Archive for the ‘Writing assignment 3: critical memoir’ Category
disclosures, identities, politics, academe
Reading the critical memoirs thus far has been quite a humbling experience; thank you to all of you for being so open to the spirit of the assignment and of the writers we have been reading in class. Having begun many drafts of more concrete moment-based memoirs, in the end I offer you some disconnected […]
Asking Questions and Outsiderness
Megha Baikadi 985 archives and feelings Dr Alexis Lothian Writing Assignment Three, 11/5/2013 Write a brief critical memoir, analyzing an aspect of your experience inside or outside the academic world. Use one or more of the readings from unit 3 as models, and explain how you are doing so either within your text or in […]
My Academic Life Form Linguistics to Literature
Menia Almenia Dr. Lothian ENG 985 Assignment # 3 5 November 2013 My life as a graduate student changes my vision of the world we live in it today. As a matter of fact, I spent most of my life living in a small town in Saudi Arabia until I got the chance […]
How Do I End Up in These Messes?: Reflections on a Teaching Moment
***Disclaimer: I am playing around with form in this – visually switching from dialogue to description of the story to moments of reflection. The most likely case is the switching doesn’t always work. I do have ideas about different ways of visually displaying the components (possibly a multi-modal combination of text, images and video.) […]
The “L” Word: A Memoir
Sheila Gross Dr. Alexis Lothian ENGL 985: Archives and Feelings 5 November 2013 The “L” Word: A Memoir I love you. Reparative. Injuring. It’s not the actual saying of the endearment that’s injuring but the absence of it. I can count on my fingers how many times I can recall my mother saying, “I love […]
Behind the Green Door
The possibilities for elucidating the nature of humanity through affect excite and encourage me. On the simplest level, it reassures my sense of the aesthetic to consider it as truth that there is more on heaven and earth than that which can be explained by any social or biological determinism. Yet, only belatedly have I […]
After the Looking Glass, Not Through It
Lauren Shoemaker Dr. Lothian ENGL 985 2 November 2013 After the Looking Glass, Not Through It I’ve never written about this except in journals, and I’m still not sure that divulging such personal experience is a good idea in this setting. I know that what made Bechdel’s, Hartman’s, Cvetkovich’s, and Sedgwick’s critical memoirs so […]
Critical Pedagogy: The Making of A Character
Kamal Salem ENGL 985 Dr. Alexis Lothian Assignment # 3 Nov, 05th, 2013 Critical Pedagogy: The Making of A Character I am a part of all that I have met, Alfred Tennyson Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.. Albert Einstein ______________________________________________________________________ In this […]
Protected: Mr. Brightside
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
“I’m too White”: A Critical Memoir
“I want to be an American Literature scholar.” This sentence does not raise an eyebrow when mentioned by a 20-something-year-old, blonde, white woman. “I want to be an African-American Literature scholar.” This sentence immediately raises hairs on people’s heads when stated by that same woman. Biological essentialism is a term that has become second nature […]
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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