The Chaos-Worshiper in the Closet: Theorizing, Stories, Killjoys, and Social Justice
Megha Baikadi 985 archives and feelings Dr Alexis Lothian Writing Assignment Five, 12/10/2013 Expand and elaborate a previous essay. Cite 5 readings from the course and two from outside. [3000-6000 words.] The Chaos-Worshiper in the Closet: Theorizing, Stories, Killjoys, and Social Justice The essay I am expanding for this is […]
Exploring a Place to Fail
http://teacherjanelle.blogspot.com/p/archives-and-feelings-final-project.html
Failure and Killjoys, Stories and Justice-through-Chaos
Writing Assignment Five, draft 12/3/2013 Expand and elaborate a previous essay. Cite 5 readings from the course and two from outside. [3000-6000 words.] Ok, its short, and late, and not quite done… but I had a really bad weekend and I didnt get more than this done. I would appreciate any feedback that […]
Performance: Exploring a Space to Fail – DRAFT
Dear Readers, I hope to do something more visually appealing in the final production. I imagine either a prezi or blog page where the reader can move back and forth between the components of story, reflection, and analysis at their own leisure, approaching the piece in different ways and offering various opportunities for points of […]
A Pedagogy of Gaps – Draft
Rob Welch Dr. A. Lothian Engl 985 2 Dec 2013 The Myth of Success and Successful Outcomes More than half a century ago, Walter Benjamin warned us that the proper direction to cast our eyes, for our own protection, was not to the future, but to the past. In a sense, we in the […]
Some Musings and Hauntings of a Teacher-Scholar
I did not grow up thinking I would ever become a teacher. It was not until I entered college, where I received several opportunities to become a writing tutor that I then began to seriously consider a teaching vocation, specifically in English. As an undergraduate, I ran English study groups for several areas of literature, […]
Learning the Forbidden Language: An Autobiographical Odyssey
Kamal Salem Dr. Alexis Lothian ENGL 985 Assignment # 5 First Draft 03rd Dec, 2013 Learning the Forbidden Language: An Autobiographical Odyssey Introduction “I am a part of all that I have met,” said Alfred Tennyson in his Ulysses. Tennyson captured the gist of the human experience in terms of its contribution to the […]
to be the tricksy narrator
{the following is my attempt at doing something like a critical memoir thing detailing the academic journey that has been this semester as seen from my very biased viewpoint} to be the tricksy narrator: Constructing the Critical Narrative For all the Wrong Reasons I elected to take ENGL 985: Archives and Feelings for what […]
Space, Place, Archive, and Intruders: How Academic Labor has Produced an Academic
Dear Friends, Here is the first draft of my paper. Do your worst 🙂 eek! Some students go to college to learn, others go to socialize. I was the student who loved the social community of the university, one that only slowed down during holiday breaks. I did not dream of becoming a professor, nor […]
It’s random, but it made me laugh out loud and reminded me of failure
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html
Recent Comments in this Document
December 3, 2013 at 4:33 pm
I think this is precisely Gramsci’s point — the factory worker and the sculptor may both be intellectuals or artists, but only one has the *function in society* ––the class position, the privilege––that makes it his or her assigned role. Just as it no doubt requires a certain class status or aspiration to see oneself as able to choose a social function or calling.
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December 3, 2013 at 2:37 am
And, regarding the university as machine, Ferguson would have it even more strongly: he would say that the liberal multiculturalist concern for development of identities is part and parcel of the university as machinery of capital, since it refocuses students’ energies on individual identity rather than the potential for redistribution of resources.
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December 3, 2013 at 2:23 am
Great articulation of the temporality of the classroom.
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December 3, 2013 at 1:46 am
Coming back to this, I’m thinking about whether this discussion of taste might be interestingly put in the kind of terms Mel Chen uses in her discussion of the boy licking the train…
Another possible citation for you, if you pursue this, might be Siane Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, which deals with various literary affects––and the sizeable subdiscipline of food studies, about which I know relatively little but which seems extremely interesting.
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December 2, 2013 at 1:45 am
This is, overall, an attempt to expand on my first writing assignment, channeling the concept into some practical form with some practical justification.
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December 1, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual is of one who is part of the subaltern group committed to opposing and transforming the social order first; intellectual work is developed with and for the group, rather than in an institution outside of it. So Nafisi’s commitment to the interests of women, which goes beyond her institutional role, might be a kind of organic intellectual work. The distinction between organic and traditional intellectual often doesn’t fit neatly onto the real world, though…
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December 1, 2013 at 2:58 pm
What do we gain by using the term labor––why might it be important to recognize what we do as *work*?
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November 28, 2013 at 7:30 am
Yeah, when we read it in class some of these critiques came up. They have a lot of textual support, too.
But that doesn’t mean its not a good text to tackle issues with – actually, it may be the best way to deal with them. after all, we can sometimes get the best critiques out of texts we *don’t* agree with. It really shows how the cultural scripts differ from the actual truths.
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November 28, 2013 at 7:24 am
Addressing the first part of your comment, there is a binary between bad-old times and good enlightened now, but I think there’s another possible binary between the good, golden past and the present troubled times. I mean, so many historical moments get romanticized, likely because those past things were good to some, and those who would or think they would benefit are those who romanticize them.
And yeah, looking at every ill does sometimes does come across as polarizing all groups into subsets of ills. It becomes too difficult to speak generally, then.
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November 28, 2013 at 7:14 am
Very nice!
I like the examples you’ve chosen to reflect on. The idealization of certain times or actions (often historical) is rampant, and it seems to be an important tool for disseminating happiness scripts, both those of perceived history and the now in which they are created and disseminated.
The female troublemaker and the feminist killjoy… I agree just the act of not enjoying, or not wanting the thing they are ‘supposed’ to want can be itself a killjoy (it doesn’t have to be starting arguments, though that’s fun too).
I’m not sure how much the subject (middle/upper class women) is simply problematic and how much it is simply the script, the happiness script of the culture. I think that probably didn’t sound right. I mean, given the racial, class and gendered nature of happiness scripts, I wonder if this film might be a site for finding problematic elements in the cultural happiness scripts, and not itself a problem choice for such a script because of its exclusions.
I can see how well you’d do with these texts – its really fascinating to me. popular culture is rich with layers of meaning, and so can be carefully analyzed… but it is also dear to students, so they should care (very much) about how it is analyzed. This combination can be a very powerful tool!
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