Legend and Achilles (sitting)

Status Anxiety Paper Topic

For those who have chosen the option to do Paper 4 on "status anxiety" will choose from the following topics.  Please come to class prepared with a draft on Thursday, December 10.  There will be no other opportunity to hand in the paper since class ends on Dec. 17.

Topic One:  Respond to the NY Times article "No Budget, No Boundaries"
In this paper you will "unpack" the phenomena of people purchasing virtual goods online as part of their participation in online / virtual communities.  Establish an opinion / thesis about it, assess the extent to which this is creating a political fiction in their personal lives and speculate on the short and long-term effects of such an enterprise.

Topic Two:  Find the two New York Times articles (one is a feature, the other is a commentary) on job seekers who are people of color and struggle to "erase" any signs of their color or ethnicity in an attempt to land a job.  Some of the applicants have real concerns about being ignored because they are considered "too black" for some jobs.  It reminded me of the Bayoumi portrait about the young man who faced brick wall in hiring with Al Jazeera on his resume.  In this paper you will explain the situation, speculate on what you think is happening and analyze it as an example of status anxiety.

Topic Three:  Write a personal paper in which you tell a narrative (story) about a current struggle you face with status anxiety.  It can be either public (such as a job search) or private (internally, with a partner or with friends).  You'll need to give a brief overview of the circumstances, explain why you have status anxiety, what you have done to cope with it and assess how you will, if possible, overcome the status anxiety.

Now, you will recall that I was both cursed and blessed not to be raised with conventional pressures around status.  My family DIDN'T say, "Why just work on this farm when we could OWN this farm!"  I say cursed because it probably made me have so little ambition in life and a blessing because I did not have to deal with that kind of pressure, to measure up and to do better than the neighbors.

See you on Thursday!

Wisdom for Our Current Age, Too

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)

In today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes a column that very much connects to our class discussion on Bayoumi's "How Does it Feel to be a Problem?" text in several ways.  The most significant is that what he calls "the narrative" - the same thing we called conditioning and a political fiction in our class - is the false sale of goods sold to Muslims AND to non-Muslims about who, why and what is happening in the Islamic world.

Friedman's column, "America vs. The Narrative," is worth reading, it's short and will add to our talk together about this serious issue.

America vs. The Narrative

What should we make of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who apparently killed 13 innocent people at Fort Hood?

Here’s my take: Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his support for Muslim suicide bombers, about how he showed up at a public-health seminar with a PowerPoint presentation titled “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam,” and about his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America — the more it seems that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by “The Narrative.”

What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

More here... 

Wisdom for Our Current Age

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

New York Magazine Publishes Short Stories in Feature Called "Political Fictions"

Suppose it is time to retire this course theme, now?  Huh?

The story by Paul Rudnick on Sarah Palin is very funny!

Here for link to New York Magazine stories 

Class Update

It was suggested by Anna that we cancel Paper 5 and the discussion of "Status Anxiety."  I have decided to agree to the paper cancelation.

You are no longer required to buy / read / bring the text Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

However, we will still have a discussion on the topic "Status Anxiety."

Read this article called "No Budget, No Boundaries" in the New York Times (here) about online "worlds" where people spend real money for virtual status symbols


DUE ON DECEMBER 5:
Bring TWO copies of Paper 4 on Toni Morrison's A Mercy for peer review