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Class Notes: Update II, Exam Week Office Hours

For students who want to drop off or pick up papers in person:

I will be in my office, Klapper 343, Monday and Wednesday morning from 9-12. I'll be in and out. If you need or want to schedule a meeting for a specific time, let me know by email.

I have also left your papers in folders in a box outside my office. Please take them by Wednesday morning, or, if necessary, I can leave them out until next Monday morning.

Leave the actual folders so I can re-use them to return Essay 4.

Essay Four

Essay 4: ENG 120
No more than 3 pages, No less than 2 pages
Due May 22 at jrcqueens@yahoo.com (or by arrangement)


For this essay, consider the course “Shock and Knowledge” itself, and respond to the following prompt:


In this course, we’ve discussed some of the narratives, strategies, emotions, images, histories, causes, and traumas of the vague and terrible idea called “war.” In the final text we read, Waiting for the Barbarians, we encountered an old man whose war probably best resembles our own – a wandering conflict confined to border lands, and whose effect on the central Empire capital is, at best, only occasional. On the other hand, those effects can be devastating and unforgettable. This is the strange magnification of terrorism; its randomness and infrequency layers one’s fear through the anxiety that anything might be possible, at any time.


In Essay Four, consider first how the old Magistrate attempted to quite literally massage the guilt and terror of the war out of himself, and how he did it with a person quite literally his relational opposite: a gendered figure of the Other, or, if you will, a woman from the “enemy” camp. Select and close-read a passage from the text that, for you, seems to best capture the contradiction of the Magistrate’s position – a passage that, for you, identifies something important about how you understand the Magistrate’s struggle to define some ethic in a space and time of conflict. This might take you about a page, but spend no more than one page on it.


For your second and third pages, relate this passage to some feeling, moment, or experience in your life where you have attempted to think through your own struggle with war and conflict. You are, after all, in a nation almost solely obsessed by its reaction to the horrifying violence of 9-11. Instead of trying to ‘solve’ the problem of the current war on terror, whatever your position or politics, use the second page of your essay to meditate on how one or two moments, experiences, feelings, or thoughts might collapse that huge idea into one manageable space of writing.


Referring to course texts when necessary or when possible, focus on using inventive vocabulary, playful images, and vivid description to poetically concentrate on your unique role as a student on the front edge of history, in a borough bordering the capital of the Empire – a borough that exists as the most ethnically diverse location that has ever existed. You are special and exceptional and you are negotiating your own ethics and beliefs in a world that you can change. Take this opportunity to write whatever you want about this subject – transition from the Magistrate’s struggle to yours, and identify those places, people, and relationships that you use to mediate meaning in your life, as refuge or as challenge. Identity the contradictions of your position, and, in your declaration, embed your ideas with specific events, places, memories, and thoughts. Take stylistic and organizational risks: invent your conclusion, explain what’s shocked you, and write your knowledge.

Class Notes: Questions for Essay Three

Sorry people: I haven't had time to do this yet. Give me the weekend--whatever I do, I'll bring it Monday, too.

Class Notes: Maus & The Regimes of Difference

In class today, we approached Maus in small groups. We discussed some of the critical themes brought up Monday -- 'women', for instance. We looked at the themes for specific meanings they transmit across multiple locations in the text, as patterns of repeated imagery, emotion, and narrative.

Afterwards, we began to discuss the effect of the "pig-masks" Spiegelman creates for his Jewish characters as they rove through the minefield of Nazi-era Poland. The pig-masks rank the Jews in the heirarchy of allegorical animals Maus employs to symbolize different characteristics of difference within the text: Cats for Germans, Mice for Jews, Pigs for Poles. In this way, the masks signify a kind of easy status for the reader to understand different identity relations. The masks are, of course, only applied in Maus; in reality, the nature of Jewish identity shifted according to who saw Vladek as "passing." (This same reality still exists in different cultures, and has been a regular feature of "outsider" identities and minorities in literature and culture for at least the past several hundred years.)

Identity is unstable, flexible; regimes that enforce identity project stereotypes in order to "master" and order a universe of guarded privilege and advantage. It's important to visibly identify the "other" because they, in turn, serve as bodies that acknowledge the superiority of the master race and its allies. In Nazi Germany, the master race was the Aryan white community promoted by Hitler. Perhaps shockingly, these ideas came to the Nazis from Jim Crow America, where certain versions of white supremacy endorsed and enforced by the federal government, local terrorist militas (the KKK), and state laws asserted the inherent superiority of 'white' Americans over 'black' Americans.

At the heart of Maus, however, lies another indivisible regime of difference: gender. The final panel leaves Spiegelman's character cursing his father as a "murderer" for burning his wife's diaries and letters, which ultimately destroyed the archive of her identity, and the answer to the continous mysteries of her chronic depression and anxiety. Vladek's life after the war remains traumatized by the suicide of his wife. Her death is the shadow hanging over his life. The quiet, intimate, domestic regime of partiarchy -- a real, vivid, on-going mutation of fascism, a precusor of racism and an effect of it -- is the heart of the narrative in Maus. It is the veil and the frame for the rest of the sequences and themes in the story.

Vladek is a complex character: we see up close how patriarchy works less as a magic word, bloated with our own distortions of its meaning, and more as a romantic, sexual, urgent function of everyday life. We see the hiding places of the Jews and the bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens that sent Anja to an asylum, and note that their circumstances are radically different while their effects produce similar kinds of doubt, anguish, and slow, disguised horror. In both spaces, there is no choice. If war produces different versions of the prison -- the camp, the POW tent, the labor line -- in "peace" there remains a gutted terror clicking as a phantom of the oldest "difference". Vladek is probably not aware how destructive his actions are, and how misperceived his concerns might sound from afar.

This is the task of literature. It shows in fragments and in subtle allusions how the truth never produces only innocence and guilt, victim and murderer. The truth is caught between hidden tones inside and outside these terms, and its "fact" only floats behind the concrete words and objects we use to illuminate it: the hoarded cash, the gold watch, the shiny walls of the asylum, the rats in the cellar, the warmth of decaying garbage. These images are functional only because they are less abstract than words like "terror" and "fear" and "safety". But, like the lost letters of Spiegelman's mother, we can never reach them. Our curiousity and our imaginition must sustain us, as the only chances we have to touch, and possibly attempt to sooth, the burdens of the past.

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."

Brief Thoughts on Writing: Spring Break

Friends:

As you write, engage your texts. Words flow from other words, not solely from the romantically vibrant inspritations of your own mind. In other words, if you're not writing, read.

Remember, as you draft you should just let yourself write. It's much easier to respond to a specific passage than try to generalize thoughts on an entire author, subject, or text. Focus on connecting specific passages within one text, or across different texts.

As you write, offer speculations that might begin to serve as additional analysis about what you read. A speculation is a kind of risk, an offering, about how you see a particular moment, representation, or passage signaling meaning. The speculative meaning you create is, in fact, an interpretation; remember, too, that you shouldn't feel burdened with trying to find the explanation. Instead, attempt only to find a meaning you find interesting, and with which you can use a tool to "open" more of the author, subject, or text you're discussing.

Again, if you're stuck, go to the texts. Open them and re-read them. You've changed since you last read them--they will be slightly new texts. Account for your new perspective by pushing yourself to find connections and create meaning using the texts as a group of different positions and ideas around one similar subject: war and its aftermath, the genders of conflict, or the identity of human bodies on the battefield.

Eventually, you're going to craft an argument or position. As you draft and doodle, consider how you might link the texts together through their similarities and/or differences.

Prepare some questions to ask me for Monday!