On page 245 of The Theory Toolbox, I read part of a sentence that triggered something in my memory. To paraphrase it, Darwin says that humans are animals just as much as any other creature on this planet. For some reason, that reminded me of the Yahoo creatures in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift. […]
In the chapter “Nature” the authors Nealon and Giroux use lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear to provide an interesting example of how we see this concept of “nature” in play. The example shows how polarizing nature can be; it is at once “an original innocence from which there has been a fall” and a “destructive…force”. Nealon […]
In my modern history class we have been reading the book In the Name of God and Country by Michael Fellman. It argues that terrorism has been a constant and crucial driving force in America from the Civil War to the present day. This thought sits like a lump in our throats. We don’t want […]
Ecocritics work to create awareness that the environment simultaneously affects and is affected by human culture, and interaction. According to the text, the aim is to view ”nature as a part of the community rather than as a commodity”. I feel that this has been true since the beginning of time as we feed of the […]
There’s a working question in the Differences chapter that deals with political correctness. It seems to me that in a lot of cases political correctness has the potential to hide prejudice. You can be when we hear things like ‘African-American,’ ‘Homosexual,’ ‘Mentally-handicapped person,’ ‘Native-American,’ and so on, you get the sense that people are saying […]
Just like an many other chapter of the Theory Toolbox, the writer poses many interesting ideologies and pushes us – the readers – to draw our own conclusions about what is being presented. However, this time more than usual the writer seems to have a forthright concept to share that deserves a bit or critiquing, […]
In The Theory Toolbox, on page 177 there is a prompt asking about whether or not “political correctness” has so deeply penetrated literary criticism to the point of being its ultimate goal. To demonstrate a possible answer to this question, the text cites a critic named Frank Lentricchia who decided to opt out of the […]
While reading the chapter “Differences” in Nealon and Giroux’s Theory To olbox, I was struck by the passage on so-called “universal” themes, particularly the comment “the supposedly “universal” subject has a very specific gender: masculine” (179). I was immediately reminded of the 2016 Oscars controversy, which erupted after the release of the Oscars nominations. From […]
While I was reading the chapter entitled “Post” from Nealon and Giroux’s “The Theory Toolbox”, I stumbled across a very intriguing quote: “Maybe all this suggests a postmodern insistence on process rather than a product: A “postmodern” cultural artifact is one that consistently questions itself and the context that it seems to fit within. Perhaps, […]
Immediately, when reading the chapter “Differences”, I knew what I would write for this week’s blog post. I agree wholly with the idea that our attributes don’t define us, such as on page 174 when the authors write “having brown skin does not inherently mean anything”. But, of course, in history (and today), we see that having […]