Hi everyone! For the next four classes, we will finally be discussing Kushner’s Angels in America, for which the augmenters’ posts about Wojnarowicz may come into our discussion. In class, we’ve been talking a lot about contagion narratives and how they’re structured. More specifically, we’ve identified that, for example, the disease is never the main […]
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More on Wojnarowicz
Although Teresa also decided to write about Wojnarowicz, I had originally intended to talk about this photo of his. David Wojnarowicz’s “Untitled (Buffalo)” is one of the artist’s best-known works and perhaps one of the most haunting artistic responses to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The work depicts a herd of buffalo falling off […]
Read More →Narrative Technique in Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”
Hello everyone! Since we will not have the chance to discuss “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” again in class, this post will be a bit longer than usual. For those of you who missed the waffles and class discussion, we are first going to briefly talk about narration, which is a topic that we touched upon […]
Read More →Thinking About Anthropomorphism in The Ghost Map
Last class, we discussed various topics relating to The Ghost Map, one of which was the anthropomorphizing — or what we called personification in class — of the bacterium in the book. Indeed, the book’s preface states the following: “This is a story with four protagonists: a deadly bacterium, a vast city, and two gifted but very different men. …” (emphasis mine). This demonstrates Steven Johnson’s conscious decision in […]
Read More →Reflecting on Decameron by Boccaccio
While the context of the Decameron is rather macabre, its story is rather uplifting and it revolves around the brigata made up of ten storytellers, predominantly women. We would like to bring to your attention the framing of this story: the contrast between the morbid plague and the peaceful garden, which brings to mind the […]
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