Archive for August, 2006

blogs as lunchroom chatter

Geoffrey Nunberg writes in Blogging in the Global Lunchroom: Taken as a whole, in fact, the blogging world sounds a lot less like a public meeting than the lunchtime chatter in a high-school cafeteria, complete with snarky comments about the kids at the tables across the room. (Bloggers didn’t invent the word snarky, but they’ve [...]

Blogs in Classrooms

blogger’s naive individualism

cross-posted to my personal blog. Sara Jameson sent me this a while back, but I finally got around to reading it. I guess I kind of suck when it comes to doing things with any expediency…. But anyway, this blogger, henrycopeland, in his original blog post here, notes that Volvo, in buying adspace on Microsoft’s [...]

Blogs in Classrooms, Uncategorized

more from Lorde

From”Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”: “I don’t like to talk about hate. I don’t like to remember the cancellation and hatred, heavy as my wished-for death, seen in the eyes of so many white people from the time I could see. It was echoed in newspapers and movies and holy pictures and [...]

Anger, Social Justice

some quotes from Audre Lorde

From “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”: My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to ue it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of [...]

Anger, Social Justice

Going Postal

In “Going Postal,” Worsham “argue[s] that if our commitment is to real individual and social change — change that would finally dissolve the relationship between pedagogy and violence — then the work of decolonization must occur at the affective level, not only to reconstitute the emotional life of the individual but also, and more importantly, [...]

Affect, Critical Pedagogy, Teaching Composition

white guys

Pfeil’s essay “Sympathy for the Devils: Notes on Some White Guys and the Ridiculous Class War” investigates a few groups of white men that are often accused by those on the Left, by feminists, and by minority groups, as being motivated by racism and sexism. Pfeil thinks this analysis is limiting, “bound to occlude more [...]

Marxism, Social Justice

Jameson on Postmodernism and Affect

So, I find myself reading things that I don’t completely understand. It seems like whenever I read something, I find that there are dozens of references I don’t get, like I’m a culturally incompetetent twit. Actually, to be more accurate, sometimes it feels like I’m cultural incompetent and I don’t get references to pieces of [...]

Affect, Marxism

Vitanza’s concerns with cynicism

In “‘The Wasteland Grows,’” Vitanza asks what I think are some amazing questions regarding the creation of cynicism in students when we teach cultural studies. Drawing on Sloterdijk and Zizek, he wonders whether students, after instruction in cultural studies, “‘they [some of the masses, students, or patients] know very well [can now see] what they [...]

Affect, Critical Pedagogy, Teaching Composition, Victor Vitanza

miasmic cynicism

I just read the following two articles: Langstraat, Lisa. “The Point Is There Is No Point: Miasmic Cynicism and Cultural Studies Composition.” JAC 22.2 (2002): 293-325. Crawford, Ilene. “Building a Theory of Affect in Cultural Studies Composition Pedagogy.” JAC 22.3 (2003): 678-684. Which really helped me understand the affective stance of postmodern society, what Langstraat [...]

Affect, Critical Pedagogy, Teaching Composition, Victor Vitanza

Thomas Wests’s politics of anger and praxis of shelter

West argues that anger needs to be considered when discussing confict, especially in regards to an agonistic critical pedagogy: “What is gained once we begin to pay close mind to the workings of anger and strong emotion is a more affectively and rhetorically nuanced understanding of the politics of ideological conflict both in general and [...]

Affect, Critical Pedagogy