Student Work: Criticism
A Window onto Life’s Stage
Communication through language is an inescapable performance, Nietzsche tells us, and we’re all actors in it. The precarious question of how truth gets performed is loudly answered by the central characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s novel "To The Lighthouse."
The Institution as a Site of Its Own Critique
On the Work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Christopher D’Arcangelo
The Woman Constructed
Language in Martha Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen" and Mary Kelly's "Post-Partum Document"
The Mother-Son and State-Citizen Complex
Mary Kelly’s "Post-Partum Document" in Conversation with Susan Silton’s "A Potentiality Long After Its Actuality Has Become a Thing of the Past"
Special Feature: On Conceptualism
Three papers written in the spring of 2019 for the seminar “What Was Conceptualism and Why Won’t It Go Away?”
“It Is Important to Know the Names of Things”
Language in "The Awakening" and "Dept. of Speculation"
PHOTOGRAPHY AS A WAY
Sergio Larrain's Valparaíso shows that photography can be a way of connecting with the world.
Informational Warfare
"American Sniper" not only espouses a tired “good vs. evil” narrative, but in altering, omitting, and fabricating aspects of the Iraq War, it perpetuates a chronology in which the nuances and complexities of the war are rendered null and void.
In Search of Perfect Work
On Thomas More's "Utopia", John Milton's "Paradise Lost," and contemporary American work culture
PLASTIC(INE) DESIRES
PLASTICS + TECHNO-UTOPIAN ALLURES // PLASTICS + OILY TEMPORALITIES // PLASTICS + ZOMBIFICATION OF FOSSILISED SUNSHINE // PLASTICS + TOXICITY // PLASTICS + QUEER FUTURITY
DANGEROUS ENVIRONMENTALISM
On the rifts between ethics-of-place environmentalism and other social and cultural issues, including postcolonialism
EUGENICS IN FRANKENSTEIN
Director James Whale picked up on the potential for commentary on eugenics in Shelley’s novel, an idea and practice that did not yet exist in Shelley’s lifetime.