Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Office Hour Marathon Schedule for Tuesday, June 28

There are no assigned readings for next week, everybody should be at work on your final projects and papers. Since there is no need for another lecture, next Tuesday I am scheduling twenty-minutes' office hours for each of you to talk to me one on one, about your final papers, your ongoing writing process, any outstanding worries you may have about the class, and also to talk through next Thursday's Symposium if you like. The office hour meetings are optional, but I do recommend it, and I'm creating a slot for each and every one of you whether you decide to take me up on it or not. Hope all is well in your worlds (all things considered), xo d 

4.20-4.40 June

4.40-5.00 Katerina

5.00-5.20 Madison

5.20-5.40 Mabel

5.40-6.00 Anguo

6.00-6.20 Jessie

6.20-6.40 Lauren

6.40-7.00 Natalie

Saturday, July 18, 2020

Afrofuturist Explorations, Retux (Janelle Monae)

Many Moons



Tightrope



Q.U.E.E.N.



Dance Apocalyptic



Dirty Computer [full E-motion Picture]

Afrofuturist Explorations

Sun Ra, Space Is The Place



Drexciya, The Quest





Parliament, Mothership Connection



Michael Jackson, Captain Eo



Missy Elliott, The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)



Outkast, ATliens



Pumzi, Wanuri Kahiu

Final Paper Workshop Worksheet

Final Paper: Close Reading and Research Paper Workshop Worksheet

Your Name: _______________________________________________________________
 
The Assigned Text (or object) You Are Reading Closely in Your Argument: 
 
__________________________________________________________________________
 
BRAINSTORM! Take 15 mins. or so to write down 20-30 claims about your chosen text, topic, or question. Don't worry whether the claims are "deep," just write down claims you think are TRUE and INTERESTING. Be as clear and specific as you can.

1.
2.

3.

4.

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

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Continue on the back of the page if you like. The more claims you have to work with, the better.
*     *     *     *
 
Final Paper/Close Argumentative Reading Workshop Worksheet (PART TWO: In Class)
Your Name: _______________________________________________________________________________
 
The Text (and/or Object) You Are Reading Closely in Your Argument: ___________________________
 
I. In groups of three: Discuss your BRAINSTORM and then PICK THE THREE BEST THESIS CANDIDATE CLAIMS and write them down in their best, clearest form here (Twenty-Four Minutes):
1.
2.
3.
II. Now on your own, for each of your three thesis candidate claims COME UP WITH THE STRONGEST OR MOST OBVIOUS OPPOSITION TO EACH THESIS (Ten Minutes):

1.

2.

3.

III. In NEW groups of three: Discuss your thesis candidates and their OPPOSITIONS and write down the results, reconsiderations, and re-edits here (Twenty-Four Minutes):
1.
2.
3.
IV. On your own, pick the strongest thesis and its best opposition and write them down in the template below (Five Minutes):
V. In NEW groups of three discuss your text/topic, thesis, opposition, and quotes/data that may support the thesis or provide a means to circumvent its objection. Also, determine whether any key terms need definitions (Thirty Minutes):
Thesis:
1. (textual/data support)


2. (textual/data support)
3. (textual/data support)


Opposition:
(textual/argumentative circumvention)


Terms requiring definition?

Four Habits of Argumentative Writing


In this course you will be producing argumentative writing based on close textual readings. We will spend a good deal of time talking together about what it means to write persuasively and read closely, what sorts of things can usefully be considered texts in the first place, and under what circumstances, and so on, but as a first approximation of what I mean I am offering you four general habits of attention and writing practice, guidelines I will want you to apply to your writing this term. If you can incorporate these four writing practices into your future work you will have mastered the task of producing a competent argumentative paper for just about any discipline in the humanities that would ask you for one. Incidentally, I will also say that taking these habits truly to heart goes a long way in my view toward inculcating the critical temper indispensable for good citizenship in functioning democracies in a world of diverse and contentious stakeholders with urgent shared problems.

A First Habit

An argumentative paper will have a thesis. A thesis is a claim. It is a statement of the thing your paper is trying to show. Very often, the claim will be straightforward enough to express in a single sentence or so, and it will usually appear early on in the paper to give your readers a clear sense of the project of the paper. A thesis is a claim that is strong. A strong claim is a claim for which you can imagine an intelligent opposition. It is a claim that you feel a need to argue for. Close readings and research papers may seem very different as writing projects, but a thesis is the key to both. Remember, when you are producing a reading about a complex literary text like a novel, a poem, or a film the object of your argument will be to illuminate the text, to draw attention to some aspect of the wider work the text is accomplishing. Once you have determined the dimension or element in a text that you want to argue about, your opposition might consist of those who would focus elsewhere or who would draw different conclusions from your own focus. When you are writing a research paper, remember that you are not simply exploring a topic, you are seeking an answer to a question. That question (sometimes in the form of an hypothesis that would answer the question) directs your research, though sometimes the research process itself can change your question. Your answer to your research question is your research paper's thesis, the claim you support with the evidence you gathered in your research and present in the body of the paper itself. Your thesis is your paper's spine, your paper's task. As you write your papers, it is a good idea to ask yourself the question, from time to time, Does this quotation, does this argument, does this paragraph support my thesis in some way? If it doesn’t, delete it. If you are drawn repeatedly away from what you have chosen as your thesis, ask yourself whether or not this signals that you really want to argue for some different thesis.

A Second Habit

You should define your central terms, especially the ones you may be using in an idiosyncratic way. Your definitions can be casual ones, they don’t have to sound like dictionary definitions. But it is crucial that once you have defined a term you will stick to the meaning you have assigned it yourself. Never simply assume that your readers know what you mean or what you are talking about. Never hesitate to explain yourself for fear of belaboring the obvious. Clarity never appears unintelligent.

A Third Habit

You should support your claims about the text with actual quotations from the text itself. In this course you will always be analyzing texts (broadly defined) and whatever text you are working on should probably be a major presence on nearly every page of your papers. A page without quotations is often a page that has lost track of its point, or one that is stuck in abstract generalizations. This doesn't mean that your paper should consist of mostly huge block quotes. On the contrary, a block quote is usually a quote that needs to be broken up and read more closely and carefully. If you see fit to include a lengthy quotation filled with provocative details, I will expect you to contextualize and discuss all of those details. If you are unprepared to do this, or fear that doing so will introduce digressions from your argument, this signals that you should be more selective about the quotations to which you are calling attention.

A Fourth Habit

You should anticipate objections to your thesis. In some ways this is the most difficult habit to master. Remember that even the most solid case for a viewpoint is vulnerable to dismissal by the suggestion of an apparently powerful counterexample. That is why you should anticipate problems, criticisms, counterexamples, and deal with them before they arise, and deal with them on your own terms. If you cannot imagine a sensible and relevant objection to your line of argument it means either that you are not looking hard enough or that your claim is not strong enough.

Thursday, June 25, 2020

William F. May, Rising to the Occasion of Our Death


For many parents, a Volkswagen van is associated with putting children to sleep on a camping trip.  Jack Kevorkian, a Detroit pathologist, has now linked the van with the veterinarian's meaning of "putting to sleep." Kevorkian conducted a dinner interview with Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer's patient, and her husband and then agreed to help her commit suicide in his VW van.  Kevorkian pressed beyond the more generally accepted practice of passive euthanasia (allowing a patient to die by withholding or withdrawing treatment) to active euthanasia (killing for mercy).
 
     Kevorkian, moreover, did not comply with the strict regulations that govern active euthanasia in, for example, the Netherlands. Holland requires that death be imminent (Adkins had beaten her son in tennis just a few days earlier); it demands a more professional review of the medical evidence and the patient's resolution than a dinner interview with a physician (who is a stranger and who does not treat patients) permits; and it calls for the final, endorsing signatures of two doctors.

     So Kevorkian-bashing is easy. But the question remains: Should we develop a judicious, regulated social policy permitting voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill? Some moralists argue that the distinction between allowing to die and killing for mercy is petty quibbling over technique. Since the patient in any event dies -- whether by acts of omission or commission -- the route to death doesn't really matter. The way modern procedures have made dying at the hands of experts and their machines such a prolonged and painful business has further fueled the euthanasia movement, which asserts not simply the right to die but the right to be killed.

     But other moralists believe that there is an important moral distinction between allowing to die and mercy killing. The euthanasia movement, these critics contend, wants to engineer death rather than face dying. Euthanasia would bypass dying to make one dead as quickly as possible. It aims to relieve suffering by knocking out the interval between life and death. It solves the problem of suffering by eliminating the sufferer.

     The impulse behind the euthanasia movement is understandable in an age when dying has become such an inhumanly endless business.  But the movement may fail to appreciate our human capacity to rise to the occasion of our death.  The best death is not always the sudden death.  Those forewarned of death and given time to prepare for it have time to engage in acts of reconciliation.  Also, advanced grieving by those about to be bereaved may ease some of their pain.  Psychiatrists have observed that those who lose a loved one accidentally have a more difficult time recovering from the loss than those who have suffered through an extended period of illness before the death.  Those who have lost a close relative by accident are more likely to experience what Geoffrey Gorer has called limitless grief.  The community, moreover, may need its aged and dependent, its sick and its dying, and the virtues which they sometimes evince -- the virtues of justice and love manifest in the agents of care.

     On the whole, our social policy should allow terminal patients to die but it should not regularize killing for mercy. Such a policy would recognize and respect that moment in illness when it no longer makes sense to bend every effort to cure or to prolong life and when one must allow patients to do their own dying. This policy seems most consonant with the obligations of the community to care and of the patient to finish his or her course.

     Advocates of active euthanasia appeal to the principle of patient autonomy -- as the use of the phrase "voluntary euthanasia" indicates. But emphasis on the patient's right to determine his or her destiny often harbors an extremely naïve view of the uncoerced nature of the decision. Patients who plead to be put to death hardly make unforced decisions if the terms and conditions under which they receive care already nudge them in the direction of the exit. If the elderly have stumbled around in their apartments, alone and frightened for years warehoused in geriatrics barracks, then the decision to be killed for mercy hardly reflects an uncoerced decision. The alternative may be so wretched as to push patients toward this escape. It is a huge irony and, in some cases, hypocrisy to talk suddenly about a compassionate killing when the aging and dying may have been starved for compassion for many years. To put it bluntly, a country has not earned the moral right to kill for mercy unless it has already sustained and supported life mercifully. Otherwise we kill for compassion only to reduce the demands on our compassion. This statement does not charge a given doctor or family member with impure motives. I am concerned here not with the individual case but with the cumulative impact of a social policy.

     I can, to be sure, imagine rare circumstances in which I hope I would have the courage to kill for mercy -- when the patient is utterly beyond human care, terminal, and in excruciating pain. A neurosurgeon once showed a group of physicians and an ethicist the picture of a Vietnam casualty who had lost all four limbs in a landmine explosion. The catastrophe had reduced the soldier to a trunk with his face transfixed in horror.  On the battlefield I would hope that I would have the courage to kill the sufferer with mercy.

     But hard cases do not always make good laws or wise social policies. Regularized mercy killings would too quickly relieve the community of its obligation to provide good care. Further, we should not always expect the law to provide us with full protection and coverage for what, in rare circumstances, we may morally need to do. Sometimes the moral life calls us out into a no-man's-land where we cannot expect total security and protection under the law. But no one said that the moral life is easy.

(1990)

The Toumin Schema (Simplified and Summarized)

You are expected to hand in a 2-3pp. precis with an attached Toulmin schema in time for at our next discussion session together, Thursday, July 2.


As we discussed at length in class this week, a precis is simply the concise recapitulation of a complex argument. You are expected to summarize what you take to be the argument and its essential elements for any one of the texts assigned in class from the first day to the day on which the precis is handed in. The purpose of the precis is not to argue for an interpretation of the work you choose, but to capture what you take to be the argument of the work you choose. (Needless to say, this too requires a form of interpretation, but I do hope the distinction still makes sense as far as it goes.)
Reproducing your chosen text's argument will involve identifying what you take to be its thesis, any qualification or exceptions to that thesis, definitions of terms, supportive reasons and data, implicit warrants, and efforts to anticipate and circumvent objections. You may also want to discuss the illustrative force of metaphors and other figures, or address stylistic effects (use of pronouns, voice, etc.).

Since so many of these elements are also at the heart of the Toulmin analysis of argument we workshopped in class last week, I am asking that you attach to your precis a simple Toulmin Schema identifying as many elements in your chosen argument as seems useful (do not worry if not all of the elements of the Schema we discussed appear to be in evidence in your chosen text, that happens all the time). In highly simplified terms, the Toulmin schema models an argument in terms familiar from the adversarial way arguments play out in courtrooms and similar settings, but useful for understanding all sorts of argumentative discourse as well. The Toulmin schema distinguishes three basic functions in an effective argument:

I. The Claim

a. Thesis
b. Qualification of the thesis
c. Exceptions to the thesis?

II. The Support (of the Claim)

a. Reasons
b. Data/Evidence
c. Warrants (implicit general assumptions on which explicit reasons and conclusions depend)

III. The Refutation (of anticipated objections to the Claim and its Support)

a. Anticipation of Objections
b. Efforts to Rebut these Objections
c. Efforts to Circumvent these Objections
(Note: these are not YOUR objections to the argument, but the author's effort to respond to objections they anticipate.)

I hope the Schema will be a useful guide to organize and clarify your precis. Good luck and remember to ask me any questions that might occur to you!