Class Notes April 24: Writing Ideas, Maus
Hello friends. A couple brief summaries:
Yesterday, we went over strategies for your third essays, which seem to be presenting a few of you with particular difficulties. As an example, I quickly lectured about finding a thesis for the 60 Minutes broadcast Sunday night. I chose the theme of "salvation" to link together stories about CIA intelligence, a steriod prescribing doctor, and the Starbucks CEO. While I wandered on a specific thesis, I came up with a guess that was something like: "In contemporary American culture, there seems to be market and a conflict for salvation, whether political, personal, or, of all places, in coffee."
We then talked about any number of themes that could be made more specific by looking at Hedges, Frankl, Vonnegut, and Spiegelman: "spaces" produced by war, gender during war, perspectives of war (civilian, soldier, camp victim, etc), love, loss, death, suicide, children, childhood, family, Nazism, women specifically, or even Jewishness, or how persons become the "other." The field is wide open for you to look at specific trends in the texts and complicate them by reading them together, or even against each other for contrast. A thesis statement would reflect that more complicated reasoning of the theme you chose.
Finally, we opened our discussion of Maus and debated what kinds of characters and narratives appear most often, and how we might describe them. We also looked at what kinds of close reading might be best for a graphic novel, and how we can approach issues of style and tone. We finished by commenting upon sections of the text we'll re-examine for class tomorrow: women, space, narrative voice, and the incremental slide into a full-out "war culture."
Yesterday, we went over strategies for your third essays, which seem to be presenting a few of you with particular difficulties. As an example, I quickly lectured about finding a thesis for the 60 Minutes broadcast Sunday night. I chose the theme of "salvation" to link together stories about CIA intelligence, a steriod prescribing doctor, and the Starbucks CEO. While I wandered on a specific thesis, I came up with a guess that was something like: "In contemporary American culture, there seems to be market and a conflict for salvation, whether political, personal, or, of all places, in coffee."
We then talked about any number of themes that could be made more specific by looking at Hedges, Frankl, Vonnegut, and Spiegelman: "spaces" produced by war, gender during war, perspectives of war (civilian, soldier, camp victim, etc), love, loss, death, suicide, children, childhood, family, Nazism, women specifically, or even Jewishness, or how persons become the "other." The field is wide open for you to look at specific trends in the texts and complicate them by reading them together, or even against each other for contrast. A thesis statement would reflect that more complicated reasoning of the theme you chose.
Finally, we opened our discussion of Maus and debated what kinds of characters and narratives appear most often, and how we might describe them. We also looked at what kinds of close reading might be best for a graphic novel, and how we can approach issues of style and tone. We finished by commenting upon sections of the text we'll re-examine for class tomorrow: women, space, narrative voice, and the incremental slide into a full-out "war culture."
posted by Jrc at 1:17 PM
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