Michel de Certeau and Paper Basketball

The most striking element of Moran’s second chapter of Interdisciplinarity was, to me, his inclusion of Michel de Certeau‘s cultural beliefs on everyday life and its relationship to society on a macro-level. As our presentation discussed on Thursday, he focuses on the concept of tactics: a method for subjugated individuals to subvert popular culture and/or large scale establishments through seemingly trivial, banal actions, e.g. playing solitaire on company’s time or taking excessively long bathroom breaks during math class. These monotonous activities can occur on both conscious and unconscious levels, but tend to veer toward the latter due to their colloquial and commonly implicit nature. Business executives and IRS workers alike don’t toss needless, scrunched-up papers into the trash from across the room because they are trying to overthrow their respective employers; simply enough, they’re bored. Continue reading “Michel de Certeau and Paper Basketball”

Social Hierarchies and “Marrying Absurd”

Bourdieu argues that cultural consumption is due to “our need to place ourselves within social hierarchies” (Moran, 72), and that this same need is transferred to how we read texts. In a previous course I learned the use the term “subject position” to frame the specific position that a person inhabits within a culture. For example some of my subject positions are female, white, college student, teenager, creative nonfiction writer, and so on. These subject positions each have a type of hierarchy be it gender, racial, or some other aspect of culture that influence how I read a text. Continue reading “Social Hierarchies and “Marrying Absurd””

Why College? Why English?

So what exactly is the real purpose of college? Why are we all here, at Suny Geneseo, studying our hearts away, in order to become… what? Do… what? Is it really in order to find a (hopefully) financially stable career? Is it for our own personal growth and development? Is it to further our knowledge of the world, and hopefully ourselves? Or maybe to have a good time? As a new transfer student this semester, these questions have been circling throughout my head as I begin to identify myself as a Geneseo student. What am I really doing here, and why? Continue reading “Why College? Why English?”

False Advertising

Before break I went to a lecture on neo-slave narratives that was presented by a former Geneseo undergraduate. The idea was that I was supposed to sit through the lecture and then write a paper about what it had taught me, for extra credit. Before you read it though, if you take anything away from it I hope it’s this:

1) Titles for lectures can be next to useless. Maybe they change once you go to grad school.

and 2) This class is only the beginning of our careers as English majors.

Here is that paper.

Continue reading “False Advertising”

W;t

In my play analysis class, we read Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play W;t. I was fortunate enough to have previously read this play in my AP Literature class senior year as well. I hold this play near and dear to my heart for it pertains to the human experience; Edson proposes the question: which offers more self-fulfillment, gaining interpersonal connections with human beings or gaining solely knowledge? Demonstrated in both the cancer-ridden protagonist, Dr. Vivian Bearing, (a professor of 17th Century poetry, specifically that of John Donne) and Dr. Posner, (an oncologist in training) Edspn suggests that with great ambition also comes great consequences.

It was noted in my class how Edson may have purposely chosen Vivian to study metaphysical poetry to pair with the intensity of the medical world. There are sections of the dialogue in which Dr. Posner is clinically describing the state of Vivian’s health meanwhile Vivian is using the language of her own profession to describe her state at the same time. The medical field and the world of English, though seeming starkly different, both describe the human experience; in the case of Vivian, that experience is death. This play collaborates these two fields, similarly to Joe Moran’s suggestions in Interdisciplinarity.

Overall, the play furthermore delves into the brevity of the moment between life and death, something that has an effect on all human beings. This play is one of my favorites and the movie starring Emma Thompson is also quite good, I definitely recommend it.

I is for…

Interdisciplinarity. Wow, there is a lot of interdisciplinarity in Zulus. Within the narrative itself, Everett generally limits himself to a story that’s relatable enough to avoid needing much support in a specialized field or to one so fantastical that it bunny hops over subjects of study onto another planet where they don’t even exist, along with other Earthling luxuries like basic biology. Where I’ve found hidden caches of references snaking out beyond the discipline of literature is in the chapter headings. Continue reading “I is for…”

Percival Everett. Is he what we think?

I haven’t posted on here much because I was always self conscious and didn’t feel like I know what to say and if what I was saying was correct. Being in this class for the past three months really has helped me develop a wider range of thinking when it comes literature. This next paper I feel more confident about than our last one. I chose to talk about Zulus in relation to romanticism as described in the Bedford. The Bedford mentions that romanticism can come back to the theme of Gothic. Gothic is described as strange and bizarre in the definition of romanticism and doesn’t that describe the whole book of Zulus? Strange and bizarre? Gothic is also described as a gloomy mood and describes Gothic heroines as mysterious, which if you ask me Alice Achitophel is pretty mysterious. So, does that mean that Percival Everett is a Gothic author when he wrote his book? The definition of Gothic describes the whole setting, mood, characteristics of Zulus. Romanticism, even though Zulus isn’t a romance novel, it is still seen though by using Gothic and that ties it back. That’s what I want to focus my second essay on.

Interstellar/Interdisciplinarity

This week I saw Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and walking out of the theater I couldn’t help but draw parallels between that and Zulus. Like Zulus, Interstellar takes place in a future dystopian Earth corrupted by its past inhabitants. The planet can no longer sustain its population and it is up to the protagonist (Matthew McConaughey) to save the world, similarly to Alice Achitophel. What I found to be the most interesting about this movie is that it questions the human perception of time and space; are we limited to only three dimensions? To capture the essence of Zulus, one must look beyond the conventional “dimensions” of close reading. Pericival Everett includes so many minute details in his novel that may or may not contribute to the general understanding of it. For example, one may research every aspect of his chapter titles and may not understand Zulus in the least bit more. In Interstellar, the characters were looking so narrowly for the “key to survival” when the answer was broadly staring them in the face. The word dimension automatically associates itself with discipline in my head. As English majors, we look for answers beyond our own dimension/discipline. Anyway, I thought the movie was phenomenal and everyone should see it because it is so similar to Zulus!