- On Crystal Baik’s “If It Looks Like a Cult” (Victoria Anderson)
- On Taylor Borthwick’s “The Sexism of the Self” (William Morgan)
- On Kelli Converso’s “Boredom, Art, and Evolution” (Abigail Joseph)
- On Olivia Federici’s “The Lessons of ‘Montero'” (William Morgan)
- On Lea Filidore’s “The Ethics of Thrifting” (Lane Anderson)
- On Qiyun Gao’s “The Silence That Kills” (Amanda Capelli)
- On Ashley Kang’s “The Audacity to Hate” (Benjamin Gassman)
- On Aidan La Poche’s “The Gilded Cage . . .” (Eric Ozawa)
- On Joyce Li’s “The Stuyvesant Controversy . . .” (Beth Machlan)
- On Emerald Lin’s “Holding My Breath for Your Story” (Karen Lepri)
- On Iris (Jingyuan) Liu’s “CRISPR: God Simulator?” (Leeore Schnairsohn)
- On Nicholas Mahoney’s “‘Bringing the Beatles Back to Hamburg’ . . .” (David Markus)
- On Nicholas Mahoney’s “Smartphones and the New Flesh” (David Markus)
- On Max Miniewicz’s “Beneath the Surface . . .” (Natasha Zaretsky)
- On Felicia Grünbaum Powell-Jones’s “Broken Glass in Film City” (Bruce Bromley / Michael Tyrell)
- On Libby Ronon’s “Love Sick” (David Foley)
- On Ray Wang’s “The Taste of Home” (Benjamin Gassman)
- On Kailyn Williams’ “Black Means Run” (Joe Vallese)
- On Stanley Yang’s “Taxi Driver and the Age of the Incel” (Jono Mischkot)
- On Stacey Zhu’s “The Translation of Critical Thinking” (Natalia Andrievskikh)
In “If it Looks Like a Cult,” Crystal Baik investigates the work of motivational speaker Tony Robbins through a variety of powerful contexts, leading to a profound insight about the fine line between inspiration and coercive control. Readers may note the diversity of sources when they scan the Works Cited list. I invited NYU Online Instruction Librarian Sam Mandani to create an in-class presentation during the early stages of the previous progression in order to demystify the research process and introduce students to online research tools. Sam’s visit to our class and her presentation did this and more. She unpacked the mystery of search terms, introduced methods for evaluating sources, and encouraged a healthy diversity of media. But perhaps most importantly for Crystal, she addressed the cyclical process of research. One simple graphic visually described the need to go back and try again, or perhaps return to a search from a different angle. While Crystal’s initial annotated bibliography was an important step in the direction of this essay, it does not reflect the final collection of sources she employed in her essay. Thanks to Sam’s foresight, Crystal continued to return to the databases late into the writing process as the focus of her essay came into being. She was open to allowing her thinking to change and to grow. This process of redirection and revision yielded a rich array of sources and led to powerful contextual work.
Crystal’s prose makes the movement towards context look effortless, but every semester I am reminded that contexts are easy to recognize when someone else creates them, and much harder when you have to construct them yourself. Our class relied heavily on several successful model texts, but we also did specific activities to move towards designing and envisioning our own contexts. In class we brainstormed ways to make our own contexts active instead of inert. We talked about them; we drew mind maps of them; we returned to images and clips from films; we made a shared Google slide representing contexts we wanted to develop; we pondered their meaning in uncomfortable silences; we let things sink in. I think the combination of private brainstorming, discussion, and informal class presentation are reflected in Crystal’s essay when she seeks to “understand the complex relationship between spirituality and commerce” in Robbins’ work. Crystal is sure never to let evidence be inert, or merely informational. A well created context doesn’t just sit there: it activates analysis, creates more questions, and even begets a sequence of more contexts.
Alongside the stunning contexts, this essay’s persuasive power is deeply rooted in the depiction of Crystal’s own experience as someone drawn to Robbin’s messaging. It is through her disclosure of her own personal “why” for choosing Robbins that her discerning readers will become more aware of the powerful figures they are drawn towards, and why. Crystal nimbly contextualizes a public figure whose influence is far more complex than it initially appears.
—Victoria Anderson
Last summer, I returned to Rebecca Solnit, reading her new memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence (2020), which hit home all over again. In a chapter titled “Some Uses of Edges,” Solnit writes, “Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value.” Solnit’s whole memoir grapples with her early struggles to create space for her mind and vision in the world of creative nonfiction, recounting how difficult it was to tear down the patriarchal assumptions that boxed her in during the 1970s and 1980s, and how crucial her imagination was in enabling her to compose a new world for her as-yet possible future and unique aesthetic.
Then, in planning for my fall Writing the Essay course, I decided to return to teaching a “reckoning”-style conversation progression for the first time since we were liberated from our shared curriculum five or six years ago. I also offered my students the opportunity to grapple with one of Solnit’s essays from Recollections as their primary text. Taylor Borthwick’s “The Sexism of the Self” makes both of my choices to return to an earlier favorite and an earlier progression seem worthwhile.
In her essay, Taylor analyzes Solnit’s “Disappearing Acts” from Recollections and Virginia Woolf’s famous “Professions for Women” to discuss how deeply misogyny can get inside and damage a woman’s sense of self. Across the first few pages of her essay, Taylor’s analysis of the problem of internalized misogyny—which Lillian Jacobs contends with in her own way in “Pussy Kayaks and Peach Pits” in Mercer Street 2021-2022—is remarkably rigorous, lucid, and insightful. Taylor then builds a conceptual and conversational bridge from Solnit’s conception of the problem to how bell hooks and other feminists go about envisioning an anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, inclusive, egalitarian community.
As Taylor acknowledges in her reflection, the work to build this larger conversation was what really challenged her. In a class in early November, 2021, we workshopped a draft of Taylor’s essay, discussing this challenge at some length. We also workshopped a second draft written by another student who was also grappling with Solnit’s chapter in the context of her own experiences growing up and aspiring to be an artist in a deeply patriarchal environment in India. When both students shared their work with Solnit’s essay as their primary text, some predictable things happened: they got valuable feedback, learned from each other, and other students grew more interested in developing their own work in more ambitious ways. However, something less predictable happened, too: several other students chose to read and grapple with Solnit’s whole collection—or one of her other books—for their third progression, and their work for that progression was their most accomplished of the term.
As Solnit writes, again in “Some Uses of Edges,” when we read nonfiction “at its best,” “Something [we] didn’t know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted.” Taylor’s essay makes it vitally clear how powerfully Solnit’s writing enacted these processes for her, and I hope her essay may now inspire more students, as she did last fall, to approach their work ambitiously and to read Solnit, too.
—William Morgan
At the start of our “Art and Its Publics” progression, I asked students to visit the just-opened Whitney Biennial 2022. We read and watched interviews with the curators, Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin, who worked through a long pandemic delay to create an exhibition that represented a diverse and capacious dialogue between artists, the public, and the cultural conditions of our moment: “We live in specific conditions in time,” as one of them put it. “The Biennial needs to reflect those times.” I valued the opportunity for students to literally participate in the current public life of art in NYC, as well as to see many examples of artists, across genres and mediums, thinking deeply about social and political questions as well as aesthetic ones.
I was struck in an early exercise by the attentive interest and questioning spirit that Kelli brought to her encounter with Harold Ancart’s painting. She was right to notice that, in a way, it was one of the outliers at the Biennial, which included few representational paintings and few works without obvious political content. As Kelli wrote, “So many of the pieces at The Biennial provide commentary on serious and immediate social issues, so I immediately wondered what the inspiration behind The Guiding Light was…It felt sort of out of place, almost frivolous, in comparison to the other, seemingly ‘deeper’ artworks.” Kelli’s initial response was an aesthetic and emotional one, and the strength of that response led her to want to spend more time with the painting, which in turn led her to ask questions about it. What I appreciate it is that Kelli didn’t end up dismissing her initial thought that Ancart’s painting was (as she put it) “frivolous”; rather, she deepend that reaction and asked a series of compelling questions about how insight and creativity can emerge out of moments and objects that do not have a clear purpose. Gathering evidence, she took seriously the artist’s statement that his intention was to explore human interest “before screens,” and moved from there – in response to the research prompts we practiced in the classroom and exercises – to a wide-ranging inquiry. She makes nimble and unexpected connections across a series of contexts, from Romantic painting to prehistoric carving, from behavioral science to aesthetic philosophy.
Kelli’s essay presents us with a rather bold idea: that art may emerge from “boredom,” from moments which seem empty and undirected, rather than those in which we feel most engaged by what’s going on around us. I appreciate the counterintuitive force of this suggestion, the way that it helps us account for aesthetic experiences -– as artists or viewers — that move us in ways we cannot immediately understand, as well as its warning about filling in all of our empty time with the easy responsiveness of our screens and devices. But I am also impressed by Kelli’s refusal, at the end of this essay, to rest on a refutation of those devices. Instead, she points out the alliance between art and technology – both products of human imagination – and asks us to keep thinking about our relationship to the things that we make, use, and encounter.
—Abigail Joseph
In Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry (1997), Donna Qualley defines inquiry as “‘the sustained work’ of coming to understand ‘through a systematic, self-critical process of discovery.’” The kind of sustained work of inquiry Qualley describes is easy for us to speak about and hard for all writers, especially first-year college students, to do. What was most remarkable in Olivia Federici’s work throughout our course together and the Controversy progression in particular was how fully she accepted, tolerated, and grew from her experiences of being stuck—of being uncertain, confused, and struggling—as she sought to develop her essay. Her process of inquiry, in other words, was genuinely inductive, self-critical, and reflexive.
Early in the Controversy progression, after just an exercise or two, Livi wondered if she should switch topics. At that point, she had as sources for her inquiry only her fanhood of and expertise about Lil Nas X, a Twitter fight she found with red-meat quotes from conservatives like South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem about the supposed blasphemy of Nas’s homoerotic video “Montero,” and a strong, thoughtful response in The Atlantic by Ashon Crawley, a gay African American professor of religion, defending Nas’s video “for the audiovisual troubling of fear” it provides. But Livi was stuck; she couldn’t find any sustained, evidence-based arguments advocating for heteronormative limits and parental control over discussions of gender and sexuality among children. How was she to examine a multi-sided debate without listening to those views?
We discussed how Livi might expand her research further, looking anew for other sources offering more detailed, evidence-based, and heart-felt arguments that we—Livi and I—might think of as queerphobic. Eventually, she read closely the words of the minister who had scared the youthful Crawley and selectively quoted from a scholarly article written by a South African theologian to consider the rhetoric on that side of her debate.
After Livi got traction in representing the multi-sided debate, we workshopped her first draft with the class. Her peers, to my slight disappointment, essentially thought she was done with her work for the whole essay, that she didn’t have anything else to consider. But Livi knew better, and her process became self-critical, re-iterative, and more expansive again. After the workshop, she asked if it’d be okay for her to pursue new research about “don’t say gay” debates. I thought that’d be great. Livi went on to research, draft, and revise what are now the final five paragraphs of her essay—reporting on the “Parental Rights in Education” bill that Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into law in March, 2022, grappling with the views of Republicans defenders of the law, and profiling with care and compassion Will Larkins, the queer high school student and “Say Gay Anyway” activist from Florida who wrote and published an essay on his views in the New York Times. This, the strongest section of her essay, all came to be after her first draft.
In the final days before the essay was due, we conferred again. This time, we discussed a few principles for how to refine and streamline some of Livi’s sentences. Having done so much already, Livi was still eager as the term ended to learn more, and her style grew clearer and more powerful in the next draft. Her process was extraordinary. Please enjoy reading Livi’s essay, as much as I enjoyed working with her, recognizing it as the fruit of her great insight and sustained earnest labor to make the processes of inductive inquiry her own.
—William Morgan
This assignment can be both tough and rewarding for students. First, it asks students to do something that is familiar to them: research a controversy or debate and present different sides from an informed point of view. Lea chose a surprising subject: Who knew that something as seemingly benign as thrift shopping has become controversial? She leads us into this debate with a steady hand, and excels as presenting her sources and research to show us the stakes of a social media trend. But that’s only half of the assignment.
The second step of the essay assignment asks students to go beyond a ‘now choose a side’ step, which is their natural inclination, and instead intellectualize the debate by exploring why it’s happening now and what it might reveal about culture. It’s the kind of advanced move that seasoned, published writers and thinkers make, so it requires high-level work. Lea got a bit stuck at this stage, as many students do. To work through it, she collected key terms that seemed to come up often in the language around the debate: ‘status,’ ‘consumerism,’ ‘identity.’ We also talked about thrifting and how it has changed over time—what it meant to her, to her mom, to me. These steps led Lea to research the ‘meaning’ of shopping and thrifting and the psychological underpinnings of fashion consumerism. Lea then made the smart move of thinking about the advent of how social media might have impacted the long-standing psychology of shopping and consumerism. These connections opened and deepened her essay and her analysis. If you look at Lea’s Works Cited list, you can see that, alongside solid factual sources, she found sources with fascinating theoretical and academic claims that explain how a desire for status and individuality have always driven fashion trends, and she applies these claims to the current thrifting debate to perform her own insightful analysis. This allows her to make some claims of her own about a seemingly frivolous social media trend among her peers, to something much more meaningful about human behavior and young people during a time of unprecedented social awareness and a desire to be seen and resist conformity.
—Lane Anderson
This essay was written for Progression 5, the final progression in the Tisch writing sequence. The essential lessons during these last few weeks of the semester were geared toward emphasizing research as a recursive process and thinking about analysis as a multi-pronged skill (one that includes close reading and synthesis of research, selection and arrangement of evidence, and reflection and interpretation of evidence). I’d like to thank David Foley for sharing his “Bits and Pieces (of Analysis)” lesson on the EWP resource page which served as an inspiration for this focus.
In my quest to help students embrace recursive research, I developed a series of lessons meant to help students balance perspective and reflection with argument, ways to make space for and differentiate between various voices, including their own. When I look at the progress from Q’s first essay for the course and this one, I see a shift from initial reticence to include her own lived experience to a writerly persona that fully embraces an authoritative “I.” She wrote in her reflection after Progression 4, that she wanted to “challenge [her]self on narrative” and tell a story that would align with the argument she was exploring. Q and I met during a writing workshop session with this goal in mind. Her work on the Annotated Bibliography assignment already illustrated a deep understanding of her sources and the ways in which they were in conversation with one another. We needed to build space for the writer, for the story the essay was trying to tell.
We spent the majority of the workshop discussing her beginning. Originally, the first anecdote was going to a movie with a friend. Q was attempting to highlight the irony that she felt more free to be Chinese in America than in China. I noted that she might want to bring in a specific example of something she could do here that she would never write in China. The result, when she went back to the draft on her own, was the “zheng zhi” example and the third paragraph reflecting on her experiences actually writing (the “twisted, spliced, and edited” sensation of writing in China and the beautiful last line of that paragraph: “In that place, everyone is speaking in Chinese, but no one is speaking Chinese”). In my note on her final graded version, I urged her to re-work her ending to elaborate on the artists’ sacrifice and do more than simply summarize previous points. She focused her revisions on that last paragraph before submitting her essay to Mercer Street. Her return to the personal decision to write the essay at all creates a sense of closure and personal stake that is much more profound.
—Amanda Capelli
I love Ashley Kang’s “The Audacity To Hate.” I love Ashley’s style, grace and charisma, her chemist’s balance of cynicism and sincerity. I love the unexpectedness of the observations she sits next to each other. Ashley shows us the vulgar intensity of the U.S. naturalization process, her nuclear family paraded one by one into an “interrogation” room, each “swearing not to be communists,” then cuts to the bath of banality surrounding that intensity, as they “scroll” and “yelp” in the waiting room, figuring out where to brunch when the last of their interviews is over. Ashley weeps for the distance between rhetoric and reality in the United States, and puzzles over the distance between her own experience and the narratives of Asian-Americanness she’s encountered in books, at NYU, in the nation she’s found beyond San Jose. She phrases with daring precision, puncturing easy accords with cutting compound phrases, as when she refers to “some diversity-seminar-panel-discussion circle jerk” In phrases like that we see her audacity at its most distilled. It’s a headrush. And it might be too strong for some.
This is a feature of what I love most about Ashley Kang’s essay: its brash confidence. As an undergraduate she goes in gloves off to call out the conflicted, but enduring, patriotism of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Viet Than Nguyen as “bootlicking.” But her confidence really crackles when she then has the poise to turn that judicious eye pointedly, acerbically, and with a touch of humor back on herself, offering the possibility that her disapproval of Nguyen is merely a product of her own “juvenile absolutism.” The drama of her ending, which builds from that theme of the impertinent adolescent and dresses it with major metaphorical heft, lands her suddenly, craftily in proximity to the titular “hope” of Barack Obama’s memoir which her own title until that moment has seemed to be cynically taking aim at. It is a turn that makes me cry, that melts some of my own cynicism. In a decade it’s the most artful ending I’ve encountered in a student essay. It feels like the real thing.
—Benjamin Gassman
Aidan La Poche wrote this essay for the final chapter of the class, which represents, in large part, the culmination of the first year of writing at Tisch. In my class, it’s an assignment that calls for a substantial list of ingredients: deeply researching into a public issue, close reading texts and works of art, conducting your own interviews, analyzing rhetoric, recreating narrative. During the semester, we work on these pieces in separate exercises. The real challenge of the essay, however, lies not just in the craft of doing each piece well, but in the art of getting those different elements to work together as part of a coherent whole.
In this essay, Aidan’s 10 a.m. ritual of scrolling through TheRealReal becomes our way into a deeper examination of the true costs of fashion in the age of TikTok. The larger ideas are always brought home to us through vivid details. The essay starts in close-up with Aidan scrolling in search of an Anna Sui T-shirt or a Vivienne Westwood bag, then pivots on the phrase, “people for whom shopping has turned into a calling,” to zoom out to a larger examination of what’s really at stake in our desire for these clothes.
Note how well Aidan balances the specific and the general, the personal and the social, the light and the serious. One place to study how Aidan does this is in the section on the Miu Miu micro-miniskirt. We get a description of both the original runway show and an analysis of the skirt itself as Aidan builds to the claim that Miu Miu’s “blending of aggressively boring menswear and hyperfeminine silhouettes allowed the collection to exist at a cross-section between fashion and irony, dullness and sexiness, and menswear and womenswear.” The micro-mini serves as the specific evidence that helps the reader see the larger ideas of the essay. Aidan is careful to turn it into an exhibit, something the reader can see in both detail and in a larger context (the echoes of Christina Aguilera and Y2K-era fashion trends, the macro effects of microtrends). The essay as a whole is rooted in exhibits like this (the scene from The Devil Wears Prada, the close reading of The RealReal’s “Sustainability Calculator”). Without them, we’d be less likely to accept or even understand its larger ideas about “limbic capitalism,” hyper-consumerism “personalized” by an algorithm, and the potential for joy despite everything. To convince the reader of ideas of that size, the exhibits must feel nearly as real, as urgent, and as complex as the world around us.
—Eric Ozawa
In his 1985 essay “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” Jim Corder wrote: “We are always standing somewhere in our narratives when we speak to others or to ourselves.” When I designed a research essay around a significant New York place, one goal was to get my students, many of whom were new to New York, out into their adopted city. The other was to give them somewhere to stand—literally—as they built a narrative about the place they’d chosen. The first step in the process required them to go to that place and simply look around: see who used it and why, who didn’t (or couldn’t), when it was busy, when it was empty, how the light hit it at the end of the day. Then they combined their observations with research to create a representation of that place, and a foundation for their investigation of inequality.
The pandemic eliminated the requirement for a site visit, and as a result Joyce was able to write about a place she’d never been. (Her beautiful opening description comes from a video available online.) The fact that she couldn’t actually “get into” Stuyvesant High School was, I think, ultimately an asset, because it enabled her to convey the urgency with which so many New York students try to get through those doors. The goal of the essay is to reveal a “deeper story” about a New York place, and what Joyce realized early on was that the biggest story about Stuyvesant happened outside the school, in the drama over its admissions process. She identified the tension between what the school represents—social mobility—and the structure it actually upholds: a seemingly-meritocratic system that, in reality, is rooted in racism and psuedo-science, resulting in the admission of only 15 Black students over the past two years. In her representation, Joyce acknowledged her own relationship to the problem: “Faced with these statistics, one can’t help but wonder if the meritocracy the SHSAT claims to guarantee can truly exist in a city steeped in systemic racism. As an Asian American, they serve as a startling reminder that, though it faces challenges of its own, my community may be benefitting from that racism.” Even though she didn’t “get into” Stuyvesant, Joyce recognized that her identity implicated her in that controversy.
But acknowledging where the controversy placed her did not stop Joyce from figuring out where she actually stood; in fact, it helped her to see how structural inequality turns marginalized populations against each other while unfair systems remain intact. The essay’s particular strength is its masterful incorporation of sources, its deft deployment of both statistics and ideas: Joyce lets the numbers and stakeholders speak for themselves, and she responds. She is not out to vilify any of the constituencies involved, but to explore the relationship between who they are and what they want, while ultimately revealing that what stands in their way is not a single test, but a deeply segregated school system.
—Beth Machlan
It brought me great pleasure to watch Emerald’s essay come into being, to wait for it, and to come to understand it. It was clear she had the inkling of an idea, something she had come to experience in Chung’s photography in conjunction with having read Cole and Berger essays closely, but it was tricky to know “precisely what it is [she was] understand[ing].” It was only through many drafts and experiments in reorganizing the order of her analysis that Emerald was able to describe not just the problem she poses at the beginning—how it is that Chung manages such intimacy as an outsider—but also the larger idea she implies about a temporal element in coming to understand art and others: waiting. In reshaping the order of analysis, Emerald practiced presenting her evidence first, and her thinking about that evidence second, helping her readers to experience deductive reasoning—in effect, waiting, and looking—in order to understand.
An example from her essay:
“[Poolaw’s] photographs, Cole writes, ‘give us lively pictures of life as it [is] being lived.’ The informality of the captured moments allows us a glimpse of the subjects’ lives in their richness and mundanity. Chung, too, accomplishes this by photographing ordinary moments. The alleyway, the arching tree, the low rooftops, and the rusted pipes on the mottled wall are not a staged background, but a corner of the city people might pass by any day.”
Notice how Emerald gives us evidence from Cole, and some further explanation of Cole’s thinking, followed by an introduction to how this idea appears in Chung’s work, and then a very detailed description of how she understands Chung’s work to show us ‘life as it is being lived.’ Here in her writing there are slow layers of both analysis and synthesis as she shows the reader how she understands both Cole and Chung, and how Cole’s thinking affects how she finds meaning in Chung’s photograph.
I believe is is due to writing and re-writing these moments of analysis that Emerald was ultimately able to reflect, to shift away from arguing, “Despite any differences in backgrounds, identities, and experiences, we share an understanding with the mother, even as she retains her own idiosyncrasy and liveliness, and we thus remain unsure precisely what it is we understand” toward being able to say, “Suspended in this moment, we hold our breath and wait for her to speak, to move, to open her eyes. Alongside us is Chung: together, in stillness, we ask the mother to tell us her story. Perhaps this is what it means to capture the moment of another—to hold one’s breath and say, silently: I am waiting.”
—Karen Lepri
Iris Liu’s critical essay on CRISPR benefits from a breadth of research, but includes two argumentative sources worth focusing on in particular. To start with, Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker essay “CRISPR and the Splice to Survive” lends Iris the terms and parameters to launch her own idea. Meanwhile, Peter Singer’s book chapter “All Animals are Equal,” collected in the Expository Writing Program’s A Digital Anthology for Writers, reframes Iris’s evolving idea even though it has nothing to do with genetic engineering and predates the invention of CRISPR by several decades. Both of these sources are written with a general audience in mind: not a community of scholars, not a specialized group of practitioners. Kolbert’s argument is designed to excite the mind of an intelligent general reader: she alerts Iris to the idea that genetic engineering is an incursion into the realm of gods. A few pages later, Singer gives Iris a new set of terms from a different field of inquiry — animal ethics — whose terms she imports into her argument about CRISPR in order to point it in a new direction.
Here’s what I believe, which Iris’s essay confirms: In order to allow for the play of mind on which a liberal education is founded, we need to keep essays essayistic. Argumentative sources aimed at a general audience (for example, essays and articles from The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic…) are thus important not just to include in one’s research, but to make foundational to one’s inquiry—that is, to serve as primary texts. Moreover, the student writer needs to encounter arguments about topics outside her essay’s field of research, which she then has a chance of importing into her own thinking, by means of an intellectual leap. Such texts can be found in the EWP Anthologies; that’s what I believe they are for.
—Leeore Schnairsohn
Like many film-centered essays published in Mercer Street over the years, Nick Mahoney’s “‘Bringing the Beatles Back to Hamburg’: Aspects of National Identity in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend” opens with a captivating piece of scenic writing. What makes this opening stand out, in my view, is the way in which it not only grabs our attention and draws us into the analysis but also plays a dynamic structuring role within the essay. From the literal image(s) of Tom Ripley’s narcissism, captured by a Polaroid camera, Nick is able to fast-forward and rewind to other relevant scenes, then springboard into a consideration of masquerade as a historical constant, before concluding by reflecting on the discombobulated humanity that no narcissistic identity attachment ever quite manages to conceal or contain.
Nick’s title doesn’t quite do justice to the complexity of his argument. This is an essay about not only national identity but its intersection with conceptions of masculinity in the twilight of a mythical era of cultural upheaval that Dennis Hopper—one of the two leading actors in Wenders’ film—continues to be associated with today. Nick was rightfully hesitant when it came to working with a lens text (Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “Surrogate Americans: Masculinity, Masquerade, and the Formation of a National Identity”) centered on a topic as seemingly distant from his own as Tammany Hall society. But he ingeniously managed to isolate the essay’s usefulness, which lies not only in its illumination of the concept of masquerade but in its discussion of relevant historical antecedents to Wenders’ Ripley, such as the figure of the “rough-and-tumble frontiersman.”
Ultimately, the success of this essay resides not only in Nick’s application of his lens text but in his own “discursive expansion” (to use his language) of Smith-Rosenberg’s thinking. In his concluding assertion that, for Wenders at least, there is “something beneath” mere masquerade, one detects a continuation, or, indeed, expansion of Nick’s own discourse on the human, as developed in his “Smartphones and the New Flesh” (also published in this year’s Mercer Street).
—David Markus
When discussing structure in relation to the Progression 2 essay as I’ve come to teach it in Writing the Essay, I’ve often referred students to the well-trodden dialectical path of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Nick Mahoney’s “Smartphones and the New Flesh” confirms to me the pedagogical usefulness of this basic guidance, even as it beautifully demonstrates that no intellectual synthesis can ever quite be complete or without remainder.
It is a testament to Nick’s well-roundedness as a writer that it’s difficult to isolate a single stand-out section in his essay. The opening description of an iconic scene from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome is as vivid and captivating as the discussion of Adam Greenfield’s reflections on digital mapping is methodical. Nick is just as compelling reflecting on the pop-scientific musings of Ray Kurzweil as he is navigating the densely allusive philosophical discourse of Giorgio Agamben.
Among the many things I appreciate about this essay is its opening wager that art, or specifically, film, of the past has the power to provoke intense questioning of our present. (As Nick demonstrates in “Aspects of National Identity in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend,” his other essay in this volume, he has an especially keen grasp of cinema and its power.) I also admire the ease with which Nick carefully considers the opposing perspectives of Greenfield and Kurzweil without obviously privileging one or appearing (overly) patronizing toward the other. Perhaps above all, I’m struck by the intellectual stamina that Nick exhibits in wrestling with Agamben’s challenging ideas until they finally yield insights into his topic of inquiry. That he accomplishes this while remaining clear, precise, and readable, right to the end, is all the more impressive.
—David Markus
In this essay, Max Miniewicz explores the intersections of environmental and racial racism, moving through a series of questions that prompt us as readers to question how we understand the systems of discrimination at the foundation of current forms of inequality and injustice. The prompt for this assignment asked the writer to focus on a topic of contemporary concern, and what I found so powerful about Max’s writing was how he invited the reader to share in his sense of urgency in grappling with these issues, asking us to accompany him on his path towards greater understanding. And questions are at the heart of this journey. In his introduction, he notes “To depart from our flawed history, we must ask…,” and through that seemingly simple turn of phrase, he underscores the power of a compelling question. What he suggests here is that the capacity in being able to ask questions, and to do so together (the “we”) helps create a sense of shared agency as writer and reader(s), offering us a way to not just face that history, but to “depart from” it, and perhaps find a way forward into meaningful change, a first step, if you will, into the kind of justice and future.
Those steps, however, are not taken alone. Instead, Max embarks on this inquiry by thinking and reading along with others, using those sources dialogically to shed new insights into the history of environmental racism and the possibilities for some kind of justice. Indeed, it seems that just as he establishes a new understanding through a historical context or case, he then launches into a new question, thereby exemplifying how writing is an evolving and emerging process of discovery, one shared with other writers and one’s readers. I am especially struck by the concluding lines, where Max notes that the pandemic has allowed us to see things in a new way, thereby opening up “new possibilities for action.” I see here again that connection between the capacity to see (and ask questions and understand) and the ability to act. Perhaps this kind of inquiry can be the beginning of the kind of action the essay calls for. Perhaps this kind of inquiry can even be a form of action itself. And by the time we arrive at the conclusion, we share the urgency he has brought to this essay, carving out a space for us to join him in the “we” implied by his final question, inviting us to travel with him as he seeks to understand and hopefully act to make the world a bit better, and showing us how understanding can be the start of a form of action as well.
—Natasha Zaretsky
A week before our class began, I emailed my students a welcome message and included a link to a recently published essay of mine, very much about our too-long viral world, one that teachers and students share. I asked students to be ready to write, in a public-facing Google doc, about something I say in this essay that they can care about. They’d do this writing in class on our first day, and it would help me and their colleagues to see how they use words to gesture towards the kind of feeling whose experiential end seems always delayed.
Felicia emailed me a few days later, clarifying that, while accustomed to writing analytical essays in which no room for storytelling could be made, she admired my essay’s joining of the analytical and personal narrative. But she wondered at her ability to match that joining. She also expressed her sense that analysis and narrative are opposed, though that opposition may be a product of her training—she wasn’t sure.
But we tell stories to ourselves and to others every day. To tell any tale involves the heft involved in all analytical labor: where to begin and why, what to leave out, what to suggest yet not fully explain, where to end—and why.
For our initial four classes, my students experienced and wrote about, in that same Google doc, eleven artworks ranging from Karim Sulayman singing Sinéad O’Connor’s “In This Heart,” blindfolded in front of Trump Tower; to Lil Nas X performing “Montero” live; to an interview with muralist and activist Judy Baca; to the last scene from the film Call Me by Your Name.
Finally, I asked students to choose one of the epigraphs at the top of our introductory artworks attachment, to tell me how their choice speaks to them. Felicia selected words from Rachel Cusk’s new book, Second Place: “If you have always been criticized from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist. But paintings and other created objects give you a location, a place to be, when the rest of the time the space has been taken up because the criticism got there first.”
Felicia wrote: “I am a child of two very different people, who—it has always seemed—feared greatly that I would turn out like the other. Yesterday I had a class in which those forbidden tensions appeared again; the sense that I cannot inhabit either space well enough, that what has been created by the pull between either ends, itself, amounts to something that does not lead me forward. Cusk offers hope.” She had, by our fourth class, begun to connect analysis and personal experience, to make something of her earlier claim of not being “sure.”
Shortly after this, I had to go on medical leave for a health emergency I couldn’t delay recognizing. But I knew that Michel Tyrell, who kindly stepped in, would nourish Felicia’s ability to craft a whole in the face of doubt.
Michael Tyrell:
First, an anniversary and a word about uncertain endings. July 8, 2022, the day I’m writing these words, would’ve been the 90th birthday of the filmmaker and actress Barbara Loden. Back in February, shortly after stepping in for Bruce (see below), I asked our students to consider Loden’s neglected masterpiece Wanda alongside Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winning Nomadland. On the surface, both are “woman on the road” movies whose respective endings deny the viewer a neat sense of closure. But while the flinty, independent Fern finally gives up her storage space, symbolically cutting herself off once and for all from a town and life that no longer exist, the hapless Wanda finds herself, for once, a welcome-if-silent stranger feted by other strangers. Facing their unknown futures with questionable material resources, these beautifully drawn, complicated characters, Fern and Wanda, moved and puzzled a classroom of student writers as they began to craft their essays. Considering the stories of experience they had limned in exercise form, they wondered most of all about how their essay drafts would end. They knew they didn’t want to diminish their fine work by tacking on pat, simplistic conclusions—or, as one student called it, the admissions- essay ending: cheerfully aspirational but flat; Hallmark sentiment hoping-for-depth.
It’s always fascinating to watch writers sharpen their grasp of chosen evidence as they shape their own drafts. Writing teachers call drafting a process, but wouldn’t the word ordeal be more appropriate? Drafting can often seem like an estrangement from one’s known and cherished possessions, weighing what’s really essential and making hard calls about what to throw out. I’ve always disliked the term “familiar essay” as a synonym for “personal essay” for reasons I couldn’t quite name until now. Maybe it’s that the word familiar gets mistranslated as relatable—if we want our readers only to relate to what we write, what happens to the unfamiliar, the unsettling, the things that can’t be decoded but must be said?
Far more difficult is managing the ambiguities within one’s own evidence, and developing an essay as sharp and fearless as “Broken Glass in Film City” rests not only on the strength of choices but the wisdom of necessary forfeitures. Ever discerning throughout the stages of synthesizing the raw material of exercises and recasting them into the field of storytelling and interrogation, Felicia raised the bar with each draft. Throughout this work, she believed in her choices, trusting that rewriting would illuminate more connections, binding these texts more tightly together while always being mindful of their distinctions. Her essay stakes out its own language, prefigured but not preconceived by diverse evidence and concepts: among others, the Society for Daughters of Absentee Fathers, “The Company of Wolves” and Balto and The Hour of the Wolf, The Sopranos, and perhaps most of all, a “grasping at the fraying threads of beginnings and ends.” Fern and Wanda don’t make an appearance in Felicia’s final draft, but yet I recognize something of their restlessness, their wandering, their refusal to follow the pack and flatten themselves into singular, explainable entities: “We reconfigure ourselves, our narrative, and the vision of our story that stretches, perhaps not out in front of us, but into us. We fragment and fray. We compose and create. We are victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and judges; we are wolves.”
Speaking of the title’s “film city” in her native Stockholm, Felicia writes that it “exists for a few blocks, and then it all ends: the town, the set, the world.” Reading these words now, I’m struck by how she might be talking about the brevity of the class itself and the creation of an essay—any essay. Before we know it, it seems, we’re hitting “submit” on our “final” drafts. Did we do it “right”? Have we ended glibly, coherently, memorably? Maybe it “doesn’t matter”—it’s the going through to the end of something that makes it worthwhile (though try telling that to students whose essays you’re grading). “Broken Glass in Film City” teaches me so much about the subtleties and shadows that lurk within the stories we tell about our lives. Like most good essays, it makes me consider how the magic of writing reconfigures experience into a series of beautiful unknowns, beginnings and ends framed for a perfect stranger.
The theme of the Film and World progression in my class was “Portraits of the Artist,” and Libby Ronon offers us a sensitive and complex reading of Joanna Hogg’s portrait of herself as a young artist: of the artist as a young woman, prey to the dissociative disorder of loving a manipulative and untrustworthy man. Key to Libby’s interpretation of The Souvenir is her close reading of image and form. Early in the progression, she noticed that the repeated images of mirrors emphasize what Julie is not seeing. They dissociate her from herself, as do the long shots and abrupt cuts that treat Julie as an “experimental subject,” creating a kind of “third person” detachment from her own experience. Building on this insight, Libby orchestrates a productive conversation between two of her sources, Richard Brody and Rebecca Mead. Brody zeroes in on Hogg’s distancing effects and finds them frustrating. Mead reveals that the frustration is intentional and was experienced even by the bewildered actress playing Julie. Maybe the most useful approach a critic can take to a work of art is to try to understand their own response to it. What is the artist doing to create that response? Libby records her response a couple of times. She notes that “[v]iewers ache to shake Julie by her shoulders and scream, ‘Look at what’s in front of you!’” and she ruefully admits to a “cringe [of] recognition every time Julie offers a conciliatory apology to a man who has clearly wronged her.” At these moments, we’re getting a portrait of a young artist gazing at a portrait of a young artist, pondering its implications, much as Julie and Anthony look at Fragonard’s painting. Through a close and probing reading of the film, she understands that Hogg wants us to turn the mirror back on ourselves, to look in ourselves for what Julie fails to see.
—David Foley
Ray Wang’s “The Taste of Home” first awakens my taste buds and then takes hold of my connective mind. I am a sucker for a food tour of New York City. Ray first gets me hungry, then gets me to think self-consciously about potential misunderstandings I’ve been operating under as to what constitutes “authentic” Chinese food. But then I discover that he’s immersing me in this food tour, and planting terms like “authenticity” to prepare me to engage alongside him with the thinking of Kwame Anthony Appiah as to whether there is such a thing as cultural authenticity, and more importantly why we are so fixated on it.
Midway through his essay Ray subtly introduces the notion that what we think of as “cultural authenticity” might just be habit. This kernel of idea is not announced but rather wedged into a brief line of first-person questions in which Ray, a student from northern China, reflects on his early experiences of Chinese food in downtown Manhattan. Ray asks: “Should my fixation on authentic Chinese food, on the taste of my home, make way for the new environment I am in? Should I accept the ‘flaws’ in the food and call this a new authentic? If authenticity is merely a habit, would these new flavors become new memories of ‘home’ years later?” That term “habit” represents an astonishingly clear synthesis of all the strands of Appiah’s thinking that have stuck out to Ray. In that question Ray has moved deftly from his own quoting and analysis of the dense and often difficult thinking about cultural preservation and cosmopolitanism into a reanimation of the conversation that began with his own brief opening review of the Chinese food offerings in Greenwich Village and surrounding neighborhoods. This is what most impresses me about Ray’s essay: the way he distills Appiah’s thinking, and then uses it as a magnifier through which to put his own very particular culinary concerns into conversations with questions about culture, authenticity, and identity that most of us are asking versions of. At the end of the essay I want to go over to The Dolar Shop on Third Avenue and keep thinking alongside Ray.
—Benjamin Gassman
Kailyn Williams’ stirring and beautifully composed “Black Means Run” is what I refer to as a ‘gift’ essay. Gift. As I write the word, I see how it can read hyperbolic, even sentimental, but I mean it in the most pragmatic of ways. For teachers, it offers multiple points of entry for effectively modeling the various components of essay (textual representation that transcends summary; meaningful conversation among texts; integration of textual evidence on the sentence and paragraph level; productive use of experiential evidence, just to name a few). For students, it is an impressive—but unintimidating—exemplar of how the cumulative work of a progression can be puzzled out, refined, and shaped into an essay that believably reads as though Kailyn is making these connections and discoveries on the page for the very first time. Kailyn’s essay is also something of a gift to the texts themselves, a testament that the ideas and inquiries posed by Brent Staples and W.E.B. Du Bois in their respective works still live and breathe, that the singular curiosities and engagement of the student writer can both revive and re-contextualize.
—Joe Vallese
There is a lot to admire in Jaewoo Stanley Yang’s essay “Taxi Driver and the Rage of the Incel.” Too much to go into here. But I think the most substantive and useful takeaways can be boiled down to two moves:
- Yang is willing to interrogate his own relationship with the film. In paragraph two, Yang admits, “I nearly sympathized with Travis Bickle” (the disturbed murderer and failed terrorist of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver). This unsettling emotional connection, in fact, motivates Yang’s line of inquiry: “I was perturbed enough to wonder what it meant to enjoy this film today, nearly fifty years after its release.” Yang helps us to see that, whether a critic, writer, artist, or simply an observer, it’s crucial to not only understand our own engagement with art, but also to challenge it, to excavate the personal biases and unquestioned cultural predispositions that shape our preferences.
- Yang reads the film as a living document whose meaning deepens and changes over time. In this way, Scorsese’s intimate portrait of an isolated, disturbed man turned violent vigilante becomes a prototype of a more unnerving community that exists today: “In today’s cultural atmosphere, Travis Bickle might be considered an ‘incel,’ roaming dark corners of the Internet instead of the streets of New York City.” This connection between then and now is the lynchpin of the Reviewing-in-Contexts essay, and it teaches another useful lesson: By seeing your exhibit source (the object you are analyzing) from a variety of lenses, your understanding of its relevance will shift and evolve.
What’s most impressive is how these two moves (self-interrogation and cultural recontextualization) come together to shape a larger idea. “Such characters fascinate viewers,” Yang writes, “because they reflect something deeply odd in us.” In other words, he goes from his fascination to our fascination, and uncovers a troublesome trend. Building from Jia Tolentino’s “The Rage of the Incels,” which notes, “Women are socialized from childhood to blame themselves if they feel undesirable,” and “Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable,” Yang comes to see that our empathy for characters like Bickle belies a problematic impulse to try to understand male predators while blaming or overlooking female survivors, enabling a culture of misogyny and violence. And so Yang’s essay closes with an articulation of a bigger problem—“If we continue to reach toward and sympathize with these men, we risk continuing to see the world in their terms”—a challenge that leaves the reader’s mind reeling and offers one final rhetorical lesson: Don’t try to resolve your essay’s question: answer it with an even more complicated one.
—Jono Mischkot
For this assignment, I asked my International Workshop II students to do something that many of them felt was outside of their comfort zone: to write an essay that would combine narrative and analysis, acting as autoethnographers who study their own experience with writing and literacy in order to gain a better understanding of it. Tony Adams and Stacy Holman-Jones explain that autoethnography “seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)”—a process that goes well beyond simply sharing a story. Stacey Zhu’s “The Translation of Critical Thinking” tackles this difficult challenge admirably. In her study of her struggles with academic writing in English as an international student, Zhu is honest, open-minded, and inquisitive. Perhaps the key to her success in the essay is that as a writer, she is driven by a clear purpose: to ‘translate’ the intricacies of the writing and thinking process between different cultural contexts and to help both international students and their instructors as they work towards greater mutual understanding.
Any translation is an act of building a bridge, and Zhu’s essay is in the business of doing just that. She cites Chinese idioms that help her explain cultural meanings behind concepts, provides translingual definitions with a detailed commentary directed at English-speaking audiences, and relies on her cultural expertise to explain why academic writing conventions might appear elusive and hard to grasp for a newcomer to the North American academic culture. The essay takes the reader through a sequence of inquiry-driven steps that allow us to witness the evolution of Zhu’s beliefs about writing and at the same time revisit our own.
The essay relies on a thorough literature review that informs its translingual and cross-cultural analysis. In her selection of sources, Zhu is mindful of the purpose that each of them serves in her argument. One article might help the writer challenge and unsettle an easy definition of the key concept; another might provide a historic and cultural background; yet other sources introduce us to the ongoing scholarly conversation about international students’ paths to fluency in writing. Zhu stays invested and motivated throughout this research, switching between what she learns from sources and her own observations, and, in turn, keeps us the reader in the moment, right there with her on her intellectual journey. This essay grants us the privilege to witness things happening: how a writer gains confidence and voice through sharing her cultural expertise, seeking answers, and actively reflecting on how new knowledge intertwines with her own experience.
—Natalia Andrievskikh