Essay 2#
Walker Percy, Paulo Freire, and Wes Anderson share an interest in the problem we’ve been considering all term: the relationship between authority and education. Each of these texts asks what happens to learning and experience when it is mediated by institutions, experts, standardized curricula, and received ideas.
In our final essay, your work will involve choosing two of these texts and drafting an essay that uses them together to identify, explore, or resolve a specific question or problem. Rather than prescribe a topic for you, I hope that an original idea for writing will emerge from your work of reading the texts. Feel free to inquire and explore these texts in whatever way makes sense to you and then construct an essay of your own design.
You might feel a strong instinct to summarize the texts at length. You might feel the temptation to simply catalog the texts’ similarities and differences. You might feel moved to present a simple binary where one text is described as “better” than the other. However, none of these approaches take risks or require any real thinking; all they do is serve to reinforce the authority of the texts. The best essays will instead have a claim of their own—something you are arguing, not reporting. A more interesting approach might be discovered by asking things like: What can these two texts do together that neither can do alone? when I place these two texts side by side, what do they allow me to see that neither did alone? How are these texts in dialogue with each other, and how does this change the meaning(s) that I discover in them? What ideas or arguments do the texts inspire or make possible? Does one text uncover something of interest in the other that was hard to see without it? What do the texts fail to understand?
Your argument will depend on deep textual analysis and close reading. Rather than merely describing what the author says in your own words, or gesturing vaguely to the texts, you should instead endeavor to show what they say by presenting their actual words and ideas to your reader. This will require that you return to the texts again and reconsider what they have to say. Identify the specific moments or passages in each text that serve your inquiry or help you make your case.
Analyzing Visual Media#
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Although it may sound odd, it will be helpful to consider film as being a text: a complex arrangement of discrete signifiers orchestrated to create something intelligible, meaningful, interpretable. The process of reading a film is very much like our approach when reading an article or book. If we imagine that every aspect of the film was a choice by the filmmaker(s), what do these choices add up to? Consider the effects that these choices have on what may, or may not, be said or argued about the film. If we consider all of these various aspects of the film as evidence, what argument(s) do they support? Is there a particular interpretation that you believe best unites all of these disparate aspects into a plausible explanation? If not, what do you make of those recalcitrant features that you can’t seem to fit into your theory about the text?
Two important principles should guide our efforts to decode the text: first, when we say that the film’s various features have been orchestrated by its creator(s), we should resist the notion that there is therefore only one “right” or “correct” answer to its meaning; secondly, although we are free to interpret the text before us as we choose, not every argument may be reasonably supported by it. This leaves us in a rhetorical situation—a space where we must defend our reading of the text to our audience using argumentation and by marshaling evidence drawn from the text itself.
We frequently have a certain interpretive context in mind when we approach a text or artifact for close reading. While there are innumerable ways to view this particular film, we will examine it within the interpretive context of our conversation about education. What does the film have to say about the purpose and experience of education? Its disciplinary effects? Our relationship to its various authorities (people, institutions, knowledge, texts)? Are there certain scenes that seem to stand out as contributions to, or extensions of, our prior conversations? How might we string several of these scenes together to create a “reading” or interpretation of the film’s global meaning(s) that accords with the interpretive context of our class?
Since film is a visual medium, the evidence we cite to support our arguments may involve things like costuming, lighting, camera angles, framing, editing, lens choice, perspective, blocking (how the actors move about in space), color, sound, music, performance, etc. How do these components of the text work together to produce the meaning we detect?
Keep in mind that a close reading should not be impressionistic (‘This film sucks!’ or ‘I love it!’); or evaluative (‘This idea is important’); instead, it should focus simply on explaining to your audience what the the text (or some part of it) means by meticulously pointing to how it is constructed to produce the meaning you observe.
Workshop: Analyzing Visual Media
