Okay I really did not think about the Greater Historical Context while I was reading Little Women. (Something that actually got me to think more about the Greater Cultural/Historical Context (besides this lecture!) was the book Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy which is a graphic novel adaption of Little Women, and seeing some of the […]
What are some picture books, comics, graphic novels that break the mold? Some examples of intertextuality you’ve seen? The Stinky Cheese Man!!! He addresses the audience directly, he turns the usual fairy tale takes on their head, and he tells a different, sillier message. Discuss the way media in different countries and cultures influence one […]
The summer before I was assigned to read Catcher in the Rye, I spent the entire summer reading books about angry grieving boys, and when I got to Catcher in the Rye, I was like “this book is unoriginal!” Because I had read all these other books that Catcher in the Rye is the blueprint […]
What should art do and what should it not do? The purpose of art is to be evocative; that is, to evoke emotion in the reader or viewer. Art should evoke some kind of emotion in the reader or viewer; if it does that, then it has succeeded. Sometimes it takes a little work on […]
Last March, after a harrowing move from one side of the county to the other, I needed something to keep me grounded. I went to the garden section of my local department store. I adopted a house plant, an aloe vera succulent. I’m not alone in this pursuit: “In the US, the 2016 National Gardening […]
Both Barf Manifesto and “Everyday Barf” are both vehicles to communicate a set of ideas in an essay-like format to the reader (“vehicle” being used in the metaphorical sense, a metaphor of both the words and concepts that are invoked by the words; as in the sentence “chips are only useful as vehicles for sauces”). […]
The Willows builds tension by repetition; the repeated descriptions of the willows, building up, as well as the stark descriptions of the narrator’s own fear. The way the narrator describes fear, with sentences such as “I cannot say that it was ominous in quality, because to me it seemed distinctly musical, yet I must admit […]
The Hundreds takes ordinary events and condenses them into hundred-word snippets, which makes them into even more of a slog than when they happened but can sometimes tip an occurrence into a different light than originally expected. One of the passages, “Anxiety made a nest in her”, deviated away from the standard form of most […]
I was walking back to my car out of the library, and it was drizzling just a little bit, so I put my sweatshirt back on. I am thinking about how I don’t like to drive in the dark, but I don’t mind the rain so much. It isn’t very wet yet; the drizzle is […]
A man calls the office asking about if our Master’s of philosophy can be done online. I have no idea. I ask to put him on hold and I google it. I think the answer is no. He hangs up on me. The copy machine is a big fancy Xerox machine. The toner comes in […]