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Darwin famously said, "Crying is a puzzler" (i.e.: he couldn't figure out the adaptive use value of crying...) And if the point of studying the world is to change it, and/or the point of representing the world is to change it....well? What is the use-value of crying? What purpose does crying serve (not to put too fine a point upon it) in Uncle Tom's Cabin?

We covered quite a few other topics this week, including the use-value of generalizing (what's the difference between a generalization that is a stereotype, and one that is an archetype?). We also tried together to locate "the real," in a variety of sites: on Bryn Mawr's campus (about to become a movie location), in the "Little House of Uncle Thomas" scene in the 1956 film The King and I, and in Stowe's novel, where it seems to reside in the spiritual, or ideal world, rather than in the material one we all know and recognize.

Further musings about any of this, as you head into the "real time" that is break?