him one way and the other. Such choices are polluted. The choice that is free, that is raw and uncompromising is the decision whether or not to fight.

Fighting is about whether or not, when you are battered and knocked to the ground, you can get up and continue. At its most profound level, it isn’t about anger or hurting the other person. When Tyler loses control and destroys a man’s face because he wanted “to destroy something beautiful”, the rest of the men are appalled. This is crude fighting for a purpose, to fulfil a desire. True fighting, like true art, does not have desires towards which it is directed but instead exists purely as an expression of the individual. Winning is a second-ary aim. The goal is to do so by overcoming one’s natural instincts by virtue of freewill, not by beating up someone weak.

At the start of the film Tyler tells the Narrator: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can”. It is this desire which underlies all true fighting. Not to cause pain but, instead, to take it and beat it. It is this creation of identity that makes

fighting the ultimate expression of “I AM”. At the end of every great boxing fight – full of blood and guts and unbreakable

wills – the two fighters always hug at the final bell. Each thanks the other, for without them they could never have made such a glorious decision to keep fighting. That is why boxing is called the ‘Noble Art’.

By Dominic Gallagher


Analysis


TORCHWOOD AND THE NATURE OF EVIL Doctor Who’s younger sibling, Torchwood, has always approached sci-

ence fiction differently from its predecessor. Although it covers much the same territory (aliens and roboTs and negaTive space wedg-

ies), Torchwood’s format has allowed it to sometimes take a more nuanced, introspective approach, telling strange and subtle stories at the fringes of a genre often dominated by the melodramatic or absurd. The new series, Torchwood: Miracle Day, more than lives up to its predecessors. The setup is simple: one day, death ceases to exist on planet Earth, and it’s up to the remnants of the Torchwood organization to find out why. It is, in part, a story about conspiracy. Conspiracies are a staple of science fic-tion – the rise of complex and sprawling social, economic, and political institutions in the modern world, opaque to outsiders and the public, creates a gap in which one can’t help but imagine sinister plots. Miracle Day, however, elevates and rarefies the conspiracy; though from the beginning of the series we have the suspicion that something sinister is going on, we have no idea what, and as the series has unfolded, each answer comes accompanied by addi-tional enigmata. This isn’t just the science fiction conspiracy plot, this is Borges’ ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ for the 21st Century. The rarefied conspiracy is crucial in portraying the nature of the outrages against the titular miracle – concentration camps for those mortally wounded but unable to die (To be incineraTed en masse) and bureaucratic control over life and death. It’s Hannah Ardendt’s ‘banality of evil’ all over again but, despite obvious parallels, Miracle Day never sinks to mere allegory. Though we live in an enlightened society which likes to imagine itself above the horrors of the past, here the catalyst of evil isn’t political or racial ideology. It’s the sleek, mechanical hell of the corporate oligarchy, facilitated by the media and public policy meant to uphold social and economic order above all else. Still, Miracle Day resists strict moralism; this is in fact a world that is in many ways amoral. The end of the cycle of life as we know it creates profound confusion and despair

– but in a deathless, faithless world, not only is hope harder to come by, but forgiveness for one’s sins would seem impossible. The character arc of Oswald Danes traces the despair of a man who can neither be forgiven nor punished for his crimes, unable to be at peace with himself and despised by the world around him. If Miracle Day has a lesson, perhaps it is that to call a man a monster is the easy way out. To be monstrous is to be exceptional – but monstrosity is only the concatena-tion of a thousand petty sins and minor failures of courage. ALSO: SYMPATHY FOR THOSE LIKE US IS EASY; TRUE COMPASSION LIES IN SYMPATHY EVEN FOR THOSE WHO HAVE DONE TERRIBLE THINGS.

By James Schuller

I was always nervous about romance in Doctor Who. I don’t think that a 900+-year-old alien has any business

falling for a teenage Earth girl, because that’s perv territory. But when River Song turned up in The Silence in the Library, I was prepared to give it a bit of a chance. When we first see River Song, we have no idea who she is, and nor does the Doctor, but she knows all about him. It’s possible she even knows his real name. That’s immensely cool. It’s more or less a first in Doctor Who. The Doctor is almost always more intelligent, and usually more knowledgeable about what-ever he’s facing than the people around him.

There’s a little bit of girl-on-top even in their names - he’s the Doctor, but she’s Professor River Song. She flirts, he’s confused; she’s utterly badass. She might be evil, she might be good, but most of all she is in charge, she knows what she’s doing and she is not taking any shit from the Doctor or from anyone. What’s more, she has this whole life that we don’t know about. It seems she’s like the Doctor - zipping from adventure to adventure and, just sometimes, their adventures coincide. They are equals, though; it’s not the Doctor taking River on an adventure (the way it normally is with companions). They’re going on adven-tures together. As equals. Am I making my point yet?

Then came Let’s Kill Hitler. Fast forward to what we know about River now, and what is she? Her whole life belongs to the Doctor. From the day she was born – before, maybe – she was bred to destroy him. Then, she kills someone (we assume the Doctor) and goes to prison. She escapes from prison to meet up with the Doctor. As far as we can tell, exclusively to meet up with the Doctor. Her life consists of adventures with the Doctor, and sitting in a cell. Yes, she breaks out of it all by herself, and is badass about it, etc, but that doesn’t really amount to much when all she does is hang around in a prison cell waiting for the Doctor to call.

And yes, there is the time in between her being saved from evil (by a few words from – guess who, the Doctor), and her going to prison, but we haven’t actually seen any of that time, have we? From what evidence we have, I imagine she spends all that time hanging around in her room, waiting for the Doctor to show up as well. Aside from everything else, I can’t imagine that the Doctor would fancy someone like that.

Analysis

7

River Song: from Badass to Clinger (or Why I Don’t Like Steven Moffat Anymore)

By Emma Bates


Analysis


‘Patience’ by the Pearl Poet

May I start simply by saying that this poem rocks, out loud? It’s in Middle English, which looks off-putting, especially for Freshers (Hello Freshers!) but at just 531 lines it flies by and turns out to be totally readable.

Jonah is kind of like another of this poet’s creations – the Dreamer in ‘Pearl’ – in that he’s lovely and totally doesn’t get what’s going on. Also like the Dreamer, you feel like giv-ing him a big hug or a cup of tea and a biccy or something. Unlike the Dreamer, however, Jonah is not dealing with an ethereal and transcendent maiden trying to guide him to a more balanced perspective on his grief. Oh no, he’s got the direct line. If the Dreamer misses a point, he gets told a parable, if Jonah misses a point, God throws his ass in a whale belly to think about what he’s done, or else provides him with a lovely

woodbine only to cause it to wilt overnight. MWA HA HA HA!But, I hear you protest, this is just a fable, albeit a biblical one. You can’t give the poet

the credit for this! At best it’s uncreative, at worst it’s plagiarism! Not in the least. The poet is working within a religious tradition, it’s true, but that hardly restricts him. I bet you never felt as sorry for Jonah before as you will when you hear about him trying to find a comfy corner of the whale’s stomach and finding only an abundance of muck. I bet it never even occurred to you to feel sorry for the guys who have to push Jonah out of their boat and feel terribly guilty for doing so. The poet’s poignant portrayal of flawed and limited human nature, as contrasted to the infi-nite patience of an all-forgiving God, expands this fable to a personal level and makes it generally applicable. The poet turns Jonah from that stock character, The erring sinner, to the poor fool who is, after all, only human, just like us. He creates his own character, to some extent making the whole story his own, whilst never losing sight of where it has come from. If this was a perfect and complete fable before, it is now something perfectly and completely new. T.S. Eliot would be proud. Or, if you prefer, compare it to Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, which he lifted largely from Holinshed. Or what about putting it alongside Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now?

Old story, new artistic creation.Add to this a nearly Chaucerian narrator in the short prologue and innumerable, but

not overly preachy, aphorisms and you have, quite simply, a lovely story in the form of a vaguely morally instructive poem. Don’t let the biblical source put you off. This is

a new creature entirely.

By Josephine Nolan

Reviews

9

How to be a Woman by Caitlin MoranI cannot be the only person who has ever heard a girl say that she

is either not interested in feminism, or does not want to be associated with such extreme ideas. These are university students mark you, people who would not be able to attend college without the Suffragettes, without the benefit of a feminist movement. I also, personally, do not think that striving for equal rights is really that extreme. For goodness’ sake, this is a country in which abortion is still illegal, and so this is a country in which the state at-tempts to control what women do with their bodies. THEY DO NOT DO THIS TO MEN. This does not seem right. Why do so few people fight against it?

Caitlin Moran’s new book, which no doubt you will have seen reviews for as completely hilari-ous which, indeed, it is, completely and utterly rebukes this view of feminism. She writes:

“So here is the quick way of working out if you’re a feminist. Put your hands in your pants.

a) Do you have a vagina? And

b) Do you want to be in charge of it?

If you say yes to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.”

It really is that simple. Whilst a majority of the book deals with Moran’s personal experiences (which, given that no

two people are the same, is far better than a book of generalisations) it contains important insights into the experiences of women. At least, it gives insights into experiences of women in Western societies. These are, theoretically the most advanced societies to date, and yet these are the societies where there is increasing pressure on young girls to wax off all their pubic hair and where being a B.A. MRS is still, for many, a positive achievement. Have you ever seen a young girl pushing a toy pram around? Or heard someone say that a girl who is good at maths or physics must be wired like a boy? Society continues to teach, subliminally, all this kind of nonsense, and it’s important that people like Caitlin Moran are starting to voice out against it, someone who isn’t an unreachable celebrity or a stuffy aca-demic.

The situation of women in Western societies has improved dramatically, but it is still one in which Jeremy Irons can say that a man touching a woman’s bottom is just an act of communica-tion, a world where things such as SlutWalks are necessary and a world in which we teach our girls that balancing family and career is nigh impossible, whilst we teach our boys that they may have them both. How to be a Woman is crucial in debunking the myths that surround femi-nism and I beg you to read it, and stand on your chair with Moran and say

“I am a feminist”. It’s important.

By Natasha Calder

The Renegade Rant and Rave The Renegade Rant and Rave


Captin America and the Good-Guy SuperheroBy Matthew Corbally Captain America, directed by Joe Johnston and starring Chris Evans,

Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving and Haley Atwell, is the fifth film in Marvel’s epic comic book superhero series, and it most definitely does not disappoint. The film is set during the Second World War and follows the adventures of Steve Rogers, a physically frail but resolutely patriotic kid from Brooklyn who, after being repeatedly denied enlistment on the basis of his being poor, is given the chance to take part in an experimental project to

create a super soldier. Despite tremendous success in turning Rogers into a towering beefcake, the project is sabotaged and Rogers is pressed into service as Captain America, first as a USO act and then into active service against the Red Skull, the head of a rogue Nazi superscience division and notable for being MORE EVIL THAN HITLER HIMSELF! Captain America also alludes heavily to the upcoming The Avengers, and contains many references to previous Marvel films, including the appearance of Iron Man’s father and the presence of Asgardian magitek as seen in Thor. In my humble opinion – and the not-so-humble opinion of many film critics – there are a lot of things to like about this film. The action and the effects are excellently done, including some of the best hand-to-hand fighting yet witnessed in a superhero movie and the amazing contrast between pre- and post-serum Chris Evans, whilst the score by under-appreciated Alan Sivestri is both utterly fantastic and perfect for the pulp, World War Two vibe of the film. The acting is simply superb, with Tommy Lee Jones as a snarky army colonel, Hugo Weaving chewing the scenery as the Red Skull and a visually incredible performance by Neal McDon-ough as Dum Dum Dugan (SERIOUSLY, THAT BATTLE BOWLER AND MOUSTACHE COMBO MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED). What I found to be the most compelling aspect of the film was how it presented a patriotic and moral upstanding superhero completely without any irony. Rogers is a good guy, not just in affiliation but in actual moral conduct, being polite, brave, noble, self-sacrificing, helpful and patriotic without fanaticism. Even before he receives the super-serum and becomes Captain America, he is more of a hero than most other superheroes, and it is interesting in how his character is not so much about overcoming his personal flaws (since he essentially has none) but more about growing into the role of Captain America and finding an outlet for his good nature in doing so. The film is devoid of the cyni-

cism that would follow any modern portrayal of a hero, and it is this idealism that may be off-putting to viewers accustomed to their heroes being a mix of reluctant, sarcastic and psychotic. Overall, Captain America is a pretty decent movie that reconstructs the heady opti-mism of Golden Age comic books, whilst setting the stage for the eagerly awaited The Aveng-ers movie.

Reviews

Reviews


Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011)

By Olen Bajarias The tentacles of Justin Bieber’s monstrous Midas touch extend far beyond innocuous-sterile bubblegum pop songs. It’s no wonder

that in Never Say Never, a documentary about the goings-on/faux-drama in the days prior to a Bieber concert, familiar figures and voices from the American pop music landscape (Miley Cyrus, Usher, Sean Kingston and Jaden Smith – an offshoot of the Will Smith family tree who not only is a massive Bieber fan but also, apparently, of Sideshow Bob) do cameos and kiss some serious Bieber-ass, possibly to get in on his commercial jackpot. The scrawny, 16-year old is IRRESISTIBLE TO PUPPY LOVE-STRUCK PRETEEN GIRLS/CONSUMERS. There is a pesti-lence of them throughout the film, and they are collectively hilarious, cringe-inducing, disturb-ing and poignant.

These hysterical and seemingly unstable nuclear ‘Beliebers’, almost every single one of them sporting orthodontics and junior-whore pink DIY’ed ‘Mrs. Bieber’ tank tops, are seen vibrating en masse outside Madison Square Garden – the self-proclaimed ‘world’s most famous arena’ and venue for Bieber’s sold-out-in-22-minutes concert – on the verge of admission, a grand-mal seizure and, possibly, menarche. The film is punctuated with a whole lot of tautological brouhaha about Bieber being just a normal teen despite it all, with many a montage/B-roll footage of the Kinder-pimp shoot-ing hoops with childhood buddies, eyebrows furrowed over a particularly slippery Chemis-try and/or History text, water-gun fights and chores. Having this in mind, I couldn’t decide whether the shirtless shots of Bieber and his hairless, anaemic nipples peppered throughout the 100 or so minutes of this film are yet another reminder of this – that underneath the American Apparel hoody + Hi-top astro get-up is just a kid liv-ing his dream – OR IF THEY’RE AN ATTEMPT TO SEXUALISE THE BIEBS, ONE ARTICLE OF CLOTHING LESS AT A TIME. SEX SELLS, AFTER ALL. KINDER-SEX EVEN MORE SO. I saw the film in 2-D so perhaps I missed the extra dimension savoured by those who

watched it through 3-D glasses. Ultimately, Never Say Never probes only as far as the pop sensation’s bare skin and not a dermal layer further. No revelations, blood, guts and gore here ladies. (And gentlemen? I did spot one fan of the XY chromosomal persuasion about 50 minutes into the film. Yes, I actually looked.) I came away from it not knowing anything I didn’t already know: Bieber can actu-ally carry a tune, Bieber lip-syncs, Bieber has apparently been inoculated against whiplash and, most importantly, that you don’t mess with the bitches who love him. They have nails, a somewhat limited but curiously potent vocabulary of threats at their disposal, submissive chaperone dads-cum-limitless ATM machines (to whom the film’s title is probably dedicated) that just adore the darlings and (therefore) have an incredible spending power – so don’t

make eye contact and get the fuck out of the way.


The professionals have been ranTing and raving for years – here are some exTracTs from The very besT of The besT.

The Original Ranters...

Walter Benjamin vs. PolemicsGenuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

louis aragon vs. the slaP-dash I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

tom clancy vs. academiaLiterature means a hundred years after you’re dead they make kids read you in

high school. I’m in the entertainment business.

Q.d. leavis vs. the reading PuBlicThe readiness to read a good novel has become a craving for fiction of any kind, and a habit of reading poor novels not only destroys the ability to distinguish between literature and trash, it creates a positive taste for a certain kind of writing, if only because it does not demand the effort of a fresh response, as the uneducated ear listens with pleasure only to a tune it is familiar with.

12

F. dalton vs. ‘the love song oF j. alFred The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very

smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry...

The Original Ranters

Contributors


Dominic Gallagher Junior Sophister English Literature and Philosophy

James Schuller Junior Sophister English Literature

Josephine Nolan Junior Sophister English Literature

Emma Bates Junior Sophister English Literature Matthew Corbally Junior Sophister English Literature

Olen Bajarias Junior Sophister Dental Sciences

A special thank you to our Faculty Advisor Dr. Darryl Jones, as well as Simon Williams, and Diane Sadler for helping us make our Ranting and Raving dreams come true. Without them we wouldn’t be able to create this forum for outrageous criticism.

Dr. Jarlath Killeen Lecturer English Literature

Want to get involved or have questions?Email [email protected]

CheCk us out online at http://tCdrantandrave.wordpress.Com

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the development and manufacture of

drug delivery devices

• Providing design and development services to the world’s

leading pharmaceutical and healthcare companies for their drug

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• Experienced in providing plastics manufacturing solutions in the

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TCD Renegade Rant and Rave - Issue 2