Grade Update

I checked my grades today and they're all in. In addition to the A- in gender, I received an A- in Political Feminist Theory and an A in Concept of Culture. I'm quite pleased. The political science class ended up being pretty difficult in the end because the paper was hard. I was going to have to do close readings of one particular difficult text while at the same time convincing the teacher that I actually knew what was going on.

Now that I've gotten good grades in the classes, I may make available my papers because I know people have nothing better to do than read what I write. If you do read them, you'll notice some of the stuff is similar. This is because I was thankfully able to use some of the material in all of my papers. My culture paper is actually an expansion of the paper I delivered at the conference. I used material from my gender paper to fill that one out. Also, I used some of that material for my political science paper. My output in culture was very minimal. In fact, I rarely read toward the end of the semester. I went to every class, though.Elzbieta is going to be my boss next year and I also may have her be my thesis advisor. She's having a party at her house on Thursday, which I'm going to. It's actually to say "goodbye" to the staff of TCDS and welcome the new staff -- of which I am a member. Marcela came over tonight from Manhattan to hang out. It's a trek now for each of us to go to one another's abodes. We're no longer 11 floors apart. We briefly discussed the writing group we're going to start. I think it may begin after next week. I'm excited. We'll see what kind of stuff comes out of my head this summer.

And now for Class #3: Methods of Expository Writing and Styles of Cultural Criticism Christopher Hitchens , Melissa Monroe A team-taught seminar, this course focuses on the elements that constitute a strong writing style, and on how writers concerned with political and cultural issues deploy various rhetorical techniques in order to entertain and outrage, provoke and inspire. A part of the class, consisting of a close evaluation of student essays in cultural criticism, will be under the direction of Ms. Monroe. At the same time, students will be reading key texts by a variety of cultural critics, including Mathew Arnold, Mark Twain, W.E.B. Du Bois, H.L. Mencken, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lionel Trilling, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Joan Didion, and Edward Said. In the sessions that he will lead, Mr. Hitchens will analyze several exemplary cultural critics, and discuss his own experience as a leading public intellectual. Our goal is to understand better how cultural critics make specific literary choices in order to elicit a political and cultural response from their readers. I was going to take this last fall and it was actually a class I was excited about. Instead, I opted for slavery. Mistake. Anyway, Christopher Hitchens is an interesting fellow apparently. He's controversal and leans to the right a little (I think), which is interesting given the history and left-winged nature of New School. He only comes four times out of the semester. He's published books and has written numerous articles.