While I’d love for you to undertake this assignment for one of the texts assigned for this week, I’m willing to let you use any of the assigned readings up to this point in the semester. I include the list choose wisely( -“Lazy River” by Zadie Smith-The Prophet’s Hair By: Salman Rushdie-Who Is Like God By: Akwaeke Emezi-Hanalei Bay By: Haruki Murakami-Orange World By Karen Russell-The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
Comedian Dan Wilbur has a Tumblr called Better Book Titles https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/better-book-titles?sort=top(you can access it by following the link) in which he and followers of his blog cleverly rename classic literary works. The names work for a variety of reasons, but the most important one is that they capture something essential about the text.
For instance, A Clockwork Orange is renamed Way Easier to Watch than Read. While this might seem like a pretty generic statement about books that have been made into films, it’s actually uniquely well suited to Burgess’s novel. The novel is narrated by Alex in a slang dialect Burgess created for the novel called Nadsat, which can, at times, make for a very disorienting experience. Stanley Kubrick famously initially rejected adapting the film because he didn’t know how to adapt the language for the screen (though he did, in fact, end up making the film). Further, it’s thoroughly uncomfortable to see the world through Alex’s eyes as we’re forced to in the novel; the film provides at least slightly more distance between the viewer and Alex than the novel does between the reader and Alex. This sense of proximity to Alex, who is a stunningly terrible human being, is “difficult” for the reader to accept.
Come up with a “Better Title” in the style of Dan Wilbur’s Better Book Titles. Write a short explanation of what aspects of the story your new title captures and why it’s better than the original.
