Senior Seminar. Here are your final exam questions, everyone — right after the jump. Remember, the exam is 10-11:50 a.m. Thursday, May 7. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Sarah Joslin: You have written that “in a utopia…it’s absolutely necessary for one’s free will to be absolutely authentic, not some synthetic illusion pulled over the eyes by a manipulative government — this would indeed be an anti-utopia. Censorship lands smack in the middle of this conflict. It’s necessary for individuals to have free range for expression and development of identity, but it’s also necessary that these individuals don’t stomp all over their neighbors in the effort.”

So say we all. But censorship is not only a matter of what one is allowed to express; it’s also a matter of what is allowed to hear and read. And children in particular are typically prevented from hearing and reading a great deal, and this censorship exists precisely in order to limit the child’s free will. The most obvious example of this sort of thing is what we politely call a “religious upbringing.” I’ve never known of a religious parent going out of their way to expose their child to ideas that would undercut that child’s faith. Paradoxically (or nonsensically, or hypocritically), the parent wants the child to “freely” choose the faith even as the parent prevents the child from weighing the arguments against the faith or experiencing the potential spiritual joys of some other faith. In this sense I would say that every parent and every school and every church is a censor of the first order.

Would you agree? If not, why not? If so, is such censorship a problem? If it is a problem, what should we do about it?

Anthony Guerrero: You argue in one of your comments that “the degree in which Plato proposes censorship is disgusting, and would have the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves.” I agree. Plato’s Republic is not in any sense a liberal democracy. The Republic might well be a valuable exercise in philosophy, but as a blueprint for an actual society it can only be read as a dystopia.

My question concerns the nation we have today. Please think about the Constitution as it exists right now. Suppose that we do not change it a bit, and that we continue to abide by it faithfully. That is, we continue to have a First Amendment, a Fourth Amendment, etc., and our government actually does respect the rights guaranteed by them, and we continue to elect our representatives and senators and presidents as we do today, and so on. Is it possible that under those conditions the United States might turn into a dystopia? Explain.

Gregg Porter: In one of your comments you compared “Socrates’ idea of the ideal state” to what sounds very much like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “Once the process of extra-uterine fetal development is perfected, society might indeed be able to raise legions of anonymously-parented children for its military, workforce, and general needs. All that without having to be pestered with troublesome emotional bonding….”

Sure. It’s easy enough to name some of the things we don’t want to use biotechnology for. It’s equally easy to name some of the things we do want to use it for (say, to cure cancer). What’s not so easy is to develop a set of bioethical guidelines to help us distinguish good from bad uses of biotechnology more generally. Not so easy — but that’s exactly what I want you to do for the final. Enjoy.

Lacie Paulson: You’ve written that “Socrates’s idea is anti-utopian,” in no small part because “[t]he women have no choice in who they marry.” Of course, marriage practices vary considerably from culture to culture, and to see how that might matter to our understanding of utopia, here’s what I want you to do. First, familiarize yourself with the myth of Shangri-La, one of the West’s most popular images of utopia. (Wikipedia describes Shangri-La as “a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains” and as “synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world”).

Next, look into the actual marriage and family structure of the real Himalayan kingdom of Tibet, starting here. Describe Tibetan polyandry to the class in some detail, then address the question of whether such marriage practices are intrinsically inimical to human happiness, and then compare and contrast Tibet to The Republic.

Rob Warden: My question for you is easy to ask but (I hope) not so easy to answer. Do you think transhumanism would lead inevitably to dystopia? Why or why not?

Sheth LaRue: You note in one of your comments that “eugenicism is still occurring today, maybe not as blatantly as it once was, but still occurring nonetheless. A quick search will find a number of dating websites for ‘perfect’ genes - although now it’s more about brains than brawn. There are even sites where you are judged before you can join…. Was Socrates all that insane in suggesting genetics be used as a starting point for choosing a mate?” At your suggestion I checked out BeautifulPeople.com and was suitably appalled — and jealous. But why are we appalled with this sort of thing? Is there really anything wrong — ethically, morally, religiously — with people systematically seeking out what they consider the most attractive mate possible? Isn’t BeautifulPeople.com right when it says that “it may not be politically correct, but it’s honest”? Finally, would a ChristianBeautifulPeople.com be possible without being an oxymoron? Why or why not?

Beth Tantanella: After commenting on the utopian family structure proposed in The Republic, you note rather archly that Socrates “is just thinking about the good of the community” and ask, “What is wrong with that?” Well, what is wrong with that? More specifically, what’s the best way to balance the good of the individual against the good of the community? If you haven’t done so already, please read Ursula Le Guin’s utopian story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and come to class prepared to summarize it and explain its significance in the utopian tradition.

Ashley Pacheco: In one of your comments you insisted that for a utopia to be a utopia it must be utopian for “all society.” At least for us today that makes sense: true utopia cannot rest upon an exploitative social hierarchy. The society must be ideal for all its members. But what if a society were to achieve that ideal not by accommodating everyone but simply by getting rid of those it doesn’t want? What if Hitler had succeeded in making Germany into his planned judenfrei utopia — I mean, what if post-Holocaust Germany really were utopian, at least in its own eyes, but only because there were no Jews left there for it to oppress? Or what if Israel were to succeed in creating its ideal Jewish state by excluding all the Palestinians? Getting rid of the “others” with whom part of a society is in conflict obviously simplifies the task of achieving utopian perfection.

I trust we can see the problem with predicating utopia on ethnic cleansing. But isn’t that in a sense what Charlotte Perkins Gilman does in Herland — create a feminist utopia by getting rid of all the men? Sure, it’s not as if the Herlanders killed the men themselves, or even wanted to. The men are eliminated by other, fully acceptable means, but the result is the same: a society free to perfect itself because it no longer has to deal with a “troublesome” element.

How can Gilman be defended against the charge that she takes too easy a way out, creating her utopian society by means of what might be called “gender cleansing”? Read more!

American Studies. Here you go, folks: final exam questions after the jump. Remember, the exam is 3-4:50 p.m. Thursday, May 7. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Gregg Porter: In one of your comments you cited Mount Rushmore as a particularly obvious instance of the cultural construction of nature. After directing us to this clip of Superman II’s General Zod doing to the United States what the United States did to the Sioux, you reminded us of the Crazy Horse Memorial, which, in the words of Chief Henry Standing Bear, aims to remind “the white man…that the red man has great heroes, too.”

That got me to thinking about the 1990s controversy over the placement of a large Christian cross just outside of Auschwitz. Please read this excerpt from Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll. Then compare and contrast the cross at Auschwitz to the sculptures on Mount Rushmore as examples of the geographical inscription of cultural hegemony.

Matt Felton: In one of your posts you lamented that kids today seem “disconnected from nature.” But why is that disconnection a problem, exactly? Given that most forms of outdoor recreation cause at least some harm to nature, isn’t it better if people just connect with nature via the Discovery Channel?

Erin Throckmorton: You’ve written that “consumers will never be able to be green completely.” Sure, not completely green — but there are plenty of people who believe consumers should at least try to be more green. Please read up a bit on consumerism, anti-consumerism, green consumerism, and Green America and report back to us on the current prospects of saving the planet by harnessing the powers of the marketplace.

Dorothy Medina: In one of your comments you described the beauty of the “pristine, rugged mountain country” surrounding the San Luis Valley. You wrote also of the local shepherds who graze their flocks here every summer. Please draw on your own experience and compare and contrast local sheepherding today to that described 150 years ago by John Muir in My First Summer in the Sierra. Pay particular attention to Muir’s description of the shepherd Billy — does that description strike you as accurate and fair?

Jacob McClure: You’ve indicated that you think “[c]onservatism, in its true meaning, would seem to be the most congenial to environmentalism.” Please read up on the political philosophies of conservatism and green conservatism, then check out Republicans for Environmental Protection, and then come to the final prepared to discuss the prospects for a conservative environmental politics in America. Why do you think environmentalism has for so long been seen almost exclusively as a “liberal” concern? Is there something intrinsic to American conservatism or the Republican Party that prevents them from going green? Read more!

American Lit II: As promised, here are your final exam questions. Remember, the exam is 1-2:50 p.m. Tuesday, May 5. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Kenneth Babcock: You have observed that “[o]ne of the main differences between The Age of Innocence and O Pioneers! is the difference in how the authors give women power. In O Pioneers!, Cather gives Alexandra power by making her a strong and smart individual…. [I]n The Age of Innocence, Wharton’s female character is powerful by deceit. May is subtle and very smart about getting the things that she wants. She plays Newland Archer for a fool. She even has May sarcastically tell Newland, “It did go off beautifully, didn’t it?”

Please continue what you’ve started here by comparing and contrasting May Archer and Alexandra Bergson in more detail, paying particular attention to how they do or do not exercise power. Then do the same for May Archer and Ellen Olenska. Finally, let us know what, if anything, you conclude from these comparisons.

Melissa Slemp: After pointing out that O Pioneers! and The Age of Innocence are both “stories of families who are struggling” and that both “involve romance on some level,” you claim that “The Age of Innocence is a better novel simply because it captures the conflict between men and women. It really shows the games that we play with one another and the lengths we will go to to find and receive love.”

I think you’re right that O Pioneers! does not turn on a “conflict between men and women.” But what is the central conflict driving Cather’s novel? And why is the conflict between men and women so special that you would cite it as the key to the superiority of The Age of Innocence?

Night Hawk: In one of your comments you wrote that you “like The Age of Innocence because it relates a little more to what I have seen in lives of people today. Many people today put on acts to please other people even though it isn’t really who they are. In O Pioneers! people are struggling to get what they want and to improve their lives, which is also what people do these days, but I haven’t noticed it as much as people putting on acts to please other people.”

Your comment got me thinking about the idea of authenticity. Consider Henry James’s characters Frederick Winterbourne (who seems to be one of those who “put on acts to please other people even though it isn’t really who they are”) and Daisy Miller, who is always just herself. It seems to me that Daisy Miller, at least in this one respect, is like Alexandra Bergson. Then there’s Alice Walker’s character Dee Johnson, aka Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, from “Everyday Use,” who seems about as fake as they come. And then there’s the (authentic) Gracie Mae Still and the (inauthentic) Traynor or “1955.”

Given the frequency of this type of character pairing — authentic vs. inauthentic — in American literature, and given the current popularity of expressions like “Keep it real,” I’m thinking maybe Americans are obsessed with authenticity. But is authenticity even possible in America today? Is anyone truly authentic any more? What is authenticity, anyway?

Jerry Montoya: You wrote that “[o]verall Wharton's novel is not as great as O Pioneers!” Fair enough. You go on to note that Newland Archer and Alexandra Bergson “both seem to be thrust into a life that they didn't choose for themselves.” But hey, aren’t we all? You add, “the main characters share a longing they have to be more intimate with the people they truly love.” Again, don’t we all?

It’s the first of these two ideas — the idea that we find ourselves thrown into circumstances we didn’t choose — that I want you to explore in your answer. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger uses the term thrownness to describe something like what you’re talking about. Read up a bit on “thrownness,” explain the concept to the class, and then let us know how you think it might help us understand some of the more memorable characters we’ve encountered this semester.

Lifeguard: You’ve written that Roxana of Pudd’nhead Wilson “is truly an interesting character. She seems so real…. I really felt for her. I [was] always wondering what and how she will come back into each setting.” I think you’re onto something important here — namely, the way our personal investment in Roxana carries us through the story. We don’t care all that much whether Tom is brought to justice for his crimes. We don’t much care what becomes of the Italians or whether the townspeople ever understand the true intelligence ov Dave Wilson. We care about what happens to Roxana. Without her, Pudd’nhead Wilson is just a clever satire. Whatever power the novel has is almost all due to her.

Would you agree? If so, do you think the novel is weakened by the fact that the ending has so little to do with Roxana? Explain.

Jonathan Andujar: I liked your observation that, despite their many differences, Beyonce and Roxanna have at least one thing in common, namely the way they both wind up “commanding the attention of the white men in the audience.” There is, of course, a long and tortured history of, shall we say, problematic relations between white men and black women. What is suggested about that history and those relations by some of the other works we’ve read this semester?

Erin Throckmorton: In one comment you wrote that Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Roxana is “the best part of the book. Very strong and you have to admire her indeed!” I would say much the same about Aunt Rachel in “A True Story.” Please compare and contrast these two memorable characters, and let us know what, if anything, you conclude from these comparisons.

Diedre Mark: In a comment about Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” you wrote that “Ginsberg is asking America where she is going and asking Whitman what he thinks of it all.” Okay, but why Whitman? What’s the significance of the fact that Ginsberg appeals to Walt Whitman in this poem rather than, say, Henry David Thoreau or Benjamin Franklin?

James Williams: In your essay on James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” you noted one critic’s claim that the story is a “cautionary tale about the dangers of ‘hip culture’ and addiction.” In response you compare Sonny’s heroin addiction to “a Cuban refugee making a raft out of empty soda cans and attempting to make it to Florida.” I understood you to be saying not that using heroin is good, but that Sonny’s heroin use tells us something good about him. It signifies the fierceness of his desire for something better than the ghetto offers him. As you put it, “It’s about paying whatever price is necessary to create light in a dark place.”

Yes: to create light in a dark place. Baldwin of course uses light and dark metaphorically throughout the story, right on up to the final paragraph, where we read that the nightclub patrons sit “[i]n the dark,” that Sonny sits “in the indigo light” of the stage, and that the drink the narrator has bought for his brother “glowed and shook above [Sonny’s] head.” What do you suppose Baldwin is trying to accomplish with this light/dark imagery? Read more!

American Studies. Dave Foreman is not your stereotypical treehugger. Wikipedia introduces him as follows:

The son of a US Air Force career officer, as a young man Foreman supported the Vietnam War. He received the highest honor of the Boy Scouts of America, the rank of Eagle Scout. Foreman first became involved in political activism as a college student, supporting Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 and founding the New Mexico branch of the conservative youth organization Young Americans for Freedom. After graduating from college in 1968, and attending the Officers Candidate School of the US Marine Corps, Foreman’s radicalism began to take shape.

Nowadays environmentalism is so completely associated with the left that it surprises us to learn of Foreman’s conservative roots. But are environmentalism and conservatism really at odds? Which political philosophy — liberalism, conservatism, socialism, libertarianism, anarchism — seems most congenial to environmentalism? While we’re at it, which religion seems most congenial to environmentalism? Read more!

Senior Seminar. The concluding chapter of We gives us a chilling description of the interrogation of I-330 and other suspected members of the Mephi. Here’s the key passage:

In the evening of that day I sat at one table with Him, with the Benefactor (for the first time) in the famous Gas Room. They brought in that woman. In my presence she was supposed to give her testimony. This woman stubbornly said nothing and was smiling. I noticed that she had sharp and very white teeth and that this was beautiful.

Then they led her under the Bell Jar. Her face became very white and since her eyes were dark and big, this was very beautiful. When they started to pump air out from under the Bell Jar, she threw back her head, half-closed her eyes, and squeezed her lips — this reminded me of something. She was looking at me, strongly gripping the armrests of the chair and looking, until her eyes closed completely. Then they dragged her out, quickly brought her back to her senses with the help of electrodes, and then put her back under the Bell Jar. They repeated this three times and she still didn’t say a word. Others, who had been brought in together with this woman, turned out to be more honorable: many of them started to talk after the first time.

This description is not particularly graphic. What makes it so powerful? I would argue that its horror is deepened by the matter-of-fact tone in which it is described, which is to say, by the failure of the recently lobotomized narrator to recognize it for the torture that it is and to be revolted by it.

OK. You all know what an America-hating knee-jerk liberal I am, and you probably recognize the photo above as one taken at Abu Ghraib prison, so you can probably guess where I’m going with this. What horrifies and disgusts me most about my own country’s barbaric treatment of “enemy combatants” is not so much that it happened in the first place. It’s the ongoing strenuous refusal of so many influential Americans to acknowledge torture as torture — and beyond that the lack of outrage among Americans generally.

That waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in fact constitute torture has been acknowledged by everyone from the International Red Cross to Republican Senator John McCain (see here), yet any number of influential talking heads still refuse to acknowledge that truth (see here). But so far only a few low-ranking soldiers (like Charles Graner and Lynddie England) have been prosecuted for torture. The high-ranking officials who authorized torture in the first place are still at large. One of the most important of these people, John Yoo, is now a law professor. Another, Jay Bybee, is a federal judge. As for Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — I’m not holding my breath. As Bob Dylan once reminded us, “All the criminals in their coats and their ties / are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.”

Here let me quote the key concept from the work of David and Nanelle Barash, who define dystopia as the denial of a biologically-based human nature:

In justifying this nightmare society [of 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien...is wrong.

Well, is there “something called human nature” which is intrinsically outraged by what we do? Or has that something been hammered out of us? Is O’Brien right or wrong?

If we think of “the soul” in We as a kind of shorthand for all that makes us uniquely human — imagination, love — then is Zamyatin suggesting in the passage above that part of being human is the ability to recognize and be revolted by torture? If so, should we say that America has lost its soul?

I’ll give you my answer to this question after you’ve all replied.

P.S. For a recent essay likening torture at Guantanamo Bay to that in Nineteen Eighty Four, take a look at Scott Horton’s “Revealing the Secrets in Room 101.” Read more!

Senior Seminar. I’d like for you to keep Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) in mind as we continue our screening and analysis of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Lang’s film is not an adaptation of Zamyatin’s novel, yet it seems to me to give visual expression to many of the novel’s dystopian ideas. Would you agree? If so, can you give examples?

In the illustration above, just for fun, I’ve juxtaposed Lang’s New Tower of Babel shot with a still depicting Blade Runner’s dystopian, film-noir vision of Los Angeles in the year 2019. Read more!

American Studies. Semester’s end is approaching fast, and it’s time to start thinking about your final paper/project. Whether presented as paper or project (e.g., PowerPoint presentation or poster display), your work should analyze one or more of the texts or authors we’ve read in class in a way that helps readers better understand both the text itself and its relation to environmentalism.

You might consider working with one or two of your classmates to examine how various authors and texts approach a single cultural-environmental theme, such as the discursive construction of nature, the gender politics of environmentalism, or the ethics of direct action.

If you do work with a group you might consider a division of intellectual labor, with one person synopsizing and situating the text, another summarizing its critical responses, and a third advancing a new argument about it.

What I’d like you to do in your replies to this post is to get started thinking about possible topics by going back over the syllabus and combining one critical essay and one primary text with one “real world” environmental issue, and then indicate briefly why the resulting combination might lead to a good paper/project.

Here’s an example of what I have in mind:

Critical essay: “The Social Siege of Nature”

Primary text: Ecotopia.

Real-world issue: Clear-cutting on La Sierra above San Luis.

More detailed guidelines for the paper/project are available here. Read more!

Comm Arts II: In class today we began analyzing the film Project X (1987). The basic idea here is to remember that films are usually very carefully constructed. Nothing is left to chance. Whatever appears in any given frame is there for a reason, and part of film analysis involves nothing more than observing what is there, and then asking and attempting to answer the question, Why it is there? (Or perhaps better, What is the effect on the viewer of it being there?)

Let’s put our collective minds to work on the image above, which depicts the researcher Teri (played by Helen Hunt) and her subject Virgil (played by Willie). What’s there? Why do you suppose the director put it there? (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Of course, there’s much more to analyzing film than scrutinizing still frames. But if we each contribute one or two key observations about the frame we can get a little practice and at least get started on our analysis.

For more about the film and the military research that inspired it, review pages 25-29 in Animal Liberation. For guidelines for Paper #4, click here. Read more!

American Lit II: In class today I argued that Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” sermon are jeremiads that can be understood as part of a literary-religious-cultural tradition extending back to ancient Israelite prophets like Hosea, Isaiah, and the Rev. Wright’s namesake, Jeremiah. The jeremiad, in the words of Mike Abrams, “attributed the calamities of Israel to its abandonment of the covenant with Jehovah and return to pagan idolatry” and “denounced with lurid and gloomy eloquence its religious and moral iniquities.” And isn’t that more or less what Ginsberg and Wright are doing — luridly denouncing their nation for its iniquities?

Here’s a sample of some biblical prophecy that doesn’t seem all that different from “Howl.” It’s from the Book of Hosea (4:11-14, from a Christian translation titled The Message):

Wine and whiskey leave my people in a stupor....

Drunk on sex, they can’t find their way home.*

They’ve replaced their God with their genitals....

Before you know it, your daughters are whores and the wives of your sons are sleeping around.

But I’m not going after your whoring daughters or the adulterous wives of your sons.

It’s the men who pick up the whores that I’m after, the men who worship at the holy whorehouses — a stupid people, ruined by whores!

Is Allen Ginsberg a 20th-century prophet? Is “Howl” a jeremiad?

*Bonus points if you recognized this line as similar in sentiment and effect to Steve Winwood’s line, “I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home,” from the song, “Can’t Find My Way Home.” Maybe Winwood is also a prophet. You can listen to him and Eric Clapton performing a version of this song here. And for a YouTube video of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” which I believe shares some of the themes of “Howl,” click here. Read more!

American Studies. There are many ways to approach The Monkey Wrench Gang. You might treat it as a classic of environmental literature (and compare it to Ecotopia). You might treat it as a Western (and compare it to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), as a post-Vietnam novel (and compare it to Rambo or the novel First Blood), as a precursor of, and how-to manual for, the Earth First! movement, and so on.

Then again, you could focus solely on a single character — say, Hayduke, who could be compared to Will Weston, Butch Cassidy, John Rambo, and Dave Foreman respectively. Or you could focus on the use of a single element — such as theme or setting — in one or more of these works. Or you could do a men’s studies project, tossing Hayduke, Weston, and John Muir into the hopper and analyzing them as exemplars of different styles of masculinity.

The sky’s the limit. The intellectual world is all before you, where to choose.

The illustration above juxtaposes two iconic images: Hayduke and Rambo. In what ways are these two essentially the same character? Read more!