Conclusions

How do you guys usually go about concluding humanities papers? My go-to strategy is to briefly philosophize on the broader implications of the argument or to suggest other potentially fruitful avenues of inquiry. Both seem kind of cheesy and inappropriate in the case of these papers, however.

My Rhetoric 103A teacher says that summarizing the preceding arguments in a short paper is insulting to the reader's intelligence. I'm not sure I buy this, since at least some crystallization of the thesis seems useful.

Any ideas?

About the Prompts

This morning I have given you at last, the last minute gift of some added prompts for the final due so soon. I will admit that I am hoping that nearly all of you are already so well along in your writing that you will have no need or interest in taking up these new prompts, but I also suspect that at least some of you will turn to them, whether because you are are stymied or uninspired by the already available topics, or perhaps because you have been putting things off to the last minute. But whether you actually write about these topics in your finals or not, I do hope that everybody will give some thought to them, because taken together they also function as a kind of preliminary map of the terrain to which the last lectures of the course will be devoted. It seems to me that it is only now, in the end, that it makes good sense for you to be turning your thoughts to these connections in particular as a way of beginning to take stock of the texts, themes, and problems of the course as a whole.

Final Prompts:

For Essaylet Two:

In "Relfections on Violence" Hannah Arendt writes

The experience of death, whether the experience of dying or the inner awareness of one's own mortality, is perhaps the most anti-political experience there is, insofar as it is usually faced in complete loneliness and impotence, signifying that we shall leave the company of our fellow men and with it that being-together and acting in concert which makes life worthwhile… What is important is that these experiences, whose elementary force is beyond doubt, have never found an institutional, political expression. No body politic I know of was ever founded on the equality before death and its actualization in violence.

How does this viewpoint comport with Judith Butler's elaboration in the essay "Precarious Life" of a connection between politics and an awareness of the precarity of human life? In the essay Butler draws our attention to a provocative claim by Emmanuel Levinas, namely: "To be in relation with the other face to face is to be unable to kill. It is also the situation of discourse." How does this assertion differ (if it does) from Arendt's insistence that "to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant"?

For Essaylet One:

Option A -- Make and defend any strong claim about the situation of the colonized and their political prospects in the chapter "Concerning Violence" from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, but you must substantiate that claim primarily through a close reading of the unusually long passage Fanon recounts (curiously without providing much in the way of a reading himself) from Aime Cesaire's Les Armes Miraculeuses, the exchange of the Rebel and the Mother. How do the arguments and details in that passage illuminate the problems, ambitions, characteristics of the text as a whole to which you want to draw our attention?

Option B -- Make and defend any strong claim about the relation between the "doing" of gender, our "undoing" by gendered desire, and the differences (or not) between these doings and undoings and the way in which violence can "do us in" as Judith Butler elaborates these paradoxes in Undoing Gender, but whatever case you make, you must substantiate your claim in a way that takes into account, among other things, the following provocative claim:

[O]ne mourns when when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you, changes you possibly forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance.

Although there is no necessity about this, it may be useful, in responding to either of these options for Essaylet One, to bear in mind (even if you do not address it specifically in the resulting reading) the passages on the relation of mortality and freedom from Arendt's "Reflections on Violence" to which I have already drawn your attention in the prompt for Essaylet Two, above.

One day, at Disneyland...

...I met Michael Jackson. I was about 7 years old and he was in a wheel chair and wearing an oft-donned surgical mask. I remember it very vaguely and my memory has been strengthened by the snapshots taken of this meeting (which are now in some Rubbermaid bin at my parent's house). But I do remember his lit up eyes and, of course, a very gentle disposition.

Anyway, the truly interesting part of this, to me, is when I met M.J., I was exiting the ride "Peter Pan" while he was just about to board the flight to Never, Never land. Rapidly, a huge group of people formed around the exit from the ride, waiting for Michael to appear. After a long time of waiting, much longer than it takes to fly to Never, Never land and back, people began to leave, it seems Michael never found the exit.

True story.

How to cite graphic novels

What is the appropriate way to quote Maus (or any g.n.)? Page numbers? Does each box have a special marker?

A History of Violence Alternate Edition

I stumbled across this in my research... I figure it would resonate with some of you and give you a little break as well.

Question

Does anyone know if Dana is right or left handed? Can anyone remember any possible references in the text?