Penguins's blog

 William and Alice James:

Unsurprisingly Unable to See Eye-to-Eye

 As some of you from our class know, I had originally planned to write a more ‘Choose-your-own-adventure’ style narrative as a conversation with William James, with several different choices leading to different outcomes, depending upon which philosophical direction the readers’ conversations with him took. However, due to my own difficulty grappling with and understanding his texts, I (and our Professor Anne) decided that this was perhaps too ambitious a project for me to successfully complete, so I scaled back quite a bit, and ended up with a one-way conversation with Mr. William James (yes, not quite as exciting as three-way, I know…).

While speaking with Professor Dalke during our conference, the conversation turned towards Ralph from A Portrait of a Lady; and how I came to adopt him as my favorite character for his more pure-minded intentions, while Professor Dalke found him to actually be quite evil and suspicious, since he himself was manipulating Isabel for his own amusement. Finding that an interesting angle that I had not considered before, I decided to write a more creative-minded piece that emphasized not only Ralph’s motives for manipulation throughout the book, but also the love he held for Isabel (whether cousinly or otherwise, is up to reader discretion).

The Victories of the Imagination are Enough