Literary Kinds 2012

I feel like my brain may be on overdrive a bit this week.  I'm thinking about Thursday's class and how we're now moving onto graphic novels and honestly I'm a bit confused.  I thought Thursday's class was incredibly interesting.  Mental differences are very real and very important to understand, especially in the context of education.  I think that's why I'm confused.  I've been trying to tie Thursday's class into the whole genre of the academic essay.  I think I've wrapped my brain around the idea that mental differences among people can lead us to create various genres of people.  I also understand from our studies of academic writing so far that catagorizing anything into genres is extremely complicated and difficult.  Is that how I should relate Thursday's class?  We should be aware of differences among people even within a possible "genre" that society may associate them with? 

Maybe I'm over thinking.  Maybe the point was just to read a chapter of a very interesting book and have scholarly discussion about it.  Maybe it's just the rigid confines of most of my schooling that is causing me to look for a bigger picture.

Mental health is a personal interest of mine - mainly because it is so personal to me, but also because I like to think that there is a connection between mental disorders and brilliance.  Newton, Michaelangelo, Nash, Einstein, Van Gogh, Aristotle - so many great minds in history who are thought to have had some sort of mental disorder (by studying their personal journals or historical accounts about their personalities).  As I said in class, I indulge in being part of a community of people who have the same mental disorder as I do.  It is my personal preference to dive into the idea that mental illness and intelligence are connected.  Very smart people come with baggage.

I watched this short (30 minute) documentary film about a young woman and her experience with bipolar disorder.  "Crooked Beauty: Navigating the line between brilliance and insanity" is a personal documentary in which the author, Jacks McNamara, advocates for people to live with their madness and use it as a tool for inspiration and creativity.  She specifically does not support allowing people to use their diagnosis as an excuse, or a burden reliever. She did not appreciate being medicated so that her 'radio transmitters' were shut down, and she more easily glanced over the world's suffering, instead of being so sensitive to it.

During Thursday's discussion, I had much to say about the education system and how I am perfectly content with the way it is; in fact, I think I was defending the system. I have come to adapt to its ways, and even dare to say that I have mastered it well—enough to know to do what I am told, say what it expected of me, and never question the system. The thought of changing a system that I have successfully maneuvered for the last 16 years of my life scares me. I’m not even sure I want to imagine a world that is any different—where students can freely do whatever they need in order to fully understand and digest material, where the established roles of teachers and students are broken down. Honestly, using the restroom without asking for permission is still something I can’t do in my college classes; I have always known my place a student and never questioned it, just always adapted to this role. But it never occurred to me that other people can’t. I was selfish in my thoughts the other day when I mentioned that in an environment that caters to everyone’s needs, I will be displaced. There are so many people who have been feeling like this for quite a while, and barely anyone to speak up and do something for them.

This week has been one of my favorite weeks at college, ever.  I think it has a lot to do with the conversations we’ve been having in class.  I’ve been connecting things from this class to lots of things in my life outside of class, I’ve been reading more, thinking more, smiling more, and writing.  I feel really lucky to have been a part of reading what we’ve read and saying what we’ve said this week, and I feel sad to be saying goodbye to this unit.  I hope that we can make graphic novels as exciting as academic writing (I’m laughing at myself because the response to that seems so glaringly obvious to me: YES! OF COURSE WE CAN!)  

Anyways...

I left last Thursday class a little shaken.  Our conversation and the Breaking Project reading made me think about things I didn’t really want to think about.

Some background:

There's an interesting piece in the Times "Week in Review" section today, called The Death of the Cyberflaneur. It locates the evolution of the internet--from its earlier days, as a place of wandering exploration, to its current structure, which is highly deterministic and commercially driven--in the longer history of the "flaneur," the 19th century wanderer who "did not have anything too definite in mind," as he strolled the streets of Paris, observing, sometimes narrating, the rich sensory experience he perceived there.

The key challenge here--to the celebration of collaboration that we've lately been engaged in--is "this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective"; it's an interesting take on "the tyranny of the social" that I think we might explore more fully together….