English

“it is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. for the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.”

“art is useful, after all, aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.”

Bryn Mawr’s Legacy of Silencing

My brain is pounding into my ears as I trek to my next meeting, hammering the familiar tune of a stress headache into my head. It is only the second week of classes, but my usual spirited fast-walk has already turned into a trudging gait that betrays my exhaustion. My mind, as is its nature, will not let me rest, promptly running an ongoing script of to-do lists and meetings through my head.

Breaking and Imposing Silence through Forgiveness

Each person, by virtue of existing in a world that disallows for complete autonomy, has experienced transgressions, either directed towards themselves, or others. And so each person, by virtue of having, at one time or another, felt wronged in some way, is imbued with the capacity and agency to forgive. But because forgiveness is so inextricably linked with the abstract and often subjective definition of wrongness, forgiveness then also becomes inextricably linked with the personal and with power.

       According to Kim and Markus, there is a sheer distinction between East Asian and American styles of speech in which East Asian culture emphasizes the “other”, “relations” and “context”, while American culture pays more attention into the “individual”, “self” and “content”. Under these cultural influences, many East Asian students, especially Chinese students, while put into a typical American classroom, exhibit a salient characteristic of being introversive, compared to their American classmates. I want to note that I am using the word “introversive” instead of “silent” this time since recently I have started to question the definition of silence and have not gotten a satisfying answer yet.

The Buffer Zone or the Elephant in the Room? : Looking at the Silence of Avoidance in American Classrooms

Shapes of Silence: Writing by Women of Colour and the Politics of Testimony

 By Proma Tagore

“There is a silence that cannot speak.

            There is a silence that will not speak.

            Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.

            I admit it.

            I hate the stillness. I hate the stone. I hate the sealed vault with its cold icon. I hate staring into the night. The questions thinning into space. The sky swallowing the echoes.

Thanks again to Sara Gladwin for this beautiful piece (I don't know why it posted twice but I can't fix it):

A friend and I were walking to a woman's house to take out her dog. We got to talking about homelessness and human suffering and if there is even such a thing. "It is wrong to pity people, because it means that you don't accept them," she argued. I agree that pity might be the wrong thing, but I don't think acceptance is okay, either. I realized that I had been raised to believe that there is human suffering in the world and that I have a responsibility to do something about it. I am reminded of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's inspiring words: "In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible." I respect and admire Rabbi Heschel for his intellectualism, spirituality, and deep sense of responsibility toward fighting injustice--which he did alongside MLK, Jr.

I grew up in a household filled with self righteous spite towards any inkling of anti-Semitism my grandfather could put his finger on. "It all comes back to the Jews, and hatred of the Jews. The Jews have endured more pain than anyone". My grandfather, his brother and his mother were the only survivors from their family of early years of the holocaust. They escaped to America from Poland, and my grandmother and her parents came from Russia. My grandfather’s family was dirt poor and his mother used to make him and his brother stand on the breadlines because she was too ashamed. This was before my grandfather went to fight in World War II. But we don’t talk about that.

given the paper i’m considering for anne, the use of breaks in a text, especially breaks to insert art, is a concept of which i’m currently hyperaware.

menchú's chapters could definitely speak for themselves alone. each section is given a heading to shape our understandings of the sections as readers.

so what, then, is the purpose of the quotation interjections at the beginning of each chapter? and how do these quotations shape the “silence” that accompanies a chapter break?