Fin

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of ILS 121 at SCE 2008.

Dear visitors: from June 23 through August 12, this blog supplemented and recorded the work of students in two sections of Interdisciplinary Letters and Sciences 121 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison during 2008’s Summer Collegiate Experience. TA: Mike Shapiro; lecturer: Larry Edgerton. Please look around and shoot me an email (address to the right) if you have any questions!

Dear students: wondering what to do during your copious free time? Some thoughts.

Grades are in!

Larry and I met this afternoon to discuss grades for this summer. He entered your grades online, and they should be available to you after midnight tonight. If you would like to see your grade breakdown I will be happy to email you your final grade sheet, including the breakdown of your final exam. (Even if you don’t ask I will try to email you the grade sheet tomorrow.)

Why we write

If you were to survey the writing staff for this summer’s course, you would likely find that we write 5 or 6 pages of text every day: the more productive writing pages toward their dissertations or towards publishable essays, some writing pages for their prelims, all of us writing end notes and marginal comments on essays (yours and our peers’), and all of us maintaining a steady textual intercourse with the wider world—blogging, email, Facebook, journaling, and so on.

The truth of it is that writing is like soccer or the violin: you might be Ronaldinho or Joshua Bell, but if you take 6 months off you’ll come back to the game or to the orchestra nearly as miserable as the next guy.

Put tersely: to write well, you must write constantly.

If your goal is to better your academic writing, write for an audience: keep a blog or publish notes on Facebook twice a week; when you know it’s your job to keep your audience interested, and when you know that you’re answerable for what you write, you’ll tend to write tauter, more productive prose.

You have a rare guide to writing such prose well: Larry’s Editing Book, the brown book you received at the beginning of the summer, shows you the steps that come after the 44 Reminders.

There are ten thousand other guides to writing: read them if you like, but ultimately you must find your own way.* It is best to read copiously—find excellent essays in the modern style (the Talk of the Town at the front of every New Yorker; longer essays anthologized in the Best American Essays series) and absorb their tone; find authors who stretch the boundaries of language (Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Virginia Woolf) and memorize their sentences.

When you read the great writers you will discover how tight a prison taut prose can be: to practice something other than ordinary academic writing, you might want a private journal, a place to experiment with words without fear of humiliation. The thing to remember is that your journal will not be read by anyone else, ever: you are not Virginia Woolf; Harcourt Brace won’t bring out your private writings in an 11-volume series after you have died; let yourself free: see what you can make words do, and if you feel embarrassed for yourself throw the journal out and start in on a blank one.

* As other guides go, I have learned most from two: Elements of Style taught me how to pare my prose and Eats, Shoots & Leaves firmly grounded my punctuation.

Textbooks: saving money

Yes, textbooks will cost a lot of money over the next four years; however, your textbooks are at least contributing to your education, at least when they are assigned and taught by good instructors. Still, there are ways to spend a little bit less for your textbooks, especially if you major in the humanities or social sciences.

Step 1. Find out what books you will need 1 or 2 weeks before classes begin. Many professors have this information on their websites or will answer (short, polite) emails asking what textbook you should purchase.

Step 2. Discriminate. Which books do you need the first week of class and which books can you wait on? Which books are central to the course and which are ancillary? Which books are you unlikely to read closely, mark up, or want to keep after the semester ends?

Step 3. Get from the library all books you won’t mark or keep. Remember that our libraries put a lot of power and access in your hands: if the local UW–Madison libraries run out of the books you need, you can try UW System Search to to get copies from other Wisconsin libraries. (Though, true to form, the library has taken down System Search for the next week.)

Step 4. Find the ISBN for each book you are going to buy. (I tend to look books up on Amazon and pull the ISBN from there.)

Step 5. Feed that ISBN into as many used book search engines as you can find.

• Amazon
• Google Product Search
• Powell’s

Example: let’s look up the edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream we used this summer. ISBN: 0140714553. Amazon has used copies, though possibly not of this edition, from $0.01 + 3.99 shipping; Powell’s has copies starting at $2.50 + shipping; Google lists copies beginning at $0.25 + shipping. Considering that this same book retails for $4 or $5, these savings are not especially significant; however, if you can buy several of your books used and from the same source you can easily save $100 or $200 per semester… and then spend that money on a digital dictionary, a nice pen, and some lovely notepads.

Educational tools: spending money

Your goal is to extract the maximum possible intellectual growth from the next 4 years. This means that you will need to spend as much time as possible as efficiently as possible.

I’ve listed some tools you might use to make your time more efficient:

• Coffee, especially for morning classes or long lectures
• Earplugs, if you prefer to study in social spaces or if you want more control over how much sleep you get
• A comfortable pen, so you can take more copious notes and spend longer writing exams

In an earlier post, I recommended investing in an electronic dictionary. My preferred model—the Sharp PW-E550—uses the Oxford American Dictionary (the little brother of the OED) but runs $75 on Amazon. The Franklin MWD-1490 uses the perfectly respectable Merriam Webster and runs only $35 or so.

Yes, they cost money you could spend on more fun things, but think how much more quickly you’ll be able to look up words if you carry this with you into the library. With portable electronic dictionaries you lose many of the problems Larry described with web dictionaries: these are always reliable, they don’t try to feed you advertising, and—best of all—you can’t access Facebook from one of these things.

The other tools-based issue you should think about seriously is note-taking.

First, update your note-taking strategy. If you’re not familiar with Cornell notes, read up on them—this is what a Cornell page looks like (PDF).

The theory of Cornell notes is that they force you to engage actively with the notes you take, giving you a left-hand column to interact with the ideas you record more passively in the right-hand column. This is a system I stumbled into in grad school, and it has increased the efficacy of my notes in a wonderful way.

The easiest way to set yourself up with Cornell-style paper is to buy note-taking paper with a law margin: it’ll look crazy at first to have the red margin so close to the center of the page, but it will set up your note and cue columns almost perfectly. The University Book Store has all sorts of paper choices with this margin setup.

I recommend pads of paper or loose-leaf paper with a clipboard, since this allows you to organize and review your notes more organically than bound notebooks.

Think about this: how many pages of notes did you take for ILS 121 this summer? That is likely to be as many pages as you take in any one class next semester. If you buy one of those wretched 3-subject notebooks you will either waste paper (if you don’t need X number of pages per class) or you will run out of paper (if you need X + 5 pages per class).

If you’re willing to spend a lot of money on note paper, the best I’ve seen are Levenger’s annotation pads (ruled, grid)—they run $20 plus shipping for 150 sheets: 17¢/sheet if you include shipping, a bit less if you buy 2 or 3 packs at once.

Final exam: Part II, example 1

Mariana agreed to let me post her answer to the Chazen essay as a model answer. Thank you, Mariana!

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Mariana’s answer is the research she put into piecing together the narrative behind the images she analyzed. Much of the art in the Chazen, particularly on the second floor, makes reference to myths and saints’ lives that aren’t necessarily familiar.

To appreciate a good piece of art, I look beyond the medium and techniques used and focus on how the artist communicates the underlying message of the piece. An outstanding artwork stands out from other pieces, takes clichés and reinvents them.

One painting which I find outstanding is Christ’s Charge to St. Peter, painted by Bernardo Strozzi circa 1635. Strozzi used oil on canvas to illustrate Jesus handing down the keys to heaven to St. Peter. What surprised me was that between Jesus and St. Peter there is another man, presumably another disciple, painted staring straight ahead at whoever looks at the painting. This man seems out of place in the painting but it makes perfect sense when taken in consideration that the painting illustrates Matthew 16:18-19, where Jesus points out Peter and says that “on this rock I will build my church.” The Church is the actual body of people who worship God; when Jesus handed Peter the key, he was really sending a message to all his people. The man between Jesus and St. Peter stood out to me because he represents the idea that the people looking at the painting should not be mere observers but rather active participants in Jesus’ work of building the Church; the message should not be left in the painting but carried out into the world. There are hundreds of paintings illustrating some sort of biblical happening all made in the same style. Strozzi took that cliché, however, and made it meaningful and deep. It was easy to set his painting apart from others of its kind because of the deeper message behind the beautiful brush strokes.

A painting which I did not like as much was St Francis Receiving the Stigmata. It was painted in 1663 by Mateo Cerezo, also using oil on canvas.  This piece is not crafted badly, the colors are still interesting and bold, but the reason I did not like this piece as much as the first is because it falls under the cliché I mentioned before. The artist illustrates St. Francis receiving the stigmata, alone in a desolate landscape. The look on St. Francis’ face is expected: he is looking up at an angel in heaven and his mouth is open as in awe and surprise. He has his palms facing outward so that the wounds of the crucifixion are visible. He also uses the cliché of adding a halo above Francis’ head to show that he is a saint, the crimson background and angel to represent the blood of Christ, and the bible lying in front of him to show his devotion to the word of God.  To me, this doesn’t stand out because it is just like many other painting of St. Francis. Instead of coming up with an inspiring way too view the scene, Cerezo paints in a way that is expected. I looked forward to seeing how the artist would interpret St. Francis receiving the stigmata, but after searching for a deeper meaning and finding none, I was thoroughly disappointed.

Living the scholarly life

I hope you will do me the kindness of checking back with this blog for the next few days. There are three or four tricks I’ve learned over my 11 years in academia (first year of college: 1997) that I want to write down.

Why? Because you are some of the best students I’ve had the privilege to work with, and I want you to kick everybody else’s ass.

Some tricks have to do with where you spend your money: in addition to coffee, earplugs, and a comfortable pen, I recommend a good electronic dictionary—they’re faster and more portable than the Webster’s New World you have right now. (I have the Sharp PW-E550 at home. There are cheaper models out there.)

Some tricks have to do with how you use your free time: always have a news podcast or an audiobook on your iPod; always have a novel or New Yorker in your backpack. Don’t spend so much as 30 seconds in an empty classroom staring at a wall: always be reading something.

Some tricks have to do with how you take notes. Have you ever heard of the Cornell method?

One incredible trick—in which I have invested years of my academic life—involves making ample and efficient use of the Writing Center.

And the best trick of all involves writing your way through the next 4 years. You cannot learn without writing; you cannot write without learning.

More anon.

Final exam: Chazen essay grades

In order to grade the Chazen essays in the time limit, I wrote comparatively few comments. Here, then, is a simplified explanation of how grades broke down:

• 5 points: Does not tackle the question and/or undershoots the minimum word count by a large margin
• 6 points: Repeats the biases Larry listed in class without any analytical work to back those biases up
• 7 points: Offers mostly description with only minimal analysis
• 8 points: Leans heavily on a bias with limited analysis
• 9 points: Analyzes one artwork expertly but doesn’t go as far with the second work
• 10 points: Thoughtful, innovative, synoptic analysis grounded in closely-observed evidence from both artworks
• -1 point: Significant grammatical mistakes covered by the 44 Reminders

The modal average is an 8—the commonest analytical fallacy was grounded in the assumption that

Good art = realistic art

Many of the writers who made this argument worked to back it up: realistic artworks are easier to engage with emotionally; a viewer can more directly understand the meaning of a realistic artwork than of an abstract artwork; you need not be as tightly anchored to a specific context to understand the meaning of a photorealistic image; you don’t need to know the history of 20th-century art to understand the dialog in which a nineteenth-century realistic painter intervenes.

Indeed, most of the history of recorded aesthetic judgment has preferred photorealism to abstraction. (Proof: a delightful New Yorker essay on cave paintings in France and Spain.)

However, there are four key problems with arguing that photorealism is inherently superior to abstraction:

1. Reflect on the artworks we’ve encountered this semester. How many of them are realistic? Not Jane Eyre. Certainly not A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Several of the short stories are realistic, but none of the movies. (How many innocent men on the run from federal agents prove their innocence and marry the lovely blondes they meet en route? I’m pretty sure CNN would have covered that story.)
2. And then how do we talk about the music? Are Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story realistic? What would that even mean?
3. And what about the identity argument? Is all realistic art good art? Is every photograph you have ever taken superior to Calder’s tremendous mobile?
4. Daguerrotype photography was available in 1839. Better cameras were commonplace by the 1850s. Why would Thomas Blackwell choose to paint Takashimaya—which must have taken weeks to render to precisely—when he could simply have taken a photograph? (Indeed, chances are better than good that he worked from a photograph when painting the picture.)

Analyses that wrestled with these questions in specific terms did a bit better than those that accepted it as a given that realism was preferable to abstraction.

If you pick up your final exam in the fall and have any questions about your grade on the Chazen essay, I do hope you’ll contact me: I’m always happy to talk about art!

The grade distribution for the Chazen essays looks, for once, like a grade curve ought to look:

Grade distribution for part II of the final exam

(There are no grades below 5. This is part of an attempt to avoid the grade-norming issues we encountered with the midterm.)

Final exam: Part II—the Chazen essay

(The green assignment sheet lists the Chazen essay as Part III.)

The writing staff has divided the grading of the final as we did the midterm.

I realize that this forces you to write for an audience with whose expectations you aren’t necessarily as familiar, but this is a good thing: because you don’t know exactly what your reader will look for, you should write the taughtest and most intellectually daring work you can. Because your reader knows nothing about you, s/he will come to your essay thinking that you might well be the finest writer in the class; all you have to do is play along.

That said, a few of you have asked what I expect for Part II, the essay on the visual arts.

Larry’s lecture last Wednesday hit the two most important points:

• Don’t write that better art = more realistic art: what’s so great about realism? I have a perfectly realistic world out my window; why would I want to see one in an art gallery? If an artist is using realism in the 19th, 20th, or 21st century, why?
• Find the meaning of both the artworks you discuss—or, at least, the attempted meaning; you might well argue that the artwork you like less aimed at one meaning but missed.

Here is just one of a dozen possible structural strategies for this essay:

1. First sentence—a thesis statement of sorts: at a minimum, you can make a simple claim that outlines the rest of your essay, e.g. “Work 1 succeeds because of X; work 2 fails because of Y.” A more sophisticated thesis might say “Good art does X; work 1 does it, work 2 does not.” Perhaps the most sophisticated thesis would claim “By looking at work 1 and work 2, we can deduce a general theory, X, that distinguishes successful art from unsuccessful art.”
2. First body paragraph—a one-sentence description of the first work: who made it and when, its materials and general description; example: “John Chamberlain’s El Reno (1962), a sculpture of painted sheet metal, seems to abstract and aestheticize a car crash.” Then a one-sentence theory of what the artist was trying to achieve and an evaluation of his/her success; example: “Chamberlain seems to have meant to critique drunk driving in America in the 1960s; his sculpture conveys the precarious suddenness of the violent collision of cars, but also suggests the permanence of death.”* The rest of this paragraph should point to details from the artwork that backs up your reading: how do we know the artist meant to communicate X? How do we know that s/he succeeded? Look at every datum you can get your eyes on: the title, the medium, the size, the composition, color and texture, the interplay of forms and tones (lightness and darkness), and every other issue Larry raised in lecture.
3. Second body paragraph—same as the paragraph above, but in reverse: what is work 2, what did the artist seek to achieve, and why did s/he fail?
4. Short conclusion—what does the comparison of these two artworks reveal about art itself?

* This is not what Chamberlain was getting at, I’m pretty sure.

Midterm: Part V, example 3

Here is the third example of a strong answer to Part V of the midterm, this one provided by Ruby. Thank you, Ruby!

Ruby’s essay offers a model of an evidence-rich analytical argument that fits in just one page. Notice that her first two paragraphs lay out detailed evidence from the production and the script, but that the last paragraph of each ties that evidence back into Ruby’s main argument. The third paragraph, then, dwells at greater length on that argument and its consequences for our interpretation of the text.

William Brown changed the last scene of the play, Act V Scene I, by giving the Indian boy back to the mortal world. It is related to the theme of imagination vs. logic because Brown is making a statement that true imagination cannot survive with human interference. The removal of the boy rekindles Oberon and Titania’s love for each other because with the boy’s presence threatened to tear the King and Queen apart, which would end the world of imagination. Brown, by adding the Indian boy’s last appearance, wants to explicitly show that by returning him to the mortal world, the fairy world will end with a ‘happily ever after.’

In the book, Oberon is able to take the boy from Titania and it is assumed that Oberon keeps the boy since that is the last time the boy is mentioned, but the play is not so; in the play, while all are dancing, the Indian boy enters the stage full of merriment, lights, and music and sadly looks upon happy Titania and Oberon dancing. He is then quietly ushered away by the fairies. This contrasts the stage setup of when Titania and Oberon are fighting over the Indian boy with no music or dancing and simple lighting. By doing this, Brown emphasizes his point that the happiness and existence of the fairy world is interrupted with human presence.

This interpretation is valid because the imaginative world can improve the logical world with its interference[;] examples are Helena and Demetrius falling in love and Hermia and Lysander falling in love again, but interference of the logical world into the imaginative world only causes mayhem, for example, Oberon and Titania quarreling over the Indian boy. The play interestingly showed this by creating a merry scene of dancing once the Indian boy was forgotten by the Queen and King of the fairy world, and the boy then being removed.