Various Texts Read in ENGL301
New Analysis
Heavily Stylized Metaphor
Interesting Stuff
John Donne excerpts from Devotions
New Opinons
Existential Bullshit
Relevant to real life
James Merill 'b o d y', Christmas Tree, The Sawfish
Franz Kafka 'Before the Law'
Toni Morrison Recitatif
Toni Morrison Desdemona
Kim F Hall 'Othello and the Problem of Blackness'
Gayle Salamon 'The Life and Death of Latisha King'
Toni Morrison 'Playing in the Dark'
Marie De Gournay 'Ladies Complaint'
Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”
Raymond Williams 'Advertising, A Magic System'
Susan Sontag 'AIDS and it's metaphors'
Shakespeare 'Othello'
Lisa Delpit 'No Kinda Sense'
Chris Ofili Etching of Othello
Leslie Jameson 'The Empathy Exams'
Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
Aphra Behn, “The Willing Mistress”
Williams "Medium' 'Mediation'
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, excerpt from Remediation: Understanding New Media
François Rabelais, prologue to Gargantua
Marianne Constable, “How to Do Things with Law,”
Kenneth Burke 'A Rhetoric of Motives'
Stuart Hall Encoding/Decoding
Lili Loofbourow, “The Male Glance”
Short-ish works about life in general. 'body' is just about the word body. Christmas Tree is a shape poem about the 'life' of a christmas tree. The Sawfish is about this really ugly fish in an aquarium.
Discusses ideas like legal precedence, and the way that words and their meanings have become extremely important in our legal system.
A short story about a man standing in front a door, which is refered to as 'the law'. A Guardian prevents him from entering, so he stands there until he dies.
A short-ish work describing an interpretation of the male gaze. It poses that the patriarchy does not hate women overtly. In fact, it almost ignores them, giving them a 'glance' instead of any real consideration.
A ponderance on the meaning of authenticity in an age where great works of art are availble as tiny pixels on our phone. It describes thinking of art not as a physical thing, but as an expirience.
A short story following two girls, one black and one white, through different points in their lives. The story is notable, because it is impossible to discern which character is white and which is black, forcing the reader to consider both options.
An article describing the incident in which a weird little white boy got mad at a girl named Latisha, and decided to shoot her because that made sense to his weird little white boy brain.
A shakespeare play! It's writing style is exactly the same as every other play. It's known for being very tragic, and having some very overt racism in there too. A very sad read.
Three 'etchings' which is a type of art? I think. They depict othello at various points in his story, with various different styles in order to represent his conflicts.
A very funny poem about a guy who is trying to get laid and has to convince his girl that it's not worth waiting around for. notably, it's both a parody of the genre of poetry and a genuine expression of emotion.
A response to Marvell's poem. This poem takes on the female perspective, and though it is much less overt it is also about sex. It's fun because it was written in a society where women aren't supposed to talk about sex.
An interpretation of othello in play form! So a follow-up play, but from Desdemona's perspective. It's always nice to get the female perspective.
A stupidly long read about the problems people have with Othello being black. There is a very long explanation, but the gist of it is that people want to escape the complexity of race and racism by simply denying what we know what race Othello is.
A very interesting read about non-conventional language and dialect. In it, Delpit realizes that her bias against AAVE, or 'Ebonics', was actually a manifestation of bias in education. In actuality, no dialect is objectively superior to any other.
An excerpt from an essay on how AIDS, and illness in general, is used in metaphor, and how that changes people's perceptions of these illnesses
A discussion of rhetoric, it's origins and what it can accomplish. I struggled through reading it, so... yeah. I categorized it as an opinon because he doesn't seem to be saying anything particularly useful.
A woman describes her expiriences as a medical examiner, in which she was asked to rate how well medical students could show empathy for her situation. She talks about how difficult it is to really define empathy, and how it's even harder to test.
A short analysis of how advertising and other forms of media seek to compress certian 'frameworks of knowledge', and how we as the consumers of this media 'decode' this information. I did not understand it
A short piece discussing the reasoning behind our rhetoric-based society. It talks about how much of an impact advertising has on our society today, because of it's influence on the economy
Seperates understanding of media into three distinct parts: Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and remediation. They all have very complex meanings that we discussed in class and I have forgotten them
It starts with 'blessed art thou', which i thought was funny. It's an extended prologue to a feminist work, in which she discusses all the things a reader must consider before they begin to critisize her. At least, that's how I understood it.
A short, consice rambling on the 'miserable condition of man'. On the surface he's talking about how much it sucks to be human. There's probably a metaphor, but I'm too sleepy to figure it out
We read 'Romancing the Shadow', an excerpt in which she discusses the treatment of black characters in american literature, and how it goes directly against what America claims to stand for
A fun little introduction to this story. Rablais goes on an extended rant about nothing in particular(at least that I can understand), and ends by telling the reader to enjoy their expirience
A series of short essays in the form of dictionary entries. They give a more complex meaning, though, explaining how those words have changed that meaning in a social context.
Old Opinons
Montaigne's Various Works
He wrote a lot of essays in which he pretended to be humble but was actually quite full of himself. Our of the three 'Of Liars' was my favorite. Overall, though, they were pretty boring.
Francis Bacon 'Of Truth'
I do not understand this one and I never did. I think(!) It's about how the truth can be complex and stuff, and how it changes it's meaning quite often.
Erasmus 'On Copia'
An overdramatic rambling by some old ass man about what words mean, and how many different ways one can interpret a single sentence. (I didn't like this one)