Author: Rachel Katz

With the fall semester coming to a close, I can’t help but think about all of the exciting things that are going to be happening during 2017. One of the events that I am most excited for is to study abroad during the summer for a month. I will be spending four weeks in Athens, Greece taking a Humanities class through Geneseo. Continue reading “Interdisciplinarity Abroad”

Over this past week, I had the privilege of being initiated as one of my sorority’s new Vice Presidents as the new Vice President of Community Relations for the 2017 year. And while this was a highlight of career here at Geneseo and one of the parts of the spring semester that I am most excited for, it is nerve racking to think about how my ideas might differ from the previous Vice President of Community Relations and the previous ideas about the job set but the sorority as a whole. Continue reading “Changing Over of Ideas”

I’ve never been one to get mad at a slightly used book. I am a proud owner of a library card and so it didn’t faze me when ordering books for this class when I had the option of a new $20 book or an $8 used book. But when I brought my copy of Zulus the first day of class I was shocked when I found messy pencil script across the blank spaces at the beginning of each new chapter. Continue reading “All because of a cheaper price”

In class on Wednesday, it was our task at the beginning to think about how The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms is organized. Though I did not know how this could relate to our English class, I went along with this talking about how hard it is to find a word without having to go look up another word or the reasons why they choose the pictures that they did. Continue reading “Connecting School and Social Archives”

While reading through Meridian, one line that made me think was the quote from Meridian that said, “I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don’t see it as a handling down of answers” (p. 203). This was a very interesting thing to read because it relates to my life today and the way that I learn and work in a class setting. While in the majority of my classes I work in a stadium kind of seating, where the professor is in the front of the room giving a lecture and the students are in their seats taking notes. Continue reading “Meridian’s teaching practices”

It was brought up in class today the idea of violence and romance and how these two terms, though very different, end up going hand in hand whenever we talk about a sensitive subject such as violence. This was discussed when we were thinking about the Schrodinger’s cat experiment. It was determined that when putting cats in a bunker with some exploding gunpowder that only half of the cats would die. Continue reading “Science as romantic writers”

It wasn’t until reading Toomer’s “Cotton Song” in class that I think I really understood what Jean Toomer’s Cane was really all about. Something Professor McCoy say in class really struck a chord with me. She compared Jean Toomer writing this play as compared to a Geneseo student on their first day of classes. This idea allowed me to really understand where the narrator of the short poem was trying to get across. This poem touches on the song that the share croppers would sing while working in a cotton field. Continue reading “Literature into Cultural Romaticism”

In class on Wednesday, it was brought to our attention what it means to be part of “the chorus” in “The Bacchae” and what those girls would look, act, and sound like at that point in time. It is an interesting thought to decipher how the group of the chorus girls were seen at the time that the play was written viruses in the twenty-first century as the play being read and reproduced. It is interesting to discuss is the idea of the modern day “chorus” and how they might be seen in today’s society. Throughout the play, the chorus are seen singing and dancing in recognition of Dionysus, while telling stories about his life. This reminds me of the cult-like following that celebrities have in today’s society. While they sometimes are not seen in the best light, these obsessive followings for celebrities like Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, or even groups like One Direction are common and actually pretty normal to see in today’s world. Throughout social media, magazines, and television, it is hard to go through even one day without seeing one of these celebrities’ pop up on your phone and hearing their name come up in conversation.

What is important to look at is how we as a society can look at the chorus in “The Bacchae” and how this is similar or different to the “chorus” you might see today and how that might change your opinion while reading the play. From my own perspective this chorus does not seem so bad. Though they might be obsessive, they also seem like a modern day following. Though from the perspective of Pentheus, they are a group that is being controlled by a god that Pentheus does not even believe in. This idea also raises the question if there are other points that the play is trying to allude to that we are just missing because our idea on what is normal and right has shifted so much over time that we no longer can make a common point to what was written so long ago. The way to accurately look at a play would be to first look up what life was like when the play was written and produced, so confusion like this does not occur.