Cal’s riveting tale of transformation in Books III and IV of Middlesex is hardly contained to his imagined person. This transformation that Eugenides so deftly splices onto the page reverberates up through his fingertips into the the author himself, through the rods and cones of the reader as she deduces meaning, pattern, and emotion through […]
We today live at a point equidistant to the heralded turning of the third millenium as the characters of Kushner’s epic Angels in America. The particulars of our crisis and the media through which we encounter them are quite different—truly, culture has shifted far beyond recognition in this past quarter century as it has made the […]
They say death does not discriminate. And, for the most part, it’s true. Death comes for all of us one day. Most of us don’t know when that day is and most of us live with the knowledge of our imminent death on the backburner of our conscious. But there are some individuals—the sick, the […]
Hey I am shooting a film this weekend and it definitely pertains to power dynamics in sexuality. However I am in a crunch and need a beautiful woman to play the jealous lover! The film is silent and will be short. I can send info to anyone interested 🙂 alannah.fehrenbach@macaulay.cuny.edu
Hi everyone, Good discussion today! Here is a Ted Talk that addresses several of the points that were made (and may be one that some of you have seen, given some comments). It’s only 9 minutes but gets at the issues raised about how our perceptions get channeled along certain lines. http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
Hi everyone, I hope your break was fulfilling and fun. I had hoped everyone would post over the break but I see that only a few of you have. Ariella’s focus on the effects of a rapidly shifting culture on young people is insightful and I wonder how you all might experience our own shifts […]
Technology’s incessant progress disrupts the polarized narrative of sexual liberation and control: it is not supposed directionality of the power that machines channel which constitutes their relevance, but it is that that they channel at all, at an ever gathering speed. From the railroad to the refrigerator, from the lithograph to the MRI, and onward […]
This week’s readings highlight the confusion of young women as they floundered between the old world morals and the new rules of modernity in play during the 1920s. Ladies were given mixed messages regarding their roles in society, as they were permitted to pursue higher learning in college and to enter the work force, which […]
Lolita Just so ya’ll know there is a Kubrick retrospective going on at the the IFC and they’re showing Lolita tomorrow (on Sunday)
With Lolita, we fully enter the realm of what Foucault called biopower and the ways in which scientia sexualis plays a role in establishing what is deemed normal and what abnormal, or pathological. Here are a few reminders about Foucault with gestures toward Nabokov in anticipation of class tomorrow—which should be terrific, given your posts […]
