- On Mary Chen’s “The ‘I’ in Tribe is Silent” (Benjamin Gassman)
- On Elianne del Campo’s “Opening Our Eyes to History” (Grant Ginder)
- On Ayslin Exum’s “The Next Exit” (Bruce Bromley)
- On Melissa Bo-Ya Feng’s “Orwell, Trump, and Twitter” (Stephen Butler)
- On Stephanie Huang’s “Art Versus Artist” (Avia Tadmor)
- On Lillian Jacobs’ “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits” (Elizabeth Kurkjian)
- On Mashrur Khan’s “Journeys to Belonging” (Bruce Bromley)
- On Jessica Kupillas’ “Beatitudes” (Eric Ozawa)
- On Jamie Lee’s “The Importance of Uncertainty . . .” (Andrei Guruianu)
- On Ruofan Li’s “Productivity or What We Will” (Chris Edling)
- On Megan Maxfield’s “Sadism, Sontag, and Snuff” (William Morgan)
- On Tyler Moran’s “Severing the String” (Grant Ginder)
- On Brooke Nguyen’s “Taking Up Space” (Courtney Chatellier)
- On Jasmin Sabirin’s “Pinterest” (Leeore Schnairsohn)
- On Devarshi Vasa’s “The War on People” (Laura Weinert-Kendt)
- On Ilia Wayans’ “Those Who Silence Us” (Zach Udko)
- On Ella Webb’s “And All the Men Merely Players” (Doug Dibbern)
- On Samantha Whitley’s “Stay Woke” (Zach Udko)
- On Justin Yoon’s “The Rules of the Game” (Colm O’Shea)
On Mary Chen’s “The ‘I’ in Tribe is Silent
In Writing The Essay: Global New York, one of my aims is for students to learn how to build meaningful conversations between their own observations of the city and the writing they encounter that is engaged with the city. We make a commitment to valuing observed evidence and to experiencing the city as writers and critical thinkers. In the fall of 2020, we began the course by reading the first half of Teju Cole’s novel Open City, much of which is centered around the protagonist Julius’ walks up and down the island of Manhattan. With fewer students engaged in the wandering and exploration that is often typical of the first semester at NYU, and with Covid restrictions preventing us from taking the tours of the city that usually accompany the course, we followed Julius page by page on his walks around Manhattan. Alongside Cole’s novel we read a series of essays that were in conversation with the places Julius visited, or with the thematic alleys that his thinking strayed down. In the first essay assignment for the course, students were asked to closely and carefully represent a moment from the novel as a means of illuminating an idea that Cole is asking his readers to consider. The assignment asks students to use evidence from their own experience and at least one of the secondary essays to deepen this idea.
In “The ‘I’ in Tribe is Silent,” Mary Chen responds to Julius’ considerations of the complications of a collective identity by turning immediately inward and considering two different versions of “we” she sees herself inhabiting. As with Cole’s protagonist, Chen doesn’t settle easily, but rather she pries critically into what she observes. Her question about the pull of her own “tribal” affiliations and the conflicts inherent in them sets the stage for a thoughtful journey–one where she ultimately considers the pleasures and pitfalls of assenting to an assumed solidarity, as well as how such assumptions often interfere with an individual’s freedom of choice.
What is most impressive to me in Chen’s essay is the way she works with the Brussells section of Cole’s novel, representing a café conversation Julius has with Farouq and Khalil, two Moroccan immigrants to Belgium he meets in a shop he frequents to make long distance phone calls (the novel is a period piece!). Chen honors the tense specificity of the conversation Julius finds himself in, while simultaneously employing it to serve her own discussion. She doesn’t get bogged down in the purposefully incendiary particulars Cole sets before us; rather, her work helps us to recognize the significance of the conversation that extends beyond its particulars. This is not easy. Ultimately, she is able to take a conversation about September 11, 2001, the U.S. intervention in the Middle East, and the question of who has the privilege of defining “terrorism,” and repurpose it to help us think about the costs, benefits, and commonalities of our tribal identities. Mary’s thinking is strong enough, and purposeful enough, that she can play safely with fire. For this, I admire her essay.
—Benjamin Gassman
On Elianne del Campo’s “Opening Our Eyes to History”
Dig is a word my students hear a bit too often from me when they’re working on this progression. Understanding a controversy is a matter of uncovering its roots, and in this sense, Elianne’s essay is a masterclass in excavation. She begins the essay with a thorough representation of the debate at hand—the fight over the removal of Confederate statues—which she skillfully ties to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The writing in these opening paragraphs is objective and journalistic; before making an argument about what this controversy represents and why it’s important, Elianne knows her reader must have a firm grasp on what happened and what’s at stake. This careful work was indeed characteristic of Elianne’s writing over the course of the semester. Whether she was analyzing the historical significance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma or questioning the roots of disinformation, her thinking was deliberate, patient, and evidence-based.
It’s after this thorough representation of the controversy that Elianne’s real digging begins. Notably, she provides the reader with a number of frameworks through which we can gain a greater understanding of the tensions that drive the debate over the removal of Confederate monuments. These frameworks are bolstered by Elianne’s thoughtful consideration of her sources, and are presented to the reader with clear, conceptual language; from historical negationism to freedom of expression and nationalism, Elianne deftly uses key terms to show us why this controversy matters. In doing so, she makes a clear, compelling argument: in the face of difficult truths about their past, Americans “must accept their discomfort, criticism, and self-reflection as necessary for the improvement of society, something that benefits us all.”
—Grant Ginder
On Ayslin Exum’s “The Next Exit”
There’s a moment in Asylin’s essay that harks back to everything before it—her narrative about her father and prison, about being “sidelined and degraded as another ghost in a black body,” and about Raoul Peck’s work with James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro. Ayslin has connected her father’s story, and her own experience of the weight of that story, with Peck’s film along the following lines: Peck’s camera offers histories leading to where America is now, aimed at clarifying what sorts of bodies are socially valued and what sorts must be cut out, this last move linked to the country’s uncritical affection for the simple story that denies the complexity it has no interest in seeing, anyway. So, Ayslin’s labors with her primary text tell us how her father’s life happened with respect to the culture whose business it is to order that life. But the moment I refer to in my first sentence comes in Ayslin’s final paragraph, when she needs to point out, at the world in which we are reading her, so we can leave her with a sense of what must be done.
The American superficiality that Ayslin’s been pondering sets up Baldwin’s words in her ending, his assertion that we, all of us, “cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.” Ayslin listens to the qualification of that “mainly,” hears the potential life in it, since what we qualify is susceptible to rethinking, remaking. Yes, as Ayslin ruminates, “the flat expanse of the desert to the horizon seems endless and immutable.” But we are on the road that our kind built. Much of our collective responsibility lies in asking ourselves why we “didn’t build a sign” for the next exit. To “pay our dues,” to wake up to the world we’re in, requires our capacity for thinking critically about that world, for judging the lives it makes possible and impossible: only then can we turn. The three sections of Ayslin’s essay, her beginning, middle and ending, together show the turns that make other lives realizable, on and off the page. And paying our dues becomes knowing what we are paying for.
—Bruce Bromley
On Melissa Bo-Ya Feng’s “Orwell, Trump, and Twitter”
One of the best things about teaching International Writing Workshop 1 is that the shorter third progression allows for more time on the first. But that extra time can be counterproductive if students’ systems get overloaded with all the new things we are trying to teach them: new reading habits, a new vocabulary for writing, new pre-writing habits, new drafting habits, new revising habits, totally novel ways of envisioning how the work of writing might respond to the problems of the world, etc. And of course during the Fall 2020 semester, the problems of the world had upended our classroom practices and relegated many of us to the cyberspaces of Zoom and Google Meet. To their credit, many students managed to absorb and enact these novel lessons without ever meeting us, their writing professors, in person.
Melissa Bo-Ya Feng is one of those remarkable students, and her essay “Orwell, Trump and Twitter: Changing the Connection between Politics and Language” illustrates a number of practices vital to college-level and, indeed, scholarly writing in general. First, Melissa’s essay accurately and fully represents George Orwell’s influential essay, demonstrating the value of close, careful reading. Second, Melissa’s essay coherently explores the contextual and conceptual connections and tensions between the work of Orwell, Simon Kuper, and Brian Ott, revealing the way a well-constructed conversation between carefully-chosen sources can develop an inquiry on the page. Perhaps one of the most important moments in the progression was Melissa’s encounter with Kuper’s article. Reading about Trump’s tweeting through the lens of Orwell’s ideas just a few weeks before the 2020 election was both timely and thought-provoking. It also modeled for Melissa how a writer can acknowledge the persuasiveness of another writer’s claims while at the same time complicating and/or challenging them. In Melissa’s essay she uses Kuper’s essay to perform a crucial “yes, but…” move of her own, a move that sets-up her own contribution to this important conversation.
But more than anything, Melissa’s essay showcases what can happen when a student is genuinely open to thinking inductively about evidence across weeks of work. Melissa was willing throughout the first progression to continually refine her own reflections on the relationship between language and politics, ultimately gathering enough evidence to challenge and complicate Orwell’s ideas with an intellectual confidence that grew from exercise to exercise, draft to draft. It was my pleasure to both guide and to observe this growth.
—Stephen Butler
On Stephanie Huang’s “Art Versus Artist”
In the cover letter that Stephanie Huang submitted alongside her essay, which is now a part of her reflection for Mercer Street, she writes:
I specifically recall reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire all in one summer and obsessing about the eccentricities of the man, Nabokov, himself. As I read more about him, it struck me that he was quite misogynistic. But I pushed this perception to the back of my brain and told myself that, since he was dead, it hardly mattered anymore. As someone who fixates on certain books and then heavily romanticizes their authors, I have far too often been disappointed. Yet after J.K. Rowling’s transphobic tweets in the summer of 2020, I was not only angry but confused. As someone who grew up in the pages of Harry Potter, where did that leave me now? When my professor prompted us to find an occasion for writing, I seized the opportunity and set to work on a problem that some might discard as a passing thought.
A key to the success of Stephanie’s essay was her candid desire to investigate a recent occasion that not only angered and confused her, but could also clearly served as a lens for investigating a larger intellectual problem—one that had long puzzled her and, as it turns out, many literary-attuned minds!
Stephanie’s use of J.K. Rowling’s transphobic tweets to engage with more established theorists and scholars around her problem of interest is reflected in her essay’s structure. After articulating and dramatizing the stakes around the age-old question of whether we can (and should) separate “the art from the artist,” Stephanie orchestrates a dynamic and critical conversation among those thinkers in a way that moves us from one deepening of the problem to another. Here, part of the essay’s success lies within Stephanie’s astute use of sources: she not only identifies Jackson, Barthes, Foucault, and Logie as relevant voices in the conversation, but also accurately and effectively unpacks their ideas to us—her readers who may be new to them. But this engagement with other thinkers, no matter how established, would fall flat without Stephanie’s compelling analysis of how they elucidate and complicate our understanding of the contemporary occasion at hand.
In fact, another strength of Stephanie’s piece is her attentive close reading of J.K Rowling’s statements about trans individuals—both their content and context. One particularly strong example of such close reading is Stephanie’s analysis of the implications of Rowling choosing to make public statements on Twitter— a platform that “allows [her] to reach a wider audience than Barthes or Foucault might have imagined possible.” This piece of evidence becomes key to the novelty of Stephanie’s argument; as a result of authors’ increasingly casual engagements with their readers, she writes, “ignorance (of the author) may be a bliss, but maintaining that ignorance has become a more difficult task.”
In class, we considered rhetorician Wayne Booth’s suggestion that essayists aim not to solve an intellectual problem as much as to offer their readers a new or deeper understanding of it. To my mind, this is precisely what Stephanie achieves by the end of this ambitious piece. By offering us a new understanding of how contemporary media complicates our relationship with the authors we read, Stephanie shows us that the age-old problem with which she began does not merely persist in our time; it also begets new ethical questions concerning our relationship to art. We are left to think about our own choices as literary and cultural consumers— a task that seems daunting, exciting, and inevitable all at once!
—Avia Tadmor
On Lillian Jacobs’ “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits”
In her essay, Lillian generates momentum, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. Her examination of Sindha Agha’s five-minute documentary triggers an intellectual problem, and Lillian employs multiple sources to contemplate what is revelatory about the film in relation to larger phenomena. (In class, we talk about how an essay moves between macro and micro scales.) She ruminates on the power and meaning of “visual metaphors,” recursively returning to and weaving together evidence she worked with earlier in her paper. She represents her sources carefully, offering additional contextual details to give us a fuller understanding, as well.
The paragraphs in her essay epitomize a writerly rule that I ask students to strive for: one purpose for each. Her transitions flag why we need to move into this new unit of material, and she often sums up the take-aways for her paragraphs, too. I slipped into speaking with a “we” here because her taut, captivating, clever language and rhythmic choices compel us to participate in her journey. (We stress these things in class: Can you help us care about these sources? Can you be more precise with your word choices and musicality as you draft? Can you condense your prose to communicate what you want with the least drag?)
Lillian’s motivation propels this paper forward, imbuing it with energy and importance. She selected source material from the choices and parameters in the assignment to try to express something she herself valued. (I encourage students to choose things that are both challenging and illuminating to them, and to never write only what they already know or believe). When I read this essay, I see the evolution of her thinking. I feel her authenticity. I admire her candor.
She beautifully synthesizes the essential points that she learns from her sources to make her own strong argument. (Her inquiry and argument also connect to the mission of our Tisch “Art & the World” expository writing classes: contending with how art responds to (and often influences) cultural norms and boundaries.) While her personal experience helps fuel this essay, her conclusion connects to universal desires for visibility, respect, and agency. It transfers an urgency to question and a desire to create to the reader.
—Elizabeth Kurkjian
On Mashrur Khan’s “Journeys to Belonging”
Mashrur chose, in his final essay concerned with work produced by a single mind, to begin by introducing material whose relations to that primary mind he’ll have to linger over, later. This delaying the entrance of his main thinker gives Mashrur the room to organize the shape of his eventual inquiry. It also sets up his reader’s expectations and then shifts them, so that we watch him move from Chimamanda Adichie to Peter Docter, ready to see how he will connect the two in non-obvious ways.
His labors with Adichie are at an angle to his own story, something that underscores the virtues in putting materials together so that their differences cast a light on what the writer can make of them. Adichie fell under the sway of that “single story” about her “family’s domestic help,” equating personhood with impoverished tales about that personhood. But Mashrur shows that it’s possible to patronize your own origins: he “had worked so hard to remove” himself “from Bangladesh” that his “vision” of his own country sank beneath the life he knew in America. These reflections lead Mashrur to one of his key terms, “belonging,” to the notion of what it means to hold tight to place, and to the self who does the holding, especially under pandemic conditions, when the world seems charged with loss.
Mashrur’s work, towards the end of his beginning section, with acknowledging where all of us are, now, in terms of COVID and how this appears to thicken the concept of home, shows the power in seeing any essay as a form large enough for pointing to the actual world and reflecting on how readers and writers can speak back to that world. This making room for the messiness of daily life takes Mashrur to a researched interview with Docter, who tells the tale of how Herbie Hancock, playing with Miles Davis, “messed up a note.” Docter focuses on how Davis “didn’t judge” that note but made new sounds around it, so that what might have been error was allowed for, turned into something else, became value. All this directs Mashrur to thinking in his ending section about the concluding idea in Docter’s film, looking back to Adichie, and highlighting, in dialogue with the two, that we risk ourselves when we block out what can be transformed. The necessity of transformation can reform even the belonging whereby we understand what home can mean. And the essay manifesting these turns becomes a part of the life it struggles to represent.
—Bruce Bromley
On Jessica Kupillas’ “Beatitudes”
There’s much to admire in Jessica Kupillas’s essay – the strength of her voice, the sense of pacing, the way the shape of the essay seems formed out of its wandering idea – but I would like to draw readers’ attention to what I see as the foundation of her essay: an expansive close reading.
1 ) Close reading is a crucial skill of the course, fundamental to both the literary and scholarly essay, but it’s a difficult skill to learn. It’s worth pointing out that she isn’t using texts here just to support what she already wanted to say. And she isn’t just following a quotation with a paraphrase or an explanation that shuts down discussion. Her first introduction of the text by the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell sets up a connection, a working theory for what drew her to Grace Church, but she doesn’t stop there. Look at what she does with what she hears the priest say (framed by her memory of a Simon and Garfunkel song). Here, Jessica’s close reading opens up the quotation, instead of explaining it away. She thinks through the assumptions and the implications of the sentence, and holds up its questionable terms to the light. The mystery she encounters there sends her back to Mitchell, and then, surprisingly, to Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which two minor characters, trapped in an absurd world, wonder whether someone is watching. (“No clarity is owed to Rosencrantz or Guildenstern,” she writes, “they are not the chess players, but rather the chess pieces.”)
2) Close reading can be layered. She offers a series of descriptions of her primary site. She comes to it first by way of her memories, then draws us into a scene created out of her experiential research. She later steps back to examine its history and the way it presents itself online “as a steadfast beacon of hope in a hurting world.” Future readers might be forgiven for missing the essay’s brief references to the pandemic (“… but I try to meet every amen, a whisper behind my mask”). Writing about this city is never simple, particularly this year with its dangers and quarantines, but, for the students in the class, their essays were a way to connect to their new home, and to write themselves into some deeper relationship.
3 ) Close reading inspires dialogue. Look at how the incorporation of Alexey Kondakov’s restaged religious photographs helps her enlarge her idea, widening the notion of the church as “at once a site of peace and a symbol of endurance, miraculously surviving in a world that frequently seems anything but” to encompass the larger city that surrounds it. This sends her back to that mystery she encountered at Grace Church with a new insight. In the end, Jessica shows how a good essay can transform even a writer’s solitude into a form of communion.
—Eric Ozawa
On Jamie Lee’s “The Importance of Uncertainty in Solving The Problem With Everything“
I tell my students, when they are investigating a body of work by one author, to try to inhabit the mind space of that writer at the time of composing the work. What were their preoccupations, what were they worried about, and what were the questions that they returned to almost compulsively? If they succeed at this task, the next step is to shape those discoveries into an essay that gives the reader a full sense of how that writer’s mind works, a presence made palpable on the page. In Jamie Lee’s essay on Meghan Daum’s The Trouble With Everything, I believe she accurately recognized what those patterns were, what thoughts preoccupied Daum, and then crafted an essay that reflected her critical assessment of the work in both content and form.
After reading a range of essayistic chapters from the book, Jamie observed that Daum was concerned primarily by how polarized everyday cultural and political discourse had become – whether the topic happened to be the feminist movement, political correctness, or cancel culture. According to Daum, important issues are increasingly being thought of in rigid, strictly binary terms, leading to intractable arguments where one is either right or wrong, and there are consequences for falling on the wrong side of the dividing line. This lack of a gray area, a space that should be defined by fine distinctions and discretion, is what drives Daum’s curiosity and subsequent critiques. Jamie’s writing in her own essay honors that concern and echoes Daum’s own desire to dwell in ambiguity. Jamie does this through several deft rhetorical moves throughout the essay where she seems to come to a tentative conclusion only to question and reconsider it through the lens of a new text or piece of evidence.
Notably, Jamie also does not give Daum a complete pass in her analysis, simply assuming that her arguments leave no room for critique. For example, Jamie writes: “Yet, despite the value of her arguments, Daum is somewhat blinded by her privilege.” This shows an ability not only to understand the arguments in Daum’s body of work, but also to grapple with the legitimacy of those arguments by holding the writer accountable for what she says. The value in such a move is that while reckoning with Daum’s ideas, Jamie also grapples with her own initial assumptions about the work, allowing the argument to shift, adjust, and evolve.
That moment, along with other well-executed “But…”, “However…”, “If…”, and “Perhaps…” moments throughout the essay indeed signal to the reader what it means to value nuance as a component of dialogic exchange. Jamie simultaneously conveys what that looks like through the back and forth conversation that develops organically between her sources, as well as between those thinkers and her own evolving claims along the way.
—Andrei Guruianu
On Ruofan Li’s “Productivity or What We Will”
A year into the pandemic, with most of my students joining classes from the solitude of their bedrooms, I assigned a progression about doing nothing. The assignment arose from a combination of pedagogical aims and practical constraints. This progression is typically a review of a substantial work by one author, pulling together insights from several parts of the work (i.e. several essays in a book) to create an interpretive argument about the work as a whole. With COVID-19 scattering students across the globe, however, our class needed a shared text that could be easily accessed online: something intellectually hefty and complex, inviting interpretation and response.
Geoff Schullenberger, our EWP colleague, had mentioned Jenny Odell’s work during a previous faculty development meeting. Upon closer inspection, “How to Do Nothing” seemed like an ideal and timely fit. The lecture addresses virtual life, isolation from the physical world, the bigger cages and longer chains of digital labor, and technologies that commodify humans’ attention. What better material for pandemic-restricted, computer-bound students to tackle than this?
Tackle they did, producing some of the best writing I read all semester, especially this essay by Ruofan Li. During drafting stages, Ruofan consistently hit deadlines with strong work. The personal anecdote near the beginning and end of this essay appeared in her first writing exercise of the progression and was expanded during a later activity about vivid description. Several of the sources were engaged, thoughtfully and comprehensively, in an annotated bibliography she wrote halfway through the progression. These long strides made early in the writing process advanced and clarified Ruofan’s ideas, which continued to grow and change in later drafting.
Partially because of this strong, steady effort, Ruofan’s final draft applies many of the essential rhetorical moves our class emphasizes. Apt representation and astute understanding of source material lead to her own insights, which lead to further questions—all of which lead Ruofan, again and again, back to her sources. As a good steward of others’ ideas, Ruofan doesn’t merely tell us what sources say; she shows us with deftly-chosen, well-managed quotations, and then interprets and connects them to forge an argument of her own.
In the basketball documentary “The Last Dance” (another video, like Odell’s lecture, that I enjoyed during the pandemic), it is notable how often interviewees, when discussing Michael Jordan’s mythical greatness, mention fundamentals like passing and dribbling. Similarly, Ruofan’s essay epitomizes the first-rate work that is achieved through mastery of small, essential moves and a consistent commitment to bring one’s best game, even when practicing alone.
—Chris Edling
On Megan Maxfield’s “Sadism, Sontag, and Snuff in The Act of Killing
Megan Maxfield’s “Sadism, Sontag, and Snuff in The Act of Killing”—which she researched and wrote last spring in our first-year seminar “Literature and Film of Human Rights”—highlights her clear, vivid style and, as she notes in her own reflection for Mercer Street, her serious work to grapple with a critique of the film as voyeuristic “snuff.” Writing that The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s acclaimed 2012 docudrama, offers its viewer “a bizarre, technicolor tour of the political landscape protecting the perpetrators of the Indonesian Genocide,” Megan opens by representing vividly several scenes where the perpetrators dramatically recreate their crimes in the mode of their favorite Hollywood films (westerns, gangster films, etc.), discuss their apparent pleasures in committing and recollecting acts of sadism and cruelty, and go about their everyday lives with impunity, as the paramilitary organization with which they are allied continues to dominate the Indonesian political landscape. Perhaps Megan’s most gripping representation of visceral evidence of their crimes and mindset occurs when she describes the killers’ dramatic reenactment of their burning of a ‘communist’ village—a scene that is so traumatizing that many of the women and children play-acting as ‘communists’ in it continue to “cry” and “look shocked, despondent, and tearful” after “Cut” is called.
These representations motivate Megan’s exploration of a larger set of questions about snuff, voyeurism, and desensitization to violence in cinema, photography, and everyday life. Megan’s “yes, but” analytic work to counter the critique of Oppenheimer’s film as snuff, accomplished in part by juxtaposing it to another documentary, is nuanced, tempered, extensive, and thoughtful. Then, after tarrying with Sontag’s famous arguments about voyeurism in photography, and presenting research about Oppenheimer’s process and stated intentions for his film, Megan arrives at her elegant idea that “Oppenheimer is exploring the same anesthetization as Sontag was. But in Indonesia, the anesthetization has already occurred.” If further revisions were possible, I might like to see Megan unpack even more the implications of this deeply insightful—and, to me, original—notion. As it is, she fittingly calls on Oppenheimer’s viewers and readers of her essay to grapple more forthrightly with our “relation to the anesthetized world of the executioners.” Her implication seems to be that viewers of the film and readers of her essay have the obligation to do more than simply pretend that we stand on some moral highground.
—William Morgan
On Tyler Moran’s “Severing the String”
After reading Tyler’s essay the first time, I immediately signed into my various social media accounts with a sinking feeling in my stomach; I wanted to see if I could pinpoint how thoroughly my internet identity had become, in Tyler’s words, a performance of a “semi-sentient marionette.” But then, this ability to force her readers to question their assumptions about something as ostensibly trivial as a Tweet was a quality that I came to expect from Tyler’s work over the semester we spent together. She knows how to poke holes in the shields we hide behind—and that, to me, is the sign of a great essayist.
Here, with “Severing the String,” Tyler challenges us to reconsider how we construct (or, allow others to construct) our online selves. Her close, careful reading of her texts and the ways in which they speak to one another provides the foundation for this work. She patiently stages a conversation between Tolentino, Renner, Lanier, and Orlowski, and in doing so constructs her own argument about the perils of life online and the market forces that control it. This argument emerges most notably at the beginning of paragraph eight, when Tyler uses both Renner’s and Lanier’s thinking to show us just how little agency we have over the construction of our digital selves. Here, Tyler both accepts the merits of Tolentino’s thinking, while also suggesting implications that Tolentino potentially hasn’t considered—namely, the troubling notion that “in addition to being exploited, our identities are increasingly fabricated by forces beyond our control” (paragraph 11). With such a dire prognosis, a lesser writer might be tempted to provide a reductive solution in the essay’s conclusion, a directive to simply delete our Twitter accounts and take a walk outside. Tyler, however, avoids this trap. Rather, she acknowledges how inextricable social media has become to everyday life, and asks her readers to question not only “what we see” on our screens, but also the manipulative algorithms that determine “why we see it.” It’s a clarion call—one that encourages us to regain the agency we’ve forfeited in order to preserve our own “unique performances.”
—Grant Ginder
On Brooke Nguyen’s “Taking Up Space”
The first time I read Cathy Park Hong’s funny, weird, and incisive personal essay “Bad English,” I knew that I wanted to include it on my Writing the Essay syllabus. I failed to anticipate how challenging the text would prove for my students, many of whom found it hard to overcome this baffling (to them), brilliant (to me) opening line: “I had a special, almost erotic relationship with my stationary when I was young.” But don’t you remember feeling that way about, you know, brightly colored erasers shaped like little animals when you were like, eight years old? I asked. No; no, they didn’t, they assured me.
So I was surprised, delighted, to read Brooke Nguyen’s “Taking Up Space,” which so deftly conveys Hong’s style and thinking, with quoted passages that represent the depth and capaciousness of the text as a whole (even if the part about the stationary didn’t make the cut), and without shying away from the complexity of Hong’s attitudes and attachments. Brooke’s essay is a masterful demonstration of Kenneth Burke’s “parlor” metaphor: her (and Hong’s) interlocutors come and go, shifting the essayistic conversation from a reflection on the feeling of alienation that accompanies speaking an accented English, to the different ways that first- and second-generation immigrants balance the desire to take up space against the temptation “to disappear.”
Please note, also, the many excellent paired-terms that Brooke quotes and coins to name the concepts that link each strand of this essay together: “indelicate intimacies”; “anxieties of belonging”; “Lunchable story”; “strained tolerance”; “vicious distinction”; “unbreakable denotation.”
Lastly: Brooke was not big on drafts, at least in the sense that I tend to think of them. Or, throughout the semester, it seemed as if she was writing one essay, and then after class or in an email the week a final draft was due, she would inform me that she was scrapping everything and starting from scratch. Um, okay, good luck? I would think. Which is just to say: Brooke reminded me that the writing process is highly personal, and that not everyone needs an elaborate scaffold to build something with strength and substance.
—Courtney Chatellier
On Jasmin Sabirin’s “Pinterest: Inspiration or Manipulation?”
Jasmin’s essay reminds me of some key principles of essaying as an art. Let us take for granted that the sentences step with balance and precision, that the paragraphs follow one another in an architecture of increasing complexity, and that the essay’s idea proceeds in a rhythm of exploration, recursion, synthesis, and rediscovery. Let’s assume that the end looks back to the beginning from a place of heightened awareness, and successfully articulates the terms of that awareness. I’m interested in what happens after Jasmin’s essay ends. What happens is: I make my own essay.
Let me explain what I mean. The Ideology and Algorithm progression asks students to reckon with a platform (usually from the world of social media) with which they have a personal relationship. Along the way, they are asked to write scenes from their own experience. In this preparatory writing, Jasmin located her reckoning with Pinterest in a particular place, time, and story: Malaysia, 3:00am, trying to stay alert between classes taking place on Brooklyn time. You can find the surviving traces of this scene two-thirds of the way through the essay. By the end of the paragraph, the scene’s particulars have faded into concept. It doesn’t reappear in the essay.
Yet the story of the student in Malaysia trapped on Zoom at 3:00am has struck my mind and caused a new thought to form. Now, I wonder whether Pinterest and platforms with similar mythologies have turned us all into creatures of 3:00am even at midday: trying to keep our minds running with little fuel, grateful for the fumes that the platforms offer us, and willing to suspend our sense of right and wrong to keep running just a little farther. Jasmin’s essay has struck this ripple in my mind. And my thinking continues. I want to write it down and see how far it will go.
I think the work of an essay, which includes preparatory writing, is to ground your mind in a problem you don’t yet know how to articulate, but which you know exists because your experience has told you so. This can be true even if your essay includes no personal experience as evidence. If you do this, you’re likely to hit upon an idea that you want to get right, for your own sake, and thus also for a reader. This compulsion will help you sharpen your diction, balance your sentences, and structure your paragraphs. Your idea may keep you up at night well before your essay is due. Cast into the world, it should skip into the minds of your readers, making ripples in each one.
—Leeore Schnairsohn
On Devarshi Vasa’s “The War on People”
Starting with its clear, provocative title, Devarshi Vasa’s “The War on People” is full of smart moves that make it a rich teaching resource for writing, research, and analysis. Vasa’s essay demonstrates the way well-chosen sources can be used for a variety of purposes: to provoke, to provide background, to refine our thinking, to offer terms and ideas that illuminate, and to connect ideas to the world around us.
In his first page and a half, he creates an engaging beginning that invites the reader to imagine their way into a specific problem, and to envision the human consequences of that problem up close. He uses vividly-rendered evidence—the story of Calvin Bryant—to give us a sense of what’s at stake, and why his controversy matters, so we step into his essay with our hearts and minds invested.
He then pivots to an elegant, efficient representation of the historical context of the problem, incorporating well-chosen, well-integrated sources in an attempt to tell the story behind the problem. He gives us the background we need to know to interpret the particular legislation up for debate, then poses a clear question that he will consider: Should the US push for drug decriminalization across the country?
His representation of the controversy has both depth and breadth in its use of evidence/sources. I like that he doesn’t just accept each source’s claim at face value, but seeks out additional evidence to test these sources’ claims. More impressively, he doesn’t merely pick sources on both sides of the issue to give a veneer of fairness to his own argument. He chooses counterpoint sources that genuinely force us to pause and re-evaluate our thinking mid-essay, and to understand the full complexity of his issue. We don’t hear from obvious right-wing pundits or anti-legalization zealots. Instead, we hear a more nuanced critique from sources like Keith Humphreys, psychology professor at Stanford and drug policy advisor for both Bush and Obama, who asserts that it’s naïve to assume corporations will do the right thing once they are able to market drugs, and not begin aggressive campaigns (as we’ve seen with alcohol and tobacco.)
Vasa identifies the paradigms that need to be shifted (viewing addiction as personal choice/failure), raising comparisons to other diseases, and using sources from the field of psychology to help us think about “diachronous responsibility” and addiction stigma. But again, he doesn’t merely discuss the surface effects of our problematic view of drugs and addiction, he devotes careful thought to how this issue plays a role the larger social and cultural structure: the way addiction becomes a stigma that is weaponized against people of color, as in the case of the tragic killing of George Floyd.
Vasa’s ending doesn’t oversimplify the issue or try to wash away the complexity he has established. He knows that decriminalizing drugs is no silver bullet. After acknowledging that fact, he reframes decriminalization as “part of a departure” from a stigma that has “dehumanized minorities and drug addicts for decades.” Because of his thoughtful, carefully constructed argument, there is power in Vasa’s final voicing of what decriminalization can do: It can disarm “those in authority from this powerful and dangerous weapon, and instead, replac[e] it with values that emphasize human rights and dignity, regardless of an individual’s history of drug use.”
—Laura Weinert-Kendt
On Ilia Wayans’ “Those Who Silence Us”
This first assignment of the year asks students to reflect on the nuanced relationship between a chosen film and a text in an engaging video that they narrate. Screening their projects in front of the class, many describe the exhilaration and terror they feel having to consider an audience for their writing beyond the singular reader who grades them.
In “Those Who Silence Us,” Ilia Wayans masterfully pairs Zadie Smith’s essay “Getting in and Out” with Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight. In her preliminary exercises, Ilia began to unpack Smith’s questions: “Who owns black pain?” Who has the right to represent black suffering in their art? Recognizing the similarities between her identity and Smith’s, she explores the complex ways that biracial artists navigate representation. After watching Jenkins’ film, she deepens her understanding of the barriers forged by intersectional stigma.
In order to develop a sense of cohesion for her script, Ilia recognized the need to develop a central question that would be neither too specific nor too broad; it would need to speak to both pieces of evidence and leave room for her own further investigation. The scene she beautifully renders from Moonlight redirected her to attend to what is often not “vocalized” in these difficult conversations. In her final draft, she asks: “Why is it that we, as a black collective, feel silenced by both those from within and beyond our community?”
While Ilia’s script is merely three pages (double-spaced), the visual track of her essay speaks volumes—giving us access to some of the powerful images that inspire her thought process. On the second day of class, I ask students to share their own interpretation of William Carlos Williams’ brief poem “This Is Just To Say.” What images come to mind when you hear his words? Some see the Garden of Eden; others imagine a strained marriage, a slammed refrigerator, a bitter fight; some will argue that it’s a metaphor for income inequality; a few insist that it’s a commentary on sexual consent. The class is often relieved to learn that there is no general consensus about the poem’s meaning, no “right” or “definitive” interpretation among the “experts”—and that some believe that it can function as a revealing Rorschach test of sorts. Together we reflect on the different ways we each look at a work of art based on the stored memories and personal experiences we bring to any encounter. No two spectators can possibly view an image, a film, or a text in the exact same way.
The form of the video essay allows us to highlight the individual nature of spectatorship. Throughout the first unit, I encourage students to keep a folder on their desktops with dozens of images that they connect to their chosen essays and films. These images eventually form the basis of their video tracks. By attaching these visual associations to their words, my hope is that our students can feel fully heard and understood, giving voice to some of the ideas that might ordinarily overflow beyond the page limit of an assignment.
—Zach Udko
On Ella Webb’s “And All the Men Merely Players: Gender in the Classical Theater”
In my class – like all of my colleagues – I emphasize the notion that we are writing essays for readers, and because of that – echoing back to my students what they have told me – we’ve decided that essays should offer new perspectives, shed light on an issue in surprising ways, open up discussions into new avenues – in short, that writers should be articulating some counterintuitive, complex ideas. Ella did a really good job of harnessing research to accomplish this time. Through the strength of her evidence, she makes what at first appears to be a rather radical position ultimately seem quite logical.
—Doug Dibbern
On Samantha Whitley’s “Stay Woke”
The great American film about so-called “cancel culture” has not yet been made; once it hits theaters, I look forward to hearing Sam Whitley’s thoughts, as she can now confidently call herself an expert on the art inspired by this cultural moment. Over the course of seven weeks, Sam rigorously studied numerous television series, feature-length documentaries, stand-up comedy specials, celebrity interviews, TED talks, journal articles, and blog posts representing a multiplicity of perspectives related to this controversy.
In the three-minute vlog pitch she shared with her classmates at the beginning of this unit, she recalls the first “call-out” that troubled her: the ostracization of YouTube influencer Shane Dawson for his highly problematic racist remarks. Once a fan of his content, she wonders, “was he a victim of cancel culture or did he deserve it? And is this the right way to create a better world?” Recognizing that we “now hold the careers of entertainers in the palms of our hands,” she considers how we might use this power more wisely. Armed with a clearly-defined problem based on a shift in the status quo, she set out to closely examine patterns related to form and content in tv and film cancellation narratives (South Park, Bojack Horseman, The Morning Show; and the comedy specials of Aziz Ansari, Kathy Griffin, and Kevin Hart). Sam wanted to know more about how prominent voices inside Hollywood portray their own disavowed and disgraced figures.
She then plunged herself into the research process with an exhaustive Annotated Bibliography of the most thought-provoking and challenging videos she encountered online, along with an assortment of articles and opinion pieces from newspapers, magazines, and journals. In addition, she wrote a 20-page Viewing Journal — a bullet point catalogue of her thoughts and emotions while watching the art that would ultimately form the basis of her argument. Her Viewing Journal became a crucial space to document her gut reactions (“The level of ‘wokeness’ on this show is kind of insufferable”), questions (“I don’t know how I feel about this argument that we are no longer allowed to be risky or offensive”), and insightful commentary (“When we think of cancel culture, we rarely think about the people who are really hurt by it. We look at the cancelled celebrity and they’re seen as the victim”). A quote from Aziz Ansari in his “comeback” comedy special Right Now leads her to investigate the ways we have divorced comedy from context—and the unintended consequences of this disentanglement.
Rather than diving into this body of evidence with a fixed opinion, Sam approached all of her artistic and argumentative evidence with a genuine sense of curiosity. “Last semester, each of my essays had questions but I felt like I already knew the answers before I even wrote them, and I would spend that entire essay proving a point,” she wrote to me in a cover letter accompanying her video.
When confronted with voices that challenged her views, Sam often pushed herself to reconsider her own evolving stance, and as a result, her overall argument became more nuanced. How could Sam begin to see “cancel culture” in new ways, and perhaps from the mindset of someone who disagreed with her? How could we find opportunities to recognize the limitations of easy answers and to envision a movement towards a more “compassionate culture”? Her engagement with this material led her on a journey that drifted further away from certainty as she approached her final edit—to a place where she recognizes that all proposed solutions must be viewed in context. Sam demonstrates a commitment to the ongoing and evolving process of situated thinking, modeling a crucial attribute of the most responsible and thoughtful artistic citizens.
—Zach Udko
On Justin Yoon’s “The Rules of the Game”
I’ve heard a saying attributed to Zen Samurai: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” That might sound too extreme; surely we take some art/games/life pursuits more seriously than others. But consider how Justin’s essay tracks the idea of transferable skills, and sketches out the rewards of approaching challenges with a technician’s eye for detail.
Justin’s initial problem—why is he so repulsed by Mortal Kombat’s brutal end sequence when violence features in many of the games he plays?—gets replaced by a more compelling question: why do we form attachments to activities? Drawing from research into game philosophy, along with personal experience as both an avid artist and gamer, Justin’s investigation morphs into a larger idea about why we love what we love.
Justin never explicitly mentions writing in the essay, but I appreciate the precision of his descriptions that link the physical pleasures of drawing with keyboard manipulation: “excitement… gripped me as fledgling sketches bloomed across unmarked paper—the visual confirmation of mechanical improvement. I fell in love with the gradual process of improving mechanically. . . .” He also builds on the dance concept of kinemes, which break down movements/skills into component parts, imbuing every nuance with value. His argument is one dear to the technician’s heart—that intimate connections are formed from beloved techniques. This fusion of personal engagement with impersonal technique is called ‘style.’
A significant (and often hidden) part of ourselves is bound up in our style—how we do what we do. It comes out in the games and arts that we perform. Becoming more conscious of the layers of techniques we use to ‘play’ our lives is not trivial work. In fact, becoming more aware of what attracts (or repels) us is something we should all be invested in, and this essay serves as an excellent jumping-off point for that exploration. We are the games we play, and so, like the Samurai, pay attention to what you are doing and how you do it. Your life depends on it.
—Colm O’Shea