- On Diya Cherian’s “Beyond the Picket Line . . .” (Laura Weinert-Kendt)
- On Aislin Exum’s “See the Body Gone” (Bruce Bromley)
- On Torie George’s “Hollow Promises . . .” (Grant Ginder)
- On Luiza Ghazaryan’s “The Brain in Your Hands” (Ger O’Donoghue)
- On Sofia Goorno’s “The Strong Female Lead . . .” (Doug Dibbern)
- On Hana Greif’s “African American Vernacular English . . .” (Katherine Carlson)
- On Jaeyeong Jeong’s “A Tale of Three Names” (Conor Creaney)
- On Elle Jung’s “noise begin to alias . . .” (Christopher Wall)
- On Aidan Kash’s “The Real Danger of Minions” (Colm O’Shea)
- On Ryder Kern’s “Ethel Cain’s New Songs for the South” (Victoria Anderson)
- On Sunny Qi’s “Surviving 996” (Michele Hanks)
- On Maria Silva’s “Unraveling the Self Through Language” (Bruce Bromley)
- On Kai Tomizawa’s “I Post, Therefore I Am . . .” (Zach Udko)
- On Jennifer Tran’s “I Thought You Were Vietnamese” (Natasha Zaretsky)
- On Zining Wang’s “The Love in Cyberspace” (Leeore Schnairsohn)
- On Ziqiu Wang’s “The Missing Words” (Bruce Bromley)
- On Ava Wolesky’s “The View from My Cubby” (David Foley)
- On Haonan Wu’s “Crazy Rich Asians: Annotated Bibliography” (Jono Mischkot)
- On Lark Zabel’s “Not in My New York . . .” (Grant Ginder)
Diya Cherian’s “Beyond the Picket Line” is an excellent example of a student choosing a current, local controversy—in her case, a recent nursing strike in NYC, which she feels a personal stake in as a premed student—and using it to raise a question with no easy answer, which nevertheless leads to productive cultural analysis. Cherian’s opening is vivid, situating us in a particular time, place, and set of concerns. We see the hats and scarves, read the picket signs. But almost immediately she is calling our attention beneath the surface. “The picket line was a symptom of a much larger problem,” she writes, hinting at what will later become the project of her essay: to uncover the deeper systemic issues that have led up to this nursing strike. This labor tactic presents a complicated predicament: While nursing unions have the right to strike as a negotiating tactic like any other union, is this tactic ethical, given its potential impact on the community? Cherian’s tough question, carefully placed at the end of her beginning, provokes thought and compels us to read on—precisely what a strong central question in an essay must do.
In her pursuit of understanding, Cherian is careful to give voice to both sides. Using well-integrated sources, Cherian reveals the current unsafe staffing ratios, considers the effect of nursing burnout on patient care, and reframes the strike not as a recklessly aggressive tactic, but as a final, desperate move after a long string of negotiations that proved futile. Yet Cherian doesn’t shy away from presenting the human cost of this tactic as well: sharply increased mortality and lower-quality care throughout the strike.
I recall that at this point in her drafting, Cherian felt stuck. It seemed impossible to figure out an answer to her question as she could genuinely see both sides. But subsequent exercises and feedback helped her see that she could still say something meaningful by enlarging the reader’s sense of the cultural and systemic problems that had led to this crisis. As she discovers and shows us, the very structure of the healthcare system itself undergirds the problem. As Cherian reveals via her source, “While they exist to benefit patients, hospitals are set up financially to benefit wealthy executives, whose profits do not depend on patient outcomes shaped by adequate nursing staff.” While the ethics of striking may be questioned, Cherian shifts our attention to the highly questionable ethics of a healthcare system that routinely prioritizes profits over patients and staff. As her essay builds towards its urgent, persuasive call for a new system that truly values patients’ health and its workers’ well-being, Cherian makes the full implications of the problem clear: “The old adage ‘health is wealth’ implies a subconscious belief that underpins these discussions: profits are useless without the health and well-being to make use of them. This truth was evident during the pandemic; the economic stability of our nation and world is contingent upon a healthy society, and whether we like it or not, our collective health has implications beyond the profits at one hospital.”
—Laura Weinert-Kendt
Ayslin’s work is a variation on the Texts in Context essay, which ends many of our writing courses. Here, though, students select a maker in any field, do a modicum of research on issues important for that maker, and have the freedom to connect these labors with narrative writing, where the energy in their voices can come alive.
Near the time when students were going to begin the drafting process, I wanted to make some room. We’d watched Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ 2019 film, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I am, and I believed Morrison’s advice might help us get closer to what the final essay in our class can do. So, in our shared Google doc, I wrote: Think about Toni Morrison’s words to her creative writing students at Princeton: “I do not want you to write anything about your little life”; “ I want you to invent,” to ‘Invent” something “far distant from your life.” After these words, Morrison says that, for her students, “a door opened.”
The prompt, for all of us, was to write a few paragraphs according to Morrison’s guidance. Now. In class.
When I began my part of this, students watched me, while Tori Amos sang (live) her “Winter” song on the large flat screen, very much about striving to move forward. Later, students told me how tough such writing felt, initially, but that seeing me “in the zone” helped them to feel that the zone was reachable. I was underscoring how power can be made horizontal, rather than vertical: we were all at the same round table, committed to the work. And that shared commitment made the work real.
Here’s my own beginning, which students read:
She’ll burn everything but the pants.
They were green like those first leaves in spring, here in this new place so different from the Rio she can’t remember. They had some red in them, too, and her friend whose name she can’t say told her they were for Halloween, a word she couldn’t get close to.
She called him Antonio because she had no way of mouthing the thickness in the middle of the Anthony that he was. She wanted those pants to match her body. Some day, they would.
And here’s how Ayslin began:
I can still see the stain spreading like a void, a whirlpool on a cotton white t-shirt. The soft thud as hands and knees hit the ground, a gasping breath as the cab driver rolls out of the car. It’s always flashes like this— a shock of brilliant yellow and checkerboard smeared with crimson. The moment now is a cheery 1950s diner, and I’m with my father, absent-mindedly smiling over his fries, savoring each bite and licking the salt off his fingers. He believes he set me free from that life. I look at him, not eating, trying to avoid staring at the black and white checked floor. My mother named me Pharoah because she believed that I could make a kingdom for myself in this world and deliver her, too, from our meager place in the projects of Chicago. I kept my head on straight as best I could, but anger seemed to flow out into the streets that night. My dad meets my stare with a perplexed look, eyebrow raised and mouth still stuffed with fries.
This writing made the room out of which students’ final essays came. Ayslin threads together narrative from her own experience, which takes her to investigating her selected materials, thinking in varied ways about the kinds of bodies that get seen, the kind that don’t, and what both say about the culture we belong to. And our real-time, shared writing opened the door for her essay’s last, resonant paragraph:
I wonder what Black art could be if it was not so often limited and labeled. I laugh when I think of my teenage self, gripping a Zora Neale Hurston novel, wondering if I was Black enough. If my experience was adequate, authentic, real. When the boys shouted slurs and mockingly imitated rappers, I didn’t know if there was anything I could be except invisible. I wish I’d had Harris’s art then: to speak to all my contradictions and to turn insecurities into ideas. Art is not a body. A film is not a body. And if we live, are loud, and accept our myriad inconsistencies to create and explore, we are not just a body, either, no matter what our country, politicians, or police try to tell us.
Those words show how a voice can sing to a world very much in need of listening to it.
—Bruce Bromley
Torie George’s essay on the controversy surrounding land acknowledgements is extraordinary for its confidence and clear-eyed reflection. Torie takes a practice in which many of us have engaged, and—with the help of writing from Indigenous scholars and other experts—shows us how, while well-intentioned, land acknowledgements often amount to little more than “performative activism.” At the heart of this work is a compelling, crucial examination of the traditional roots of land acknowledgements, and how the practice has evolved into a “ubiquitous” act that “negates [its] benefits.” Here, Torie’s keen analytical and reflective abilities shine brightest, as she traces the history of her subject in order to show how the act itself isn’t the problem, but rather “the belief that this acknowledgement is enough in the spirit of reconciliation.”
This term—reconciliation—allows her, in the next paragraph, to pivot her essay’s focus to the concept of reconciliation politics, the complexities of which add tension to her argument. She shows us how, in the guise of reconciliation, practices like land acknowledgements are “framed in a manner that overlooks the historical context of colonialism and, more specifically, the ongoing impacts this had on Indigenous peoples today.” The thinking behind this sentence blows me away. It demonstrates an ability to criticize a practice as being both good, but hollow, well-intentioned, but not enough. What’s more, Torie resists easy, reductive answers in the essay’s conclusion. Instead, she embraces the complexities of her thinking, and argues how while land acknowledgements might be a first step, settler nations must also “focus on building equitable relationships with Indigenous groups” while identifying how “institutions perpetuate discrimination and erasure of Indigenous culture and identity.”
—Grant Ginder
Luiza Ghazaryan’s essay responds to our final progression, “Interpreting an Artifact,” which I based on Noelle Molé Liston’s progression, “Thinking With Things.” I asked students to identify a novel artifact produced by scientific discourses and to interpret its conceptual significance within a defined social context. With such open-ended parameters, the first step of selecting the object of inquiry proved challenging.
Luiza’s selection of cerebral organoids (“Lab-grown mini-brains”) set her on a promising path from the start. By contrast, some students picked topics that were overly broad, or already hashed out to death, or that they seemed kind of bored by before they even started. This challenge seems generally relevant in any of our choose-your-own-adventure research progressions. During the summer, I told Nate Mickelson how much success in this progression seemed to hang on choosing that first step wisely. Nate asked me what we could do to help students make better choices; that remains my guiding question here. Reflecting on what made Luiza’s choice successful might help other students get a feel for what makes certain topics viable and interesting.
The first element of Luiza’s success was that her topic was interesting to her. Luiza had a sense of wonder and excitement about cerebral organoids, along with a degree of frustration about how they were perceived or written about in the public sphere. I also found the topic immediately interesting, but possibly for all the reasons Luiza was frustrated with.
For me, a lab-grown brain immediately triggered thoughts of weird-science, of the uncanny brain-in-a-jar, and, less frivolously, of how we conceptualize our mental states. Those inclinations in the direction of philosophy of mind were not the core of Luiza’s interests. I admired how this highly motivated student didn’t follow the teacher’s curiosity to optimize the grade. Luiza was confident and consistent in framing the inquiry around the medical potential of cerebral organoids, the importance of resisting the seduction of the uncanny, and – ultimately – the ways in which a non-reductive materialist perspective on neurochemistry could help to destigmatize mental illness. In staying true to her interests, Luiza enacted the role of an expert communicating to an audience that lacked her expertise. This suggests another angle on topic selection, and one our former colleague Ben Stewart often emphasized: encourage students to select topics they have expertise in so that they can write from a position that allows both confident authority and room for new discovery.
Luiza chose something she was intrinsically interested in. She chose a topic that was also interesting for several divergent reasons to different people. She chose a topic she already knew a great deal about. Finally, she chose a topic which she knew to be generally misunderstood and poorly-framed in non-expert discourse. These four characteristics might give me some directions for how I invite students to choose research topics in the future.
—Gerard O’Donoghue
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 – essays should offer new perspectives, shed light on an issue in surprising ways, open up discussions into new avenues; in short, writers should be articulating some counterintuitive, complex ideas. To that end, we often practice creating chains of claims that have a cause-and-effect relationship; other times, we practice explaining why one might believe seemingly contradictory claims at the same time. This particular assignment came from a progression in which we studied how to write about film, so we had studied the specifically cinematic formal techniques the filmmakers use to convey ideas and influence the audience’s emotions. Sofia did a really good job of harnessing research to accomplish this task. Through the strength of her formal analysis, she develops a rich, multi-layered analysis of the film.
—Doug Dibbern
In her essay, “African American Vernacular English and the White Weaponization of Speech,” Hana Greif examines a chapter from bell hooks’s book, Teaching to Transgress, in order to pose a fascinating question about who has access to certain patterns of dialect, and when. While rooted in a larger conversation about linguistic appropriation, the dilemma Hana wrestles with becomes more urgent by focusing on how that conversation unfolds in a space with which she is already very familiar: the college classroom.
The original prompt that led to this essay asked students to engage deeply with an author’s core claim and to test them against ideologically-related texts. Without careful attention, it’s easy for this “test” to wander into one of two pitfalls. The writer may wind up re-stating the source’s argument without ever developing their own, or, they might oversimplify the author’s claims in order to marshall an artificial critique. Hana wrestled with these challenges early in the writing process. Her biggest concern was that she mostly agreed with hooks, and worried that she lacked the authority to engage in a critical conversation with a writer she admired so much. This is a challenge that nearly all academic writers face at one point or another: how can I find my own foothold within a group of accomplished thinkers? What can I say that hasn’t already been said?
In Hana’s early writing on hooks, she expressed that she felt pulled toward questions about interplay between speaker and audience. According to hooks, encouraging students to use their own languages and dialects in the classroom allows others “the opportunity to listen without ‘mastery,” without owning or possessing speech through interpretation.” Although Hana largely agrees with the substance of hooks’s argument, she is less optimistic: “There is a danger, however, in assuming that a language that is misunderstood cannot be exploited.” This moment in the essay deftly illustrates the art of real critical engagement: by acknowledging hooks’s argument in its full complexity, Hana makes her own counter-argument that much more powerful.
Having uncovered a genuinely uncertain question, Hana was ready to explore her secondary texts in a more targeted way. As a student in a writing class who was already thinking about questions of linguistic justice, she refined her research terms to look for other sources that explored linguistic diversity in the classroom in different disciplinary genres: Clery is a journalist, for example, while Hartman and Machado are writing studies scholars.
While neither easy nor uncomplicated, Hana’s journey became easier once she identified her own intellectual investment in her project. Through the prewriting process, she asked herself, What is hooks saying, and why do I care? Her response to those questions guided her research, and eventually, her essay.
—Katherine Carlson
You might observe, as you read the first four paragraphs of this essay, that Jaeyeong doesn’t begin with a question or a general claim. Instead, he starts with a nuanced and detailed description of his three names (Chinese, English, and Korean) and how they came to be. This descriptive work is wonderfully faithful to the oddness of the world that we live in, and contains details that make the story feel grounded and concrete: his grandparents making a mistake in translating between Korean and Chinese; his English name being plucked from “The Name Box;” his eventual acceptance of this name after Iron Man is released. Jaeyeong goes on to end this section with a striking description of how he navigates the world using these three names “like name tags in a room full of people I don’t know.” By the end of this beginning section, we can already see that this essay is laying out, in a concrete and engaging way, the specific conditions of his life.
We might learn from Jaeyeong’s beginning that this work of naming a complicated and intriguing set of real-world phenomena makes the writer’s task much easier. By capturing the overlapping, competing identities encapsulated in his three names, he has given himself a job to do in the rest of the essay, an inquiry to pursue. Implicit in this beginning are profound questions that the essay will later make explicit: What does a name signify? What historical, cultural, and personal connotations does it carry? How does the holder of any name (including you, reader!) make sense of the friction between the historically-accumulated set of meanings that a name carries and the unique sense of selfhood that this particular carrier of the name brings with them?
Jaeyeong understands here that in order to understand his multiple names he needs to explore these three histories and to make sense of himself as a kind of node where they converge. His work with Jamaica Kincaid’s “In History” is important in making this happen: Kincaid’s rigorous interrogation of the way British colonialism contributed to her own identity helps Jaeyeong to see how a thoughtful writer grapples with the inheritance of an oppressive history. This grappling is as much emotional as it is intellectual, and as Jaeyeong engages with Kincaid’s insights, we see him moving toward an ending that conveys an expanded sense of how he might reimagine his own identity.
When tackling important questions relating to identity, there is a danger that the writer can, in the pursuit of “relatability,” seek big, one-size-fits-all answers. The result can sometimes be broad generalizations (“ah, the circle of life!”) and an unconvincing use of the word “we” that sacrifices nuance in the attempt to appeal to a broad audience. Jaeyeong elegantly sidesteps this danger, by keeping his essay precisely focused on the specifics of his own personal and historical identities and trusting that the reader can join the dots to their own life themselves, if they choose to do so. The resulting essay is a great example of the fact that when a writer accurately describes their world in its richness and multiplicity, it can lead to a nuanced and surprising piece of writing.
—Conor Creaney
I often frame essay writing to my Tisch students as a “structured way of thinking through a problem.” At the end of each semester I suggest that they can use the methodology we’ve practiced in class to teach themselves about their art. After years of getting what felt like polite nods in response, I decided to create a progression that might demonstrate how this could be true. Now, as a capstone activity each spring, my students ask a question about their artform or creative process and then design a project to help them answer it. They compile a reading list to study artists and academics who’ve pondered some form of their question before and workshop their project design with classmates. If they’re going to tweak their creative process, for example, how will they assess the result? Will they ask for feedback? If so … from whom? What questions should they ask? How will they ask them? And how will they make sense of the response? One of the first things my students learn is that there’s no neutral way to pose a question.
These projects inevitably raise far deeper questions about how we define the most basic terms we’ve used in class: What should count as “evidence”? What should be deemed “persuasive”? And what, ultimately, does it mean to say we “know” something? It’s one thing to analyze evidence that has already been shaped and given to you by an expert or included in an anthology of “approved” texts. It’s another thing to design an experiment that can generate a range of unexpected results and trust that your answer — or some answer, or some inkling of an answer — might be hiding there in front of you. Over the past few years my students have asked an amazing range of questions, but as they try to answer them they all grapple with the same thing: to figure out how to figure out. We think we know how to do that, I tell them, but we don’t. We’re always learning how to learn.
After I launched this progression a few years ago, I was struck when Ruben Polendo, the chair of the drama department at the time, noted in a talk to the entering first-year class that Tisch is part of an R1 university and should be a laboratory for the creation of knowledge. Elle’s eloquent essay shows us what this knowledge might look like: it can emerge both from personal experience and an annotated bibliography; it can be rigorous, analytical, and creative; it can make complicated claims in an uncomplicated way; it can embrace aspects of what we call the familiar essay, as the writer brings us with them step by step, through unexpected setbacks, as they attempt to answer a question. And finally, it can be aimed at fellow practitioners but be generous enough to reach lay readers as well. I didn’t know what “room tone” was before I read this essay — it’s one of the great gifts of this progression that I get to learn from my students — but the filmmakers in class were also deeply engaged in Elle’s presentation and the film that resulted from this experiment. Rereading Elle’s paper now reminds me that most of what I’ve learned was figured out by other people. With that in mind, the classroom starts to feel like a place gifted with both generosity and obligation. We keep teaching each other so we can teach ourselves, and teach ourselves so we can teach each other.
—Christopher Wall
The Tisch 4th progression for Art In The World involves examining an aspect of tradition and how it impacts our own cultural moment. There’s something about the word ‘tradition’ that can turn young people off, so I tend to say the progression is about learning to see ghosts—to feel their influence on our living world.
Why learn to see ghosts? Well, aside from being a neat party trick, one can be more conscious about culture-making when one knows something about the invisible historical forces shaping our choices. And really powerful ghosts—let’s call them ‘archetypes’—are treasure-troves for the trainee artist, providing an inexhaustible supply of energy for new creations. For those two reasons alone, the 4th progression essay is a worthy investment of time. And let me say, Aidan Kash put in the time. She sent me draft after draft, working in such a disciplined and careful manner (ironically for an essay about the crudest, sloppiest humor we have: slapstick) to involve yet more scholarly research, incorporate my critical comments, etc. Over the course of her drafts, she set up an elaborate set of nesting dolls in this piece (ghosts-within-ghosts, if you will) taking us all the way back to ancient ‘ritual clowning’ practices, where the archetype of the Fool is presented in sharp distinction to the wise gods of the tribe. The clown evolves again during the Renaissance with the arrival of commedia dell’arte, and then Aidan takes us to the dawn of cinema with Chaplin’s Tramp. The purpose of all this historical analysis of the shifting role of the clown, and its relation to power structures, is to ask: what might the presence of this archetype mean in the 21st century, as minions spread rapidly in the realm of memes, corporate logos, and global entertainment markets?
If an academic discipline can be known by the kinds of questions it asks, then Aidan’s essay does a fine job of performing contemporary cultural analysis, asking: What is this art work doing? What are its roots? Why is this tradition reemerging now?
—Colm O’Shea
The final progression in my CAS Writing the Essay class begins with a simple invitation. Whose creative work fascinates you? Whose art or design are you obsessed with? Whose artistic output are you curious or confused about? Despite being collectively exhausted in the final stretch of the semester, the volume of the room slowly rises as they brainstorm their top choices. Ryder Kern’s process took a sharp turn when, a few exercises into the progression, he surprised me by requesting a switch from a famous comedian to the emerging musician Hayden Silas Anhedönia and her creative persona Ethel Cain. I mention this small moment because I believe that the creative momentum born out of the act of taking a turn in thinking is especially apparent throughout Ryder’s celebration of the complexity of Anhedönia’s own creative agency. Initiated by of a critical change in direction, the final essay arrives at an original insight which understands Anhedönia’s surprising identification with, and maternal adoration for, a region of America that seeks to erase her because she is transgender.
But how exactly does one build an essay that accounts for layers of such complexity, and make sense of it for the reader? A series of curational and compositional choices form the sound structure of the writing. Throughout the essay Ryder looks directly at the heart of Anhedönia’s modern southern gothic aesthetic through attention to carefully selected details of form and content in the work. He writes of the music video “American Teenager” that “Cain seems to be dancing around a ghost town, its empty highways and deserted stadiums suggesting it was a thriving city in the recent past”, and then follows with the observation that “[t]he song features an echoey guitar riff over upbeat drums, and spearheaded by Cain’s acrobatic falsettos, it frequently reaches thrilling climaxes […]”. The fusion of the imagery with the soundscape allows direct access to the unique layers of longing and dislocation the work evokes.
Ryder continues the pattern of bold decisions, naming and interpreting Anhedönia’s complex choices when he zooms out to the larger contexts that intersect with the work. The movement to broader political and aesthetic contexts are the result of rigorous research, yet are never simply informational. Ryder articulates the results of his research on the recent rise in political attacks against the LGBTQ+ community, yielding the nuanced interpretation that “Anhedönia acknowledges the suffering she has endured as a result of her environment, but acknowledges, too, the necessity of this environment to her identity”. A subsequent context reveals Anhedönia’s place in the context of other musicians concerned with the dislocation felt in a hollowed out American landscape. The categorization leads to the claim that that “[she] is part of a breed of artists looking both to capture the essence of rural American culture as it disintegrates and make clear that our idealized conception of its past never existed”. The layered claims Ryder articulates as a result of the contexts are not contradictory or “off point”, but express the complexity and rich tension of identification and critique embodied through Anhedönia’s creation of Ethel Caine’s musical world.
Finally, a quick note on the power of qualitative signposting. Ryder’s expert guidance for readers through the complex turns and contextual expansions of the essay can be seen in the carefully crafted sign-posts in the first sentences of each body paragraph. What is especially notable is that while the signposts add clarity to the direction of the essay, they are so much more than basic directions for weary drivers. They are part of the fabric of surprising choices that have swept up Ryder, and by extension us, on a rich quest for complexity.
—Victoria Anderson
The Cultural Conversations Progression in my Advanced College Essay class asks students to interrogate the cultural underpinnings of a particular STEM discourse. In “996,” Sunny Qi artfully analyzes the complex meaning of work in contemporary Chinese culture by examining the 996-work week and the protests against it. There is a lot to admire in Qi’s excellent essay (the comprehensive research, the analysis, the accessible and clear prose, etc.). When I use Qi’s essay in future classes, I anticipate asking students to consider how he developed the essay’s question and how he approached the analytic task of answering it. His introduction stages a careful process of simultaneously explaining the effects of culture of overwork in the Chinese technology sector while problematizing this culture of overwork by contrasting it with shorter work weeks in other national contexts. This allows him to create a problem that warrants the kind of cultural analysis he pursues in his essay. Qi models a range of analytic techniques in this essay: pattern-mapping, contextualization, problematizing. His contextualization of both 996 and the Lying Flat Movement within changing Chinese demography and Confucianism offers the kinds of cultural analysis needed to develop a deeper answer to his opening question. His conclusion concisely and insightfully names the deeper insight he developed over the course of the essay. The synchronicity between the kind of question Qi’s essay raises, the type of analysis he uses to answer it, and the kind of answer he develops is especially compelling.
Before Sunny Qi wrote “996” in our Advanced College Essay class, I had, at best, a passing familiarity with the Lying Flat Movement and the practice of 996. His essay did what good essays should do: it allowed me (and all of his readers) to understand and contextualize these phenomena while offering a particular analytic perspective on it.
—Michele Hanks
What led up to Bia (as she prefers to be called) writing her essay for our second progression was a web of real-time, in-class writing, which she and her colleagues did in a shared Google doc. We watched and wrote about Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning; Ocean Vuong speaking about how he was instructed, as a Vietnamese American boy, to make himself invisible in order to be safe; sections of Pina Bausch’s reimagining of The Rite of Spring; and material from Spike Lee’s recent film of David Byrne: American Utopia, filmed when the show was still on Broadway.
Bia paid close attention to what Byrne does in the film’s opening scene. He sings while holding a model of the human brain and, afterwards, talks directly to the audience about how vast numbers of a child’s neural connections are “pruned” over time, according to how the child’s environment schools them in what is useful and what is not, what ought to be valued and devalued. Bia noticed: “But this usefulness is a metric which we do not choose – especially not as children.” And: “The connections we lose are a product of our society “ and of how that society talks to us.
The virtues of a web of texts to experience and to write about in real-time are that the elements of any web are not identical—their connections make the whole real. And my students were writing in response to my focus questions, which asked them to notice what’s importantly not being said, along with: how can you live in a world that doesn’t want you? What does the capacity to survive mean here?
All this fought against the human compulsion to simplify, to mash together things and qualities and persons that are not replicas of one another. We can see Bia resisting this mashing together especially in her essay’s eighth paragraph, which begins: “Once we are able to put something—a feeling, an action, an object—into words, we have a certain power over it.” She goes on to reflect on James Baldwin, Susanne K. Langer, and Audre Lorde, her primary text, listening to how all three speak to one another, how that speaking makes room for her and for what she can craft of her own by means of it.
So, she lands on the page and makes it her own. And that power is some vital part of why all of us are here, in and outside any classroom.
—Bruce Bromley
Kai deftly transforms a tired topic (ruminations on the impacts of social media) into a masterclass of representation and reflection.
This video essay inhabits a three-act structure: (1) a vivid, accurate, and contextualized description of Adrian Piper’s 1985 installation “What Will Become of Me,” (2) a clear and concise explanation of Jia Tolentino’s idea from her 2020 essay “The I in the Internet,” and (3) a satisfying transition into a central question worth exploring, inspired by this unlikely pairing of evidence. By placing jars of fingernail clippings alongside Tolentino’s concerns about social media malaise, Kai reminds us that the most interesting ideas often emerge from the surprising connections that only vaguely make sense to us at first. These are the sorts of fascinating associations that come from the idiosyncratic mind of a creative thinker—the types of moves that still elude ChatGPT.
I believe the video essay is one answer to academia’s growing concern about AI-generated work. In this form, we creep closer to the mind’s eye, tracking visual associations with key terms and concepts. We see a fuller picture of the author’s concerns and preoccupations when we are able to look with them on a video track. When we have to read our words out loud, when we have to match sight to sound, when we know a broader audience (instead of one singular reader) will encounter our ideas, we suddenly care a great deal about developing work that showcases our individual voices.
Sharing this vision with an audience involves pushing past one’s comfort zone. Together as a class, we recognize the cognitive and emotional benefits of experiencing discomfort (developing resistance, increasing confidence, reducing stress, and pushing past the blocks that inhibit us as writers and artists). Over the course of year, Kai was always eager to contribute their own (sometimes provocative) thoughts to a lively discussion, and they consistently filled the room with infectious energy. Here at NYU, there is no shortage of intelligent, hard-working students; over the past 20 years, I have taught hundreds. Once in a while, however, a student reveals talents that separate them from the rest of their peers. Kai is just such a student.
—Zach Udko
Walking across Washington Square Park, I was struck by the enthusiasm in Jennifer’s voice. This conversation started in our classroom in Rubin Hall, continuing as we walked towards the park on our way to the other side of the square. We made our way through the usual bustle of the many students and faculty and others who cross through the various footpaths and sidewalks between class periods. What still stays with me, many months later, is how little it mattered where we were, or how many other people were around us, or how busy it was. Nor did it matter that class was done for the day. Jennifer had a clear focus and question that was clearly pushing her – motivating her in our conversation about what it meant to write, and how writing connected to her identity and sense of self. Looking back, that moment perhaps crystallized what makes Jennifer’s writing so compelling. Her voice reflects the urgency of a meaningful question, one that takes on momentum as she positions it in dialogue with other voices and ideas, other sources and contexts that help her in her own inquiry. This shows how writing is ultimately an intellectual and creative endeavor, a way to grapple with meaning. In this case, what is particularly powerful is how Jennifer does not shy away from incorporating her own lived experience as part of her process of discovery and insight. This all begins for me in class with the motivating problem—the intellectual puzzle or question that motivates one to write, and ideally, motivates one’s reader to read and engage with your inquiry. This essay epitomizes that ethos—the importance of pursuing a meaningful question and the exciting possibilities that emerge from taking a question and considering it from a range of sources and perspectives, including, in this case, one’s own lived experience. The question, then, takes on more dimensions and layers as the essay proceeds—reflecting how the writer is open to where the question may lead. This also leaves space for readers to truly engage with the question motivating the writer to write, and to share in the process of discovering new ideas and insight. As Jennifer explores the complexities of language and identity in this essay, she invites us into that process with her. As a reader, I feel the same palpable energy from our walk across the park, and through the page, as readers, we can feel like we, too, are a part of the grappling for meaning that is at the heart of writing.
—Natasha Zaretsky
I think Zining’s essay is a good example of essayistic thinking in a research context. By ‘essayistic thinking’ I mean the transcendence of reductive moral binaries like ‘good/bad,’ ‘helpful/harmful,’ ‘beneficial/deleterious,’ etc., and the creation of a new idea instead. What you don’t want is a research project that ends up saying, essentially, ‘There is good stuff and also bad stuff, and we should have more good stuff and less bad stuff.’ What you do want is a research project that ends up showing you, and your readers, a new way to think about something.
Here’s how I think Zining did that. (I can’t be sure, because I was not inside Zining’s mind when she made the connections that sparked the thinking of her essay.) I think two things entered her mind: one was an interest in ‘virtual’ aspects of Chinese pop culture, and the other was an essay by Sherry Turkle that we read in class. Once those two things were in her mind, Zining began to develop the feeling that Turkle’s term ‘relational artifact’ might have something to do with the way fans fall in love with the ‘idols’ of virtual pop groups. What was the connection, exactly?
As soon as this question emerged in Zining’s mind, the two things were transformed into evidence. She wrote the essay to try to figure out what these two pieces of evidence were pointing to, each in its own way. She found other evidence, some of which deepened her understanding of a tricky term or problem, some of which offered further mysteries she felt compelled to address. All along, the initial discovery of a mysterious connection remained the spine and motivation—the third rail—of her essay.
Given all that reading, thinking, and rethinking, there is no way Zining’s essay could have concluded that ‘virtual love is bad’ or that ‘virtual love is good’ or that ‘virtual love is both good and bad’ or that ‘virtual love is neutral.’ Of course, she arrived at a far more interesting idea.
—Leeore Schnairsohn
There’s a moment towards the end of Ziqiu’s essay where she fuses together, without equating them, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay, “Speaking of Nature,” and a brief narrative of her own experience. Both materials think about the words available to those who might speak them, who are obliged to speak them, and both consider linguistic practices whose consequences show up as real in the world beyond words. But this power on Ziqiu’s part had a history in our class. And that history began with our initial labors on behalf of our first progression.
For the first two weeks, my students responded to 13 artworks in multiple media, writing about what they noticed that seemed important, how that noticing helped them to feel, what it encouraged them to think about, and how all this spoke to them in the world they are trying to know. They did this work in a shared Google doc, so everyone could see how the class as a group thought and felt and what they made of their thinking/feeling. I want to linger on Ziqiu’s words about a scene from the current HBO series, My Brilliant Friend, based on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. In episode 2 of the second season, “The Body,” Elena and Lila, long childhood friends, are in their late teens. Lila has married Stefano and is deeply unhappy; Elena nears the end of what Americans would call junior high school, longing for a life of books and words and advanced study, all of which their impoverished world makes impossible for their sex.
Elena doesn’t understand Lila’s hatred of the idea of pregnancy, doesn’t adequately know what her friend’s being pregnant cost her, living with an abusive husband. So, the two friends fight about what each can’t quite see of the other. Ziqiu’s experience of the scene’s end reflects:
When Elena walks around their part of the city and observes the interaction between mothers and their children and the communications between them—who possess the expectations for how married women should be (to have children and to obey their husbands’ wills)—the music comes up and amplifies as she continues her reflection. Her stillness on the street, in contrast to the movement of the neighbors behind her, demonstrates how she is the only one stopping and reflecting upon the restrictions and norms that are constraining people like her friend, Lila. The ones who stop and reflect upon the current status and norms of our lives are the ones who don’t live blindly. And this clip encourages me to be one of those people.
That last sentence: Ziqui’s voice showed up and resonated on the page. And this showing up, this resonance, helped her to read Kimmerer with care and vigilance and to attend to how her primary text could deepen something reprehensible, something worrying in the world that Ziqui recognized.
The power of our first weeks of real-time writing made this essay possible. And Ziqui’s thinking/feeling voice makes that power pay.
—Bruce Bromley
My first essay progression in Fall semester is called “Word, Image, Memory.” Its basic move is response. Students use an image and a scene from experience to investigate their response to a chosen essay. We begin the semester with response because response is the first essential move in any investigation. What happens to you as you look at the artwork or read the essay? What’s provoking that response? What does your response make you want to think about? To think about response is to think about why an artwork or essay or idea matters to you, how you yourself are invested in it.
Ava Wolesky finds a compelling answer to that question in “The View from My Cubby.” Her source text, Teju Cole’s “Object Lesson,” argues that sometimes photos of objects can bring us closer to violence and trauma than dramatic scenes of human conflict. For Ava the question raised by Cole’s essay—how do we stop being numb to human suffering?—is searingly personal. It echoes the protective numbness she developed in the face of horrifying realities. As in all good personal essays, the question for the writer becomes a question for the reader. How have we come to accept a world in which children learn to hide in cubbies to avoid an active shooter?
Ava pulls off something quite tricky in this essay. She builds her story with precise, well-chosen details, but she stops short of telling us what they mean. She makes assumptions about the reader. She assumes the reader knows about the Boston Marathon bombing and why a school might have to reinforce its exit doors. Her assumptions make us complicit. They say, “Of course we all know what it means when a child hides in a cubby.” Her numb acceptance becomes ours. Even more disturbingly, she shows us how our numbness is passed on to children.
She moves into a different register when representing Cole’s essay. Here the reader needs more help, and here too the details are precise and well-chosen. In one deft paragraph, she makes Cole’s essay clear to a reader who hasn’t read it. The last sentence of her representation restates the problem of her own essay more explicitly. How can we “prevent viewers from dissociating from what we see, to grapple with its painful truth”? The problem she’s taken from Cole’s essay is our tendency to dissociate from painful realities. The question her essay leaves us worrying about is what we would do if we allowed ourselves to feel the pain.
—David Foley
When I first assigned the annotated bibliography seven or eight years ago, I pitched it to my students as a relatively uncomplicated way to boost their grades, assuming they’d be able to find five acceptable sources and represent them pretty easily. I was wrong. I was so wrong, in fact, that what began as a straightforward assignment grew increasingly involved. I realized that the annotated bib is more than a step in the process of writing a research paper; it’s nearly a paper in itself, requiring a convergence of academic skills that all students need and most lack: assessing the credibility of sources, citing accurately, representing sources, putting sources in conversation, finding one’s place in the conversation, understanding research as a generative and cyclical act where one’s questions guide the research while one’s research simultaneously reshapes the questions, etc., etc.
Our colleague, Christina Van Houten, calls it a “Reflective Annotated Bibliography.” I like this. It gets at a crucial component of the work: reflection. Because the annotated bib demands that we slow down the research process, it creates the space for students to reflect on their choices — all the potholes and rabbit holes, wrong turns and revelations — allowing them to see that research is never a straight line and that the messiness is inevitable and necessary if they are going to find something genuinely compelling and complicated to write about.
Haonan Wu’s annotated bibliography models much of this. Wu started off with a pretty basic question: a version of, Is this movie really as good as everyone says it is? She tracked the debate, finding sources that celebrate the film and sources that criticize it. But her research (precisely because the assignment gave her time to do so) grew more interesting as she added more layers, incorporating different voices (a Western film critic, a Singaporean critic), including different disciplines (a sociologist, a communications prof), and considering how these distinct perspectives serve distinct rhetorical functions (background, argument, method). The end result is that Wu goes beyond a surface judgment (yes, the movie is good / no, the movie is bad) to uncover the cultural lenses and dominant narratives that shape our perception of its goodness and/or badness.
Prompt:
Annotated Bibliography: For this second graded assignment, you will find five sources that you feel are pertinent to your chosen film and its relevant contexts. One must be a “Method Source” from a scholarly journal, three should be “Argument Sources” and/or “Background Sources” from film reviews / newspaper or magazine articles, and one is your choice (an image, a blog post, a Twitter feed, a related film, a movie trailer, etc.). With those five sources, you will create an annotated bibliography. In general, you can think of an annotated bibliography as a place to gather and reflect on your sources, tracking the scholarly conversation and figuring out your place in this conversation. More specifically, you will be evaluated on five criteria: 1) Accurate MLA citation; 2) Your assessment of the source’s credibility; 3) Concise and clear representation; 3) Your articulation of how your sources are in conversation; 4) Your articulation of how each source shapes (deepens / complicates) your own interpretation of the film and its cultural relevance. Finally, you will be asked to write, at the top of your annotated bibliography, the title of your film and the motivating question that set off your research.
Note: This work is intended to inform your next graded progression, Reviewing-in-Contexts.
—Jono Mischkot
Lark Zabel’s “Not in My New York” is a patient, rigorous dissection of what is—on its surface—an ostensibly unsexy controversy. But of course, that’s what makes it so compelling; like all thrilling essays, Lark takes a subject that might feel dry or wonky (in this case, Governor Hochul’s housing bill) and, through a series of careful rhetorical moves, shows us its vast economic, social, and racial implications. What’s more, she approaches those implications from a variety of angles, shedding light on the different populations they affect. In the essay’s beginning, she uses her peers’ TikTok videos as evidence of the “feral” state of the “competitive housing market.” It’s a sly, smart way to open the essay—one that convinces us that this isn’t just a problem for politicians in Albany, but for her audience of NYU undergrads as well.
What follows is an exemplar of a Controversy in Context essay. Lark uses a diverse set of evidence, ranging from op-eds, to economic reports from Moody’s Analytics, to interviews with experts, to peel back the layers of America’s housing crisis. As she performs this work, her sign-posting is clear and effective, and her analysis gives way to a persuasive argument: “Lasting ideologies of exclusion are at the root of [the housing] problem.” What impresses me most, however, is Lark’s careful attention to the language at play in the housing debate. She carefully defines the term NIMBY, for example, and notes how, in the OED, it is closely linked to “redlining.” This is an extraordinary moment in Lark’s essay, one in which we see her using her analytical abilities to reflect on a current ideology’s racist past.
I’ll also add that, on top of all the usual challenges of writing a successful essay, Lark was faced with an additional hurdle: Hochul’s bill was being debated as she was drafting (indeed, it failed in Albany before the final was due), which made for a bit of a moving target. The conclusion of the essay brilliantly addresses this fact—indeed, it turns it into a strength. Lark uses the bill’s defeat as evidence of how exclusionary America’s housing policies have become. She calls on us to be ready for the next battle, so that we can “fight for our neighbors, and by extension, or collective prosperity.”
—Grant Ginder