As our time together comes to close, I will have to echo a few thoughts: I should have absolutely taken this class earlier, and I have grown immensely as a researcher. It would be safe to say that JSTOR and the good folks at the library and I are good friends now. Better yet, with […]
Author Archive | Franco
Blog 7: “Ged is not white.”
Dismantling Whiteness in the Collective Imagination: Lessons for Diverse Fantasy Literature in Ursula K. Leguin’s A Wizard of Earthsea Although fantasy is increasingly diverse with decades of world-building on the part of authors in the tradition, children of the new, globalist 21st century grow up with predominately Western, ethnocentric literature, and often are unable to […]
Professor Talks: Scholarly Discourse
The Realness of the Fantastic and Minutia: Insights from Dr. Seaman and Dr. Bruns Dr. Seaman and Dr. Bruns came to us on Tuesday with the intent of sharing their scholarship with us, and the discourses they encounter while researching; at first glance, film studies and medieval literature might have little crossover, but from what we […]
Final Proposal
Franco Porras Professor Vander Zee English 299 28 March 2016 Dismantling Whiteness in the Collective Imagination: Lessons for Diverse Fantasy Literature in Ursula K. Leguin’s “Earthsea” In 1968, Ursula K. LeGuin published one of the most seminal works of children’s fantasy literature, “A Wizard of Earthsea”, the story of a young wizard named Ged and his journey towards understanding […]
Bonus Prompt: Postcolonialism Needs Marx
Sue-Im Lee brings a very sharp critique of the “Global Village”, utilizing Yamashita’s “Tropic of Orange” as both case study and framework. There’s just one glaring problem- “romantic universalism” isn’t really an epistemological substitute as a transcendental signifier for the hypocritical, neoliberal globalism. I’m honestly not sure I understand the concept of the “romantic universal” […]
American Efficacy: Are We “Free”?
Once again, our text knows the absolute best way to make us feel horrible about the various contexts in which we live. How do they contextualize the concept of agency? “None of us is in control of the social spaces that we inhabit; nor are we completely in control of the subject positions that we […]
Time “Wasted” in the Age of Capitalism: Impatience With Revolution
The text continues its sometimes winding rhetoric with the succinctly titled “Space/Time”, which makes me very anxious just by the title. After all, one of my pet projects, a fantasy novel, has been floating around in my brain (and in various mediums, through different hard drives and notebooks) for the better part of a decade, […]
No, The Author Never Died, and Some Opinons Are In Fact, Wrong
As a preface to my response to our reading, it must be said that I, as a fellow reader and an author, value highly the interpretive power of both roles in literature and study thereof. After all, one of my most favorite philosophers of the Western Hemisphere, Soren Kierkegaard wrote famously, “Truth is subjectivity.” As […]