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Calderon's picture

Emergence of Genre is all over the place

Calderon

 In my GlobalPolitics class we are reading political theory (V. Spike Peterson, ACritical Rewriting of Global Political Economy, Routledge 2003, Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: OnCosmopolitanism and Human Rights, Harvard2006) and these writes used some of Derrida’s argument to explain how theconcept of freedom is a social construct. They believe that language is a codethat society has created and since it has to be change we the new generations (genre)need to break down this old code and create maybe a new that suits better oursociety.  This is then is newemergence of meanings.

 

Derrida was useful and helped to understand that language inthe political sphere is a construction of what “might” suit the current time welive in. It made me think also of how this code of language changes and howsociety changes along with it sometimes. In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” I see slaveryas something that I have a hard time trying to understand, process even imaginewhy it happened. It makes me think that it changed because people redefinedwhat a human was here in the US. So Derrida is right, in the sense that thereis nothing there since it’s changing (takes a long time but it does)constantly. What people believe to be meaningful is not.  Also in “The Scarlet Letter” there is asociety that is so afraid of change or breaking the code of rules that decideto kill a woman who has done nothing wrong. So emergence of genre is not onlyliterary, b but also social.

 

In our class now we are learning about the emergence ofblogs and I think that since we don’t have a social code to define it, agender, or a specific structure to give, then people oppose it because is anemergence of randomness.  I thinkthat the randomness is what I very much like about blogs. It has no gender, nocode; it has just whatever words one wants to leave. I don’t know if thisposting is helpful but I like how this class and the things that I learn herehelp me think in my other classes. When I read Derrida I didn’t like the ideathat there is nothing there that is just a social construction, but now Iappreciate so much more the theory.

 

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