Welcome!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?

As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).

Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!

--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100



Monday, November 15, 2010

Deshpande's Summary and Claims

In Shekhar Deshpande’s article “The Confiadent Gaze,” he references his whole article around National Geographic. His article in July of 1997 was about “India: Turning Fifty.” This article was celebrating 50 years since India’s independence. Many American’s go to National Geographic to view other cultures from the comfort of their own home. As Deshpande states, “[m]iddle class parents have regarded the investment in the subscriptions as necessary for the exposure that the magazine gives their children about the world.” National Geographic shows many pictures that are very beautiful, and picturesque, but are they in context? Deshpande shows us that many of the pictures in the magazine are meant to appease the “Western Eye.” When anyone state “western eye,” they mean American’s or America in general. This feel for being “somewhere else” is the incentive to buy the magazine. But the main culprit for the picturesque-ness is the editors. They are the people who know what sells, and how to sell it. We are sucked into wanting to see the “primitive” people of the world, and separating ourselves from them.

One of Deshpande’s claim that really stuck out to me was, “[h]uman suffering becomes worth a good image.” As National Geographic comes out with beautiful pictures, we need to be conscious about what context they are taken in. I believe that National Geographic editors take a picture and twist the meaning just so they can have a good picture. To me, this is very disturbing. I do not like the fact that people will mess with a beautiful culture, and make it more universal, and to make us more comfortable while looking at it.

Another claim that Deshpande makes is that “[c]onstructions of self-identity comes through a representation/images of the other.” I believe this is very true statement for me. In images I can relate to, I can see a visual of what I might have wanted to represent, but couldn’t find a picture to do so. I also like to draw images of what I think my personality is like. It is a representation of me for others to see. To me, that is the coolest part about pictures/images.

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