• Ethos / Authorial Presence 
  • Yifan Gu, “To Listen Is to Bind”
    • I discovered this when I attempted to apply the code given to me at school in China to the work of Virginia Woolf. In Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” the narrator sees a black mark on the wall and throughout the story, imagines multiple possibilities of what that mark could be. In the end, she discovers that it was only a snail. I was confused the first time I read this piece of literature. I did not understand what the author was trying to convey. I assumed that the snail must be some sort of symbol that all Western-educated students understood, and if only I knew what it was, the story’s meaning would become clear.  Later, I realized I was just like the narrator in Woolf’s story. She was imagining possibilities, but the answer was obvious when she stood up and looked closer.
  • Olympia Spivey, “Making America Holy”
    • I find myself here, now, trying to write in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Hunched over my kitchen table in a half-empty New York apartment, I spend hours working on assignments that normally take me thirty minutes, while each day the news reports more deaths added to the thousands who have already perished. My family gets their income as live musicians and performers. Now, as all work has been moved online, that income is much more uncertain. Chee’s words echo through my mind as I search for the motivation to finish my last several papers of the spring semester. I wonder how writing can continue to matter to me when, in a few weeks, I will place myself on the front lines of essential work, and in doing so, expose myself to a pathogen that has killed a quarter of a million people worldwide in the last five months.
  • Mengyang Zeng, “Element of Surprise”
    • On February 6th, I sat at the front of a classroom. Everyone was asked to introduce themselves. The goal was to break the ice. A boy stood up and told us he was from China. “But Not Wuhan!” he added. He was so proud. An expression emerged on his face, somewhere between that of an Olympic champion and a soldier.  Then he laughed. Then everyone laughed. Everyone—the teacher, the students, the TA. It was grandiose, a moment of celebration: no one in this room was from Wuhan. We reached a consensus: We are not the ones dying, we are not the ones locked up; we dodged a bullet. Thus the ice was broken. For days after that, I had a delusion that I was a character in a sitcom, the laughter from that moment floating around my head as if a laugh track had been merged with my life. But apart from the laughter, there is another voice stuck in my brain, one from a video filmed in Wuhan. I watched it on the same day of that class—a middle-aged woman chasing after a hearse. “Mama!” She screamed, over and over, just as a toddler would. I thought that woman was me. How am I not her? How is anyone not from Wuhan?

• Problem / Motive
  • Lorena Campes, “Crossing the Line: Capitalist Critique and Artistic Hybridity in Parasite”
    • What makes Bong and his film of particular interest, however, is that this same class-related tension is reflected within the film industry itself, creating an ironic, hypocritical relationship between filmic capitalist critique and active participation in capitalism as a result.
  • Yifan Gu, “To Listen Is to Bind”
    • I began to question if the traditional way of literary interpretation that I learned in China still applies to a world in which different cultures meet, clash, merge, and blend incessantly.
  • Jacqueline LeKachman, “Dulce et Decorum Est: COVID-19 Health Workers and the Old Lie”
    • Precisely this emphasis on health workers as heroes prevents us from reckoning with the moral issues surrounding health workers’ forced sacrifices and taking any tangible action as a result. 
  • Fabiola Sanabria, “The Machista Costa Rican Institute of the Woman” 
    • I am aware that the mission of the institution is to protect and promote the effective exercise of human rights for women—their inclusion, empowerment, and gender equity—but how will we solve the existing gender inequality in the country if we do not address this situation as a whole society? In other words, how will we approach and combat machismo in our society if we continue denying men their role, responsibility, and opportunity to improve the system? 
  • Lydia Varcoe-Wolfson, “What You’ve Been Calling Your Vagina is Not Your Vagina”
    • Really? I thought to myself, what gives this man the authority to stand in front of a class and declare that my body is not valuable enough for specificity? 

• Transitioning Between Paragraphs / Weaving Sources
  • Anavi Jalan, “The Novel Strain of Anti-Asian Discrimination”
    • Yuh-Line Niou, a member of the New York assembly, expressed her concern and stated that the language is “fueling the xenophobia we’re seeing all over our districts” (qtd. in Carlson). / The President’s targeted language is seen by many as another move in the global competition between commercial leaders US and China.
  • Jacqueline LeKachman, “Dulce et Decorum Est: COVID-19 Health Workers and the Old Lie”
    • The omnipresence of words like “hero” and “bravery” reveals that even as doctors are dying, we continue to uncritically accept triumphant narratives that mask the fact that tragic stories like Dr. Breen’s could have been avoided with the appropriate mental health support. / Our at times harmful understanding of heroes comes largely from ingrained literary and cultural depictions of heroism, which are often myths.
  • Alana Markel, “Truth in Art(lessness)” 
    • The narrator conveys his own frustration over how to convey the unimaginable realities of war to those back home: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it” (76). / In a review of McCullin’s exhibition for the (art!) magazine Frieze, Darran Anderson highlights the “anti-heroism” in McCullin’s work, echoing O’Brien’s argument above. Anderson notes that there is “no trite moralism” or “consolation” in the images; McCullin is “lucidly devoid of ideology,” for example, capturing incredible photos from both sides of the Berlin wall (Anderson). 

• Representing a Source to an Outside Audience 
  • Yifan Gu, “To Listen Is to Bind”
    • What does this mean for our ability to appreciate “arts in the contact zone”? Susan Sontag, in her essay “Against Interpretation,” provides a new perspective on how to interpret artwork. Her main point is that the over-interpretation of artwork brings many undesired side-effects. Ancient Greeks, led by Plato, believed that art is a mimicry of reality, and therefore is useless. They separated form from content, and believed the content to be the only thing that matters, and that form is an “accessory” (4).
  • Julia Kałużna, “Plastic Shoes Unite” 
    • In her essay “Clown School,” she examines laughter through a psychodynamic lens. Alsadir notes that psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott called laughter a “gateway to the subconscious” which she argues stores the “unsocialized self,”, or in Nietzsche’s terms, “the one you are” (6). Her essay ultimately traces the reasons for the “spontaneous outbursts” of laughter to the recognition of oneself with the human, vulnerable side of the performer (2). She compares the entertaining aspect of clowning, or “play,” to dreams, which act as a form of “self-revelation” of the psyche (7). This ultimately leads her to equate comedic performance to a “therapy session,” which both disarms and heals (2).
  • Fatiha Kamal, “The Selfie: A Reinvention of Identity in Visual Self-Depiction” 
    • In her Atlantic article “You Win, Kim Kardashian,” Megan Garber argues that the book goes beyond just a vanity project. Garber explains that Kardashian West’s selfies in the book are “harbingers of arrogance, or of insecurity, or a combination of the two,” showing Kardashian West in a light that both confirms and subverts the view that many have had of her throughout the years.
  • Alana Markel, “Truth in Art(lessness)”
    • The photo is split in two by the corner of a building, whose edge runs up and out of sight. On the right, a young man remains hidden from a team of soldiers gathering just around the corner in the left frame. In this black-and-white image by British war photographer Don McCullin, neither side can apparently see the other, and it’s unclear exactly who is doing the hiding and who is in pursuit.

• Engaging with Quotes: Contextualization, Incorporation, Citation
  • Lorena Campes, “Crossing the Line: Capitalist Critique and Artistic Hybridity in Parasite”
    • In her review of Parasite for Variety, Jessica Kiang discusses Bong’s implicit indictment of capitalism, writing, “Even this grand battle royale between the haves and have-nots will only ever be . . . a sideshow indulged to distract its participants from the real enemy, which is a system that creates and nourishes such divides in the first place.” Kiang points out the fact that Bong’s film is less about the poor finally getting their revenge on the evil upper-class, and more about a capitalist system that ensures a cyclical imbalance between classes. In fact, the Park family is never depicted as “overtly detestable” (Kiang). Rather, it is continuously made apparent throughout the film just how nice they are (to this, Kim Chunk-sook gestures around the Parks’ well-appointed home and remarks, “Hell, if I had all this money, I’d be nice, too” (00:59:16)).
  • Jacqueline LeKachman, “Dulce et Decorum Est: COVID-19 Health Workers and the Old Lie”
    • As Beggan reflects, heroism “guide[s] how people think about and evaluate their lives and goals. Is the valuing of heroic action a means for people to absolve themselves of social responsibility? By elevating heroes on a pedestal, an individual social perceiver increases the status difference between hero and observer and can justify not acting in a prosocial manner” (25). In other words, he argues, the label of “hero” is a tool we use to evaluate how we, as bystanders, should (or should not) react to social crises. However, this creates a gap between heroes and regular people who then passively wait for a savior, telling themselves, “‘I’m not a hero, so there’s nothing I can do’” (Beggan 25). Hero myths actually expose a cultural desire to be saved: there is “a societal belief that you are either a hero or a regular guy. . . . Clark Kent is a slightly bumbling journalist until trouble arises—then he becomes Superman.” In popular narratives, protagonists are “largely able to keep the regular guy and the hero completely separate” (Carroll). This dichotomy in the media we consume daily further reinforces that we, the regular folk, must wait for the Supermans to swoop in to save us. But in the case of this pandemic, health workers don’t have superhuman powers. 

• Analysis / Close Reading / Reflection
  • Yifan Gu, “To Listen Is to Bind”
    • It occurs to me that as an outsider to both Chinese- and English-speaking readers, she is in an awkward position between two cultures. Having lived in both cultures and undergone the linguistic transition from Chinese to English, she has taken on a multilingual perspective, and Chinese culture would still have a major impact on the way she perceives the world even if she abandons it.
  • Alana Markel, “Truth in Art(lessness)”
    • By the end of the story, O’Brien has dismantled the entire concept of a “true” war tale. The truth has a different set of rules when it comes to war, so many rules that there seem to be none at all. There are even true stories that “never happened,” because “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant” (89). O’Brien argues that just because something happens doesn’t make it true; it must matter that it happened, whether or not it did. His concept of truth may have more to do with a feeling, an acute understanding, rather than a momentary accuracy, like that captured by the click of a camera. O’Brien makes this point not only in this chapter but through the mere existence of his novel. The Things They Carried is fictional, but true. Creative, imaginative, artistic, but true. Maybe O’Brien actually “threw down the parts” of Lemon that got stuck in a tree after he was blown up, maybe his platoon mate sang “Lemon Tree” as they “peel[ed] him off,” maybe it kept him up at night years later (89).  Maybe not. Either way, there’s no questioning its emotional integrity; it would be a failure of the reader to do so. 

• Putting Texts in Conversation: Deepening (using one text to clarify or extend the meaning of another)
  • Liberty Guillamon, “Cancel Culture, the Internet, and Trans Inclusive Feminism”
    • This divide breeds an anger within feminism, and between feminists, that is useful in understanding the modern-day TERF war. Amina Wadud’s essay “Can One Critique Cancel All Previous Efforts?” provides a more concrete explanation as to why this anger occurs. Wadud writes about the Qur’an, arguing that while there are aspects of the text that are patriarchal, some feminist critiques only serve to “reify the male gaze” (130). She argues that suggesting we must either “liberate women from every utterance in the Qur’an or . . . throw out the sacred aspect of the text altogether” is unnecessary and ineffective (131-132). Removing the “sacred aspect,” of the Qur’an, Wadud asserts, does not acknowledge the nuanced and productive arguments that come about when explaining why “six or seven sticky passages” may be problematic (132). Perhaps most concerningly, throwing out the Qur’an altogether due to its sexism requires the dismissal of an entire community and assumes the members of said community can “be transformed” and will adapt accordingly (132). Though it is not my intention to equate religious conflict and feminist in-fighting, Wadud’s concern that eliminating problematic material dismisses the value of critical discussions as well as entire communities could certainly apply in the controversy over Greer.
  • Yifan Gu, “To Listen Is to Bind”
    • Although they at first appear quite different, there is a subtle analogy to be made between Poma and Li. Poma had a political purpose, while Li had a personal purpose. Nonetheless, each has a complicated and paradoxical relationship with their cultural backgrounds. Poma wrote against Spanish rule in Inca, but he did so by using the country’s language and cultural references. Li writes in English to have private conversations with herself that are separate from her past, but she is still tied to Chinese culture. Poma is opposing the culture that has imposed itself on him and Li is running away from the culture of her youth. Four hundred years lie between these two writers. Yet, Li and Poma face the same problem of having their motives misinterpreted.
  • Julia Kałużna, “Plastic Shoes Unite”
    • This is why the one, unified roar of laughter in Kwiatkowski’s audience was so surprisingly freeing. As suggested by Alsadir’s “Clown School,” his willingness to belt off-key pop songs and poke fun at his doughy physique by becoming winded after one minute of dancing reveal a process of stripping away the “layers of socialization” (9). This in turn reveals “the clown that had been there all along—or in Winnicott’s terms, your ‘true self.’” Whenever he sang he revealed not only his own true self, but also “the interior of the audience members, who recognize themselves in what [he] is expressing” (14). Alsadir explains that the spectators “mark that recognition with laughter, sometimes the only acceptable form of catharsis” (14). Indeed, when Kwiatkowski’s audience is laughing, it is clear that his performance entails not only entertainment, but also a deep, therapeutic purge of the deep resentment that stifled smiles for so long. Connection-seeking, Alsadir’s theorized cause of cathartic laughter, is the building block of Kwiatkowski’s joke.
  • Olympia Spivey, “Making America Holy”
    • Keegan mentions that she feels intense jealousy for everyone that she sees accomplish something, or make something valuable, or who can have their written work heard from the dead—eerily ironic for a writer whose book was published after her premature death. But she considers that what might save us from such jealousies is the possibility that either none of us is special, or that all of us are (“Song for the Special”). Maybe what matters is connection—when we are able to dance near to each other, “punctuated by an 808,” as Smith describes—that affirmation that we are here, too.

• Putting Texts in Conversation: Reckoning (using one text to complicate or interrogate the meaning of another) 
  • Alana Markel, “Truth in Art(lessness)” 
    • Yet O’Brien and McCullin’s perspectives are far from interchangeable. The second vignette in O’Brien’s “How to Tell a War Story” recalls his experience of walking through the jungle with his platoon on the day Curt Lemon died. He remembers with great detail war buddies Rat Kiley and Lemon laughing and playing chicken with smoke grenades: “They were kids; they just didn’t know” (O’Brien 77). They keep traveling, and then in an instant, Lemon steps on a detonator and is killed … But this philosophy seems to differ from that of O’Brien, who proposes that the concept of truth lives in a larger, grayer sphere, where some stories, like Lemon’s death, can only be remembered surreally and not two-dimensionally. 
  • Caitlin Mulvihill, “Power and Subversion” 
    • Classicist Mary Beard considers this question in her book Women and Power: A Manifesto, a compilation of two essays exploring the relationships between femininity, masculinity, and power structures, beginning with the ancient Greeks. “You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure,” writes Beard (105). This characterization of power as a male-coded structure is not directly contradictory to the ties Aoki makes between gender and power, yet the two thinkers diverge on the correct way to transform this patriarchal structure. Beard’s conclusion, that power is an inherently masculine concept and therefore must be entirely reinvented in order to be accessible to non-masculine people, is in tension with Aoki’s belief that gender can, and should, be reformed from within. 

• Putting Text in Context via Research 
  • Madisen Fong, “No Happy Endings Can Be Found in Hate”
    • This notion of inevitability and fate has its roots in hamartia, an Aristotelian term traditionally referring to the fatal flaw of a protagonist that leads to their downfall. However, the Oxford Companion to Theater Performance also states that “The traditional debate about hamartia as moral flaw or intellectual error makes it an attribute of character, but it is equally possible to see it as part of the plot, an action rather than a character flaw” (Vince). So, the hamartia that led to Vinz’s death could have sprung from within him—his pride, his anger, or his aggression—but it could have equally been the result of his environment and the greater “plot” of society rather than the flaw of the individual. To some, Kassovitz included, this latter interpretation is more logical. Vinz’s death was too predictable, too sadly familiar, for the hamartia to lie solely within this individual. This particular hamartia, then, must be the result of a greater system at play. The aim of Kassovitz’s film, then, is to reveal the larger cultural framework that allows such a cycle to perpetuate.
  • Jessica Guo, “To Hear the Deaf” 
    • It is important to notice that the major sponsor of Aronson’s second film is the Cochlear Americas Corporation. This suggests that the narrative that Aronson chose to portray might not have captured all of the gains and losses along the journey. The language on Cochlear Americas’ website still resembles the dominant, problematic narrative. “Time To Get Back What You’ve Been Missing,” it says, casting deafness as a weakness to be cured, and the implant as a medical miracle which advocates for the Deaf community argue eliminates Deaf identity and history. The struggle of the Deaf community has never ended—it is a perpetual ongoing war.
  • Anavi Jalan, “The Novel Strain of Anti-Asian Discrimination”
    • Historical context paints a darker picture: in 1849 and 1850, Chinese immigrants entered the United States, fleeing conflicts at home. American citizens were initially grateful for these new “industrious members of the community,” but this sentiment soon turned into resentment amongst lower-class whites, who saw them as labor competition. This racism was soon codified into law: in 1854 Asians were prohibited from testifying in court and were excluded from the Naturalization Act of 1870 (Starkey). The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act went as far as to suspend all immigration of Chinese workers (Lee). 
  • Fatiha Kamal, “The Selfie: A Reinvention of Identity in Visual Self-Depiction” 
    • Before understanding the purpose behind self-depiction as it pertains to selfies, it is necessary to first investigate the purpose of self-depiction as it pertains to the original self-portrait. Eighteenth-century art theorist Roger de Piles was instrumental in helping to develop a contemporary understanding of painting, and many of his arguments still resonate with modern art concepts. Writing to an amateur audience, de Piles focuses on portraits in his work The Principles of Painting to demonstrate how technical skill is only a fraction of what makes an accomplished work of art. De Piles argues that through a careful understanding of how the choices in lighting, color, and scenery affect the mood of the painting, the artist will be able to control the “attitude,” or pose, of the figure and have control over a “graceful expression of the vices as well as of the virtues” of the subject (de Piles 62). It is not enough for de Piles that a portrait artist create an accurate physical representation of the subject; they must also be able to assign an identity to the character in the portrait. The viewer must be able to access, through the artist’s instruction, the subject’s greater qualities (their “virtues”) and their worse qualities (their “vices”) and be able to relate to them in some way (62). The connection the artist fosters with the viewer through the medium of the painting is, for de Piles, the heart of portraiture; it gives purpose to the piece’s existence. When it comes to depicting oneself, this task of representing what de Piles might call “knowledge of character” must be accomplished far more carefully (62). A sufficient reflection of a self-portrait’s subject requires an examination of oneself in order to effectively create a visually-based dialogue with the viewer.
  • Lydia Varcoe-Wolfson, “What You’ve Been Calling Your Vagina is Not Your Vagina”
    • According to the Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary, the vagina is “a canal in a female mammal that leads from the uterus to the external orifice opening into the vestibule between the labia minora.” It is an entirely internal canal. . . . The vulva, on the other hand, is defined as “the external parts of the female genital organs. . . .” The vagina is the part of the female body necessary for vaginal intercourse, childbirth, and is the canal through which menstrual fluid exits the body—all functions related to reproduction and penetrative sex. . . . On the contrary, the part of female genitalia most sensitive to stimulation, and therefore most likely to evoke sexual pleasure, is the tip of the clitoris, which is easily accessible from the outside. Thus, when we only talk about vaginas and never vulvas in the context of sex, we minimize the importance of and women’s capacity for sexual pleasure.

• Model Endings: Synthesis and Significance
  • Madisen Fong, “No Happy Endings Can Be Found in Hate” 
    • This conclusion is bleak, but so are the lives of the marginalized immigrants in the banlieues of Paris, and Kassovitz wants to present us with this reality rather than allow us to ignore it any longer. In the last seconds of the film, we hear two sounds as we watch Hubert and the officer stare down the barrel of each other’s guns. First, the now familiar sharp metronomic ticks of the clock . . . growing louder as death inches nearer. Then, one final voiceover from Hubert: “This is a story about a society that is falling and during its fall, to reassure itself, it repeats: So far so good. So far so good. . . . The importance is not in the fall, it’s in the landing” (01:36:49-01:37:11). The final punctuating gunshot marks the third senseless death of a young man from the banlieue within twenty-four hours. If the importance is “in the landing,” this ending begs the question: have we already crashed?
  • Yifan Gu, “To Listen Is to Bind”
    • Li attests to Sontag’s idea in her essay, saying that her decision to write only in English is easily overinterpreted. Some readers try to decode  her personal choice by giving it political meanings . . . Imagine being in the narrator’s position, observing the mark, touching it with your hand, feeling its texture, discovering the snail. After all, to speak is to blunder. But to listen, is to bind.
  • Jacqueline LeKachman, “Dulce et Decorum Est: COVID-19 Health Workers and the Old Lie”
    • Perhaps most importantly, we must be critical of applauding the idea of dying for your country as inherently patriotic and using this false patriotism to absolve ourselves of responsibility. Instead, we must recognize that we cannot be passive beneficiaries of heroism. Health workers are not the only ones who must take action. We too must be brave enough to redefine patriotism not as dying for your country, but as providing for those who serve us so that patriotism becomes about cultivating the life and health of our whole community—not just certain members of it.
  • Alana Markel, “Truth in Art(lessness)” 
    • At the end of “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien shares that sometimes people will approach him and express that they were surprised they liked his war story, that it touched them; he responds in his head with the words of Rat Kiley: “You dumb cooze” because they weren’t “listening” (90) … I begin to understand McCullin’s words, his continual resistance to the word “artist,” and his contradicting and ever-changing justifications. That maybe it comes not from a place of ego but from the knowledge, after sixty years of photography, that we struggle to hear him. Instead, we idolize, we take pictures of his pictures, and we analyze. McCullin is what Sontag considers to be a “morally alert photographer,”’ one who avoids the “exploitation of sentiment” at all costs (Sontag); he refuses to be confused with those who claim their work as art, as something that can be studied from different perspectives. In the current age of aestheticized, often untrustworthy news, McCullin is putting his foot down. There is no gray area in the death of a child. There are no two schools of thought in viewing a dying mother and her starving child. This is how it happened: “Asi sucedió.” McCullin’s only comment: “Yo lo ví.”
  • Mengyang Zeng, “Element of Surprise”
    • I dreamed about the PE classes I took at primary school. I was the worst student in that class, always the slowest in track. I broke my knees a few times. Too many times. I was afraid of running. My classmates decided to prank me—they would run leisurely behind me, on purpose, for the first half of the race, to make me think I miraculously outdid everyone. They offered me a false sense of happiness, one that they would break a few seconds later as they passed me one by one. Then they turned around to enjoy my face: a face of anger, shame, and disappointment. I was scared of that. I would run so fast that I thought my knees would break, lying to myself that they wouldn’t be able to catch up. They always did. . .The virus didn’t catch me in China. It caught me in New York. It turned its face toward me—I imagined it to be yellow and round—and it said, “surprise!” but I wasn’t. I was not surprised. April 27th. I want to eat braised noodles.

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