As promised, I wanted to share with y’all a few examples from the first round of blog posts. To repeat my disclaimer from classtime, these are not the “top ranked” posts, whatever that means. They aren’t even the one that I necessarily graded the highest. They are, however, really good examples of how to do some of the things I’m asking you to try out really well.
Here’s Andi’s post on Emerson and Du Bois. Notice how she finds something a little, well, weird to show us: that Du Bois has a riff on how we was able to live, if only briefly, “‘above the veil, in a blue sky’, which, just as Emerson promised it to be, ‘was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads.’” So Du Bois aspires to the same elevation and universality as Emerson but can only get there over the heads, so to speak, of often hostile peers.
And here’s Tyler’s post on the same topic. He emphasizes, instead, the long philosophical history of valorizing childhood as a purer, if more difficult to sustain, mental state than adulthood. Again, a non-obvious place to go in the analysis, one that many readers will have missed in their reading, yet one that helps us see Emerson’s attachment to Romanticism more broadly, as in William Wordsworth’s comment, in a famous poem, that the “child is father of the man.” I also note the clever title (“Visually Impaired”) and the judicious use of humor (e.g., that Emerson must have been high to write that way. For more on Romanticism and illicit drug use, read De Quincey for sure!).
Finally, check out Kaitlyn’s piece. She manages to pull off the tricky move–one that I don’t necessarily recommend doing most of the time–of pulling in multiple authors at once. She gives a pithy but accurate summary of Emerson’s argument and then pivots to her own take–that Du Bois, Fanon, and Hurston all strive for the same feeling of universality that Emerson assumes but find it difficult or impossible in the debilitating fun-house mirrors of the “racial imaginaries” of their respective places and times. She closes by circling back to Emerson, niftily pointing out that he celebrates, in his essay, “an ability largely and unwittingly based in his own privilege.”
So, great work, you three. And great work everyone, really: I could have picked many other pieces that also do great work on these texts. If you’re feeling confused/frustrated about this component of the course, get in touch.
