Last Blog Post!

I thought everyone did an excellent job on their presentations. Everyone seemed well prepared and interested in their topic and they did a great job portraying their knowledge to the class. However, the ones that really resonated with me were the Queer Theory and the African American Criticism.

For Queer Theory, I liked how the group used video clips as their examples from the text Brokeback Mountain. I enjoyed the movie when I saw it in theaters, but now that they were using it as an example, I saw it from a more critical analytical perspective. They really showed all the terms they used and described like how society taught us that being gay s a sign of weakness and men have this expectation to live up to that gay people just cant accomplish. They also showed binary opposition and the "Other." They touched base on the foundations of society and the superstructure, as well as how being a homosexual is a stereotype of identity and it discrimination. I think that was probably one of the more important terms because it is true, there is a lot that society does to bring these people down and there is a lot of discrimination going on.

Another theory that stuck with me was African American Criticism. This presentation stuck with me because I had no idea that this could be a theory and I did not know anything about it. I liked how this group talked a lot about one of the leading voices of this criticism, Ralph Ellison. The group read Battle Royal from Ellison's novel Invisible Man and they did a great job thoroughly going through all the examples in it. They talked about how African Americans have challenges with their ideologies, racial boundaries, and racial prejudice and how their criticism highlights how they are being suppressed. They talk about the stereotype of how black men want white men and how the white men put them in uncomfortable situations as a way to mock their freedom. What I learned from this theory was that this theory discusses how society keeps the African Ameican's in line by having them do what they want and how they are double voiced and unhomeli. This double voicedness and unhomeliness were the more important terms because it showed how they are are influenced by both blacks and whites and they do not know which side they can really relate to.

All in all, everyone did a great job and I learned a lot about all the different types of theories and the ways to analyze a text.