SPOILER WARNING
I recommend you read the following books NOW, if you are not already familiar with them, because we'll be talking about them at various points in the semester.
(They're all wonderful, so you really ought to read them before we spoil the suspense.)
I do NOT recommend that you choose one of these to review, as the treatment of language in most of these has been written on at length already, and would require more than 3-5 pages.
THE WHEELS OF IF - L. Sprague De Camp (1940)
1984 - George Orwell (1948)
THE LANGUAGES OF PAO - Jack Vance (1957)
BABEL-17 - Samuel R. Delany (1966)
THE EMBEDDING - Ian Watson (1973)
NATIVE TONGUE - Suzette Haden Elgin (1984), featuring invented language Laadan.
SNOWCRASH - Neal Stephenson (1992)
An essay comparing "the power of language" in SNOWCRASH and BABEL-17 can be found here.
All sf movies and t.v. shows with linguistic themes/plots/ideas are fair game for discussions, so these may also be spoiled for you.
You might want to take this as an excuse to rent lots of videos and watch lots of TV.
(I sure did, when I was planning this course.)
It's not goofing off; it's for class!
