Re: Seymour's despised fat Bananafish

this turned out to be a much bigger issue than i thought!
I first considered taking one of my three copies of nine stories and cutting
out my four stories and making it into a little booklet, as to benefit the
author and not be stealing at the same time. But then i ruled this out,
deciding that I like all of my books intact and wouldn't ruin them for such a
small reason as one little english project grade. Anyway, I ended up going
to Staples and copying 68 pages of Salinger's work.
I guess this is a lot better than what most other kids did, because at least
I have the book, in fact more than one, so I benefited the author.... Most of
the kids were able to find reprints and full online text of their stories
online. I don't know how, because I searched, but someone must put in a ton
of time to copy "well-known" short stories and make them available to the
public via the internet.
The problem with short fiction class is that we do have a textbook, entitled
"Perrine's Short Story and Structure," but it doesn't include everything my
teacher wants us to read. What we should do is take books out of the library
so that at least it's legal, but she copies a story and hands out on to each
person in my roughly 20-person class about once a week. To tell you the
truth, I don't think in any english class I've been in we've been handed out
a published anthology of short stories just to read one story.
In any sense, it happens all the time. For my OTHER english class (unusual
for a junior in high school right?) we recently had to put together a poetry
anthology, a collection of one or two of each student's favorite poems from
one of five British poets. While I have never heard of a school purchasing
30 or so copies of a poetry book when a teacher intents to assign one poem,
this is the same as "stealing" from short story writers.
However uptight high school teachers are about plagiorism, they seem to be
okay with taking away from writers themselves. Anyway, this is interesting to
think about- thanks to whoever brought up the point of it being illegal, and
I'm definitely going to talk to my teacher tomorrow.
*Jessica
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Received on Mon Mar 24 16:05:47 2003