Thesis & Review (Arin Kukharsky)

What’s the Point?

The thesis is the most important aspect of an essay, an argument that serves as its theme. Declaring the purpose of an essay is no easy task. This text provides the helpful method of thinking of the thesis as a question that asks the following three questions simultaneously: “What do you see?”, “What do you make of it?”, and “Why does it matter?”. Once you’ve went through these three questions and came up with your “macro-question,” you can start drafting an easy-to-identify thesis statement that contains a “so what.”

Responding – Really Responding – to Other Students’ Writing

In this text, Richard Straub provides a detailed guide to the art of peer review. When commenting on a fellow student’s piece, your goal is to help the writer go back and reflect on his piece, seeing what he can work on and revise. Your comments are essentially a conversation you’re having with the student’s writing as you understand and react to it. Ideally, these comments should be a mix of criticism and praise, and take the context of both the paper and the writer into consideration. By putting in the time and effort to write a constructive response, you’re greatly helping the writer improve their writing in this paper and in papers to come.

Response

These texts were jam-packed with valuable information. One provided steps to crafting a good thesis and the other gave guidelines and tips for commenting on a fellow student’s work – both preparing me for my upcoming assignments. The detailed steps to coming up with a sustained and well-articulated thesis were especially helpful as one of my biggest concerns for my rhetorical analysis is the claim I’m trying to make.

Day 6: Project Pitch (Arin Kukharsky)

Top Pick: Pokemon (main series games)

I’ve been a fan of the franchise for most of my life, yet I’ve never thought about the games as anything but a source of entertainment. This assignment gives me the opportunity to look at the Pokemon games with new eyes and examine the reason behind their widespread appeal. The pros: plenty of things to talk about, from the fantasy the games allow the player to live out to their underlying values. The cons: finding a focus for my analysis is going to be a challenge.

Option 2: Team Fortress 2

It’s an online first-person shooter game that’s managed to maintain a large player base for over 10 years, something that’s very rare in the genre. TF2 offers incredible character customization, a rich and humorous story, and surprisingly developed characters. It’s also heavily modded and has a complex trading economy, allowing players to enjoy the game however they want. A con of writing about TF2 is that there’s not much open for interpretation.

Option 3: Akala – Find No Enemy

This song is my third pick because the composition and lyrics work hand-in-hand to tackle the issues of racism, classism, as well as internal conflicts. There’s a clear presence of the Aristotelian ethos, pathos, and logos. Akala’s pleading tone, powerful lyrics, and commentary on several of society’s biggest problems lend themselves to be analyzed. The con, however, is that the sheer amount to analyze makes narrowing down a challenge.

Day 6: Writing as a Process (Arin Kukharsky)

Introduction to Composing as a Process

Writing is a long and arduous journey consisting of exploring, planning, drafting, and revising. It’s a lot of hard work that culminates in a final, polished piece. As we write, we tend to come up with and discover new ideas, our work snowballing into a finished product.

Shitty First Drafts

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first drafts.” Pouring out all of your thoughts and ideas onto paper without a single care in the world about the quality of your writing is a simple and effective way to jump-start your composition. This first draft isn’t meant to impress anyone. In fact, you might end up discarding almost everything that you put down. In this jumbled mess, however, you’re bound to find something great that’ll make the rest of your writing a cakewalk.

Freewriting

Premature editing is a disruptive habit that serves as the downfall of many writers. It’s a clash between editor and producer; you’re trying to write and make progress in your piece while, simultaneously, interrupting yourself to fix every little blunder that catches your eye. Freewriting is an exercise that aims to eliminate this habit. By writing whatever comes to mind, nonstop, for 10 minutes, you teach yourself to make the most of your natural voice and save the editing for later.

Response

Writing is a process and awful drafts are a crucial part of it. I tend to struggle with the notion of getting my ideas out on paper without editing them. These readings have helped me realize the importance of going wherever my thoughts take me and I plan on using the freewriting exercise to get better at it.

Intersectionality (Arin Kukharsky)

Dancing Around Objectification

The situations of the female dancers in Claude McKay’s The Harlem Dancer and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man are virtually the same – they’re sexualized, degraded, and idealized by the lustful men of their audience. However, the race of the dancers (one being black and the other white) serves to create a sharp contrast in the way that they are worshipped. McKay’s Harlem dancer is seen as nothing more than an alluring sex symbol, the viewers entranced by her body despite the fact that her act is comprised mainly of singing. On the other hand, Ellison’s white dancer, despite being idealized and objectified, has the status necessary to take back her own agency. She is used by the white men as a “conduit of shame” for the black teenagers, taking away their self-possession and giving them fear. While McKay’s dancer is open for all, Ellison’s is capable of denying those deemed inferior.

Intersectionality 101

According to a post on r/SRSDiscussion, intersectionality can be defined as a theory that examines how various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, and class, interrelate and create a “system of oppression” that is reflective of multiple forms of discrimination. The term “intersectionality theory” was devised from a metaphor used by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw to liken discrimination to traffic through an intersection. She used it to describe the intersection of gender and race oppression in the lives of black women: they are often discriminated against and harmed on both of these bases at the same time. The post briefly touches on Standpoint Theory, which is the idea that each person’s perspective is based off of their own, unique experiences.

The Urgency of Intersectionality

TED speaker Kimberle Crenshaw went through an exercise with her audience to give her speech a powerful start. The results of the activity showed that, while a large percentage of the audience has heard the names of young black males that were victims of police brutality, very few knew of the similar cases involving black women. Black women are often left out of issues concerning either black men or women of other races due their cases not fitting within the “available frames.” There are many issues in the realm of social justice that can be considered an intersection of two or more forms of discrimination. Unfortunately, these problems are often left in the dust by others that are less complicated and easier to promote.

Bechdel Test

The Bechdel test, first appearing as a little joke in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip, has gained mainstream appeal and is now the “standard by which feminist critics judge media.” If a movie doesn’t feature two women talking about something other than a man it fails the test. This test does, however, come with limitations. A piece can very easily pass the test while still containing sexist content and vice versa.

Response

All four of these texts offered an insight on intersectionality and the importance it holds. This in-depth look at intersectionality ties in with our readings about using various lenses to analyze texts as intersectionality is one of those lenses. I now know how crucial it is to consider every aspect of a person’s identity due to every single one playing a key role in the way things are perceived.

Question

Are there cases in which intersectionality is considered but one axis of identity is weighed far more than others?

Metaphors and Stereotypes

Metaphors We Live By:

Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, talks about the prevalence of metaphor in everyday life. They aren’t just present in language and literature but in thought and action as well. Metaphorical concepts shape the way we think, experience, and act. Take, for instance, the conceptual metaphor “argument is war.” We see arguments as a battle, the combatants using various strategies and attacking each other’s positions in an attempt to emerge victorious. This metaphor structures the way our culture views arguments, which doesn’t necessarily hold true for other cultures and societies. An example the text gives is a society which views an argument as a dance. Such a metaphor would cause that culture to experience and carry out arguments in an entirely different way. This view is so drastically different that our culture wouldn’t even perceive them as arguments. This got me thinking about cultures I’ve learned about that, at first glance, were incredibly strange. The conceptual metaphors that dictate their everyday life must be very different from the ones that dictate ours and I’d love to learn what they are.

The Egg and the Sperm:

The Egg and the Sperm, by Emily Martin aims to “shine a bright light” on the gender stereotypes that are, surprisingly, plentiful in the scientific language of biology. The processes of the female reproduction system are often portrayed in a negative light. Menstruation and ovulation are described as wasteful and destructive, while the male spermatogenesis is praised. The wasteful depiction of women is especially interesting as men end up wasting trillions more germ cells than women in a lifetime. Despite ovulation and spermatogenesis being similar processes of production, the female (less wasteful) process is written off as bad while the male process is showered with admiration. Perhaps I haven’t been doing close reads of my biology books, but I don’t recall noticing such varied language in descriptions of the reproductive systems. This just goes to show the effect that gender roles have on our society. You can find stereotypes in just about anything related to the genders.

Connections:

Upon reading both of these texts, the connection between them becomes apparent: Metaphors We Live By taught me the importance of the metaphor and The Egg and the Sperm attested to that. The metaphor of woman and man as their respective reproductive systems can be linked to the way our society perceives genders. Women are seen as passive, wasteful, and even destructive as shown by the way scientific texts describe ovulation and menstruation. Masculinity, on the other hand, is celebrated: the “sheer magnitude” of sperm produced by spermatogenesis is showered with praise. This metaphorical concept is unique to our society and culture, however. Another culture, driven by different metaphors, will see gender roles differently. That is the beauty of the metaphor.

Metaphors and Stereotypes (Arin Kukharsky)

Metaphors We Live By:

The Egg and the Sperm:

Connections:

Tools for Analyzing Texts (Arin Kukharsky)

Summary:

Everything with an intent has an analyzable rhetoric. In order to analyze this rhetoric, we have to go beyond the text in question to figure out how it affects us. We have to examine various parts of the text and their relationship to one another. Lenses, or theories, are ways of looking at texts. There are a wide variety of lenses, such as the Aristotelian lenses of ethos, pathos, and logos, providing many ways to analyze any text. When analyzing, it’s important to consider the text’s context as well as view it through theoretical lenses. When finishing up an analysis, we shouldn’t forget to offer the reader our interpretation of the text after taking it apart and putting it back together.

Response:

Reading this section of JTC, I found the plethora of methods of analyzing texts intriguing. The fact that there are so many things to consider when performing a critical analysis really makes it seem like picking a text apart bit by bit and scrutinizing every little detail to the point where there’s nothing left to say. The tools provided in this section are extremely useful and will definitely come in handy the next time I put on a lens and examine something critically.

Question:

Should I try to examine every aspect of a text until there’s nothing left to look at? Is there ever a reason to hold back?

Not Just for Sleeping (Arin Kukharsky)

I found this ad in a train on my way home from Baruch. The grandma dressed in funky clothes making a mess on her bed may have drawn my attention to the ad, but the phrase “for foreplay, or four-twenty” is what really got me looking at it. What could a subway ad possibly be advertising that had something to do with sex and drugs? Oh. It’s an ad for linens. The brooklinen ad right next to this one had a sexual reference as well. I get that sex sells, but is it really necessary to use it to sell everything?

What is Rhetoric? (Arin Kukharsky)

My first excursion into JTC left me with new knowledge about the resources at Baruch and the meaning and uses of rhetoric. I had no idea that the school provided a plethora of opportunities, such as the CAPS office’s Academic Intensive English Program, for EAL students to succeed.

Rhetoric is essentially the science of the production and reception of communication. It’s a term often used interchangeably with deception and persuasion, despite being an essential part of daily communication. Rhetorical analysis can be used to examine everything that has the intention of appealing to someone.

Before reading these pages, I honestly had no idea how to define rhetoric. The first thing that came to my mind was persuasion (which, of course, was touched on in the text). Now, I can safely say I understand rhetoric and its heavy presence in the literary world. I certainly found the fact that everything created with an intention has an analyzable rhetoric interesting and am looking forward to trying my hand at rhetorical analysis in class.

About me, Arin Kukharsky…

As a person:

I generally come off as a calm, quiet person. An introvert who’d rather sit back and watch than take action himself. But don’t be fooled by this reserved visage – I won’t hesitate to jump into the fray should the situation call for it. I’m extremely open when it comes to meeting new people. As a matter of fact, the opportunity to entwine myself in the community is one of the things that excites me the most about college. I am honest, punctual, and dedicated to growth. I take advantage of every opportunity to improve myself to the fullest. When it comes to spending my free time, I enjoy playing video games, biking, playing the piano, and hanging out with friends.

As a writer:

I am probably the slowest writer I have ever had the pleasure of knowing . It’s like I’m in a constant state of writer’s block. The fact that I spent as much time as I did thinking about what to write for these prompts can attest to that. I would, however, consider myself a fairly solid writer once the ideas finalize in the slow-cooker that is my brain.