Author: Emma Mandella

It shocks me that the semester is coming to a close; I feel like so much information has been presented to me in a surprisingly short span of time. Our final assignment for Dr. McCoy’s class is a self-reflective essay, one where we must contemplate what our work means. Why do we read, and what impact (if any) does our work have on the world? We were encouraged to consider these questions over break, and so, I thought about my mother.*

*A quick edit: I just read Toby’s post about the discovery of personal meaning in his work, which I both genuinely enjoyed and see as related to my posed question of motivation.

Continue reading “A Reflection on Motivation”

All semester, our class has discussed the concept of “interdisciplinarity”, or the relationship between different academic disciplines. Although I don’t always see it as the most thrilling book, Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran has proven key to this course. Most recently, we were asked to read a chapter about the sciences, which I immediately shied away form. I’ve always had an aversion to science; I could never understand a lot of it, while it really clicked for others. I felt behind, and so once I found other subjects that I was more comfortable with, I stuck with them exclusively. It’s a very insulated way to learn, one that I’m beginning to try and grow out of. And so far, college as a whole is encouraging such a change.

Continue reading “Artistic Muscle”

In our last class, my group tackled “Logic” by Percival Everett. As we struggled to comprehend what could tie all of these stanza together, one seemingly all-encompassing idea appeared to us. We found the idea of the interplay of parts and wholes, and were able to take that in so many different directions. Now, I’ve been desperately trying to find a way to talk about music once again. Luckily, today’s class and the subsequent ideas proposed by the group have given me the perfect foundation to launch into a discussion of parts within music.

Continue reading “Davis, Everett, and Edgar”

This week, I’ve decided to finally buckle down and put some thought into a recurring quote from our class. All semester, Dr. McCoy has told us in various contexts “[i]t is incredible that a sentence is ever understood”, a quote from Percival Everett’s Erasure. I think, at last, the quote is beginning to resonate with me, especially as our class nears the end of another Everett novel, I am Not Sidney Poitier. The book and quote combined have me considering language itself: the weight of our words, the importance of our statements, and the unpredictability of meaning.

Continue reading “What’s in a Word?”

Lyndsey Prince, Molly Byrne, Darby Nagpaul, Emma Mandella, Daina Almonte, Chaim Green

Franz Anton Mesmer was a German-born Viennese scholar with many different educational backgrounds. He studied philosophy, law, theology, and eventually medicine. After practicing medicine for ten or so years, Mesmer realized in his forties that he did not like the concept of medicine in his day, and thought that it’s solutions to health problems were too painful and unnecessary. Using all of his previous knowledge and experience, Mesmer created a new study of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Hypnosis is a state of consciousness in which someone voluntarily gives up control, and becomes more prone to suggestion and direction. Growing from this idea, Mesmer began practicing new therapeutic techniques such as hypnotherapy or animal magnetism as ways to cure illnesses. He altered modern medical practices, such as draining blood from the body. Mesmer was able to cure one patient, Fraulein Oesterline, by creating that same sensation with animal magnetism and taking the illness away without the intrusiveness of the physical procedure. Additionally, to cure one of his patients, Mesmer used a magnet to disrupt the gravitational tides that he believed were affecting her. In his novel I am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett introduces a new concept similar to this called “Fesmerization.”                                           Continue reading “Fesmerization and Control”

I’ve always been interested in Transcendentalism. It was a trend that began in high school, when I was first introduced to authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Because of this, I originally planned on attending the Thoreau-Harding lecture by Dr. Spencer Crew out of sheer interest, and debated even writing this response to it. However, Dr. Crew covered topics far beyond my expectations, which prompted me to make this post.

Continue reading “Who’s Missing?”

The other day, as work for Professor Lytton Smith’s Writing Afrofuturism class, I was asked to listen to Janelle Monae’s album Dirty Computer. This was some of the most entertaining homework I’ve ever had, especially since I still find myself listening on my own. Monae covers a lot of different issues in her album: sexuality, femininity, and race to name a few. If one were to look closely, there’s probably plenty of overlap between both Everett and Monae’s work. However, one line in her song Screwed stood out to me in particular:

“Everything is sex, except sex, which is power.”

*Graphic language and assault mention

Continue reading “Sex, Power, and Control”