Post #7

The presentations helped me a lot for what choice to pick on my final. According to the presentations about Post-colonialism, this means colonies of other countries. Assumed that European cultures are the ones that spread this. I was able to grab two three term from this, which are orientalism, un-homeliness, and decolonization. Orientalism means something considered characteristic of the peoples and cultures of west, east, or central Asia. The knowledge and study of these languages and cultures. Un- homeliness meaning neither culture feels like home for a person it could mean they don't feel like they belong anywhere.  An ideology that is often forced on groups of people. And decolonization meaning giving political independence to a country that was previously a colony. They term hybridity stood out the most for me. It means the creation of new transcultural terms within the contact zone produced by colonization. takes many forms including cultural, political, and linguistic. A good example of New Historicist that the presentation talked about was a story. So, we basically feel that history is history but we can not really say why and how it happened we were never in their shoes so we can not possibly know the reasons to why they decided to do what they did. For African American theory I was able to understand the theory through the short story Battle Royal by Ralph Ellison. About real cultural issues affecting African Americans in society throughout history. For example, when they see the naked white lady they don't know if they should look or not look. They do not know how they are expected to behave. Therefore they do not know their place in society. And Queer Theory which was mainly about how gays, lesbians, cross-dressing, and any other that might fall into the term queer. Like the term binaries meaing men/women and straight/gay. Sexuality and gender are fluid concepts. One great example that my group and I were able to relate this theory with was Brokeback Mountain. A movie that was meant to show the love relationship of two men and we were able analyze how society sees that as just a plain "gay" movie. But queer theory analyzes the term gay and lesbian. By placing them together for the term queer. The terms in the presentation for each of the theories made it a lot of easier for me to understand them.

Blod post 7

I thought the presentations overall were really funny and entertaining. Some were better than others, in terms of keeping me interested and awake, but it seemed better to me when a group used pictures,power points or even video clip to entertain the audience rather than blatantly speaking on their theory.I really liked New historicism and my own groups,Queer Theory, since we used video clips to even help the audience picture what had happened.

"Postcolonialism theory consists of a set of theories in philosophy & various approaches to literary analysis that are concerned with literature written in English involving colonialism and imperialism." Their group used Aria to discuss how two different cultures can clash when trying to determine what a persons cultural background is, to how should they act around the public. That to be an American or a Citizen of a given country you must give up your social identity and adjust and assimilate to the cultural background set by that country. '

Also after hearing on the African American criticism i realized both our groups shared common literary terms such at the binary opposition and the "other" to show how Africans are discriminated against such as gays in a point in time in American culture. I really dove deeper and felt the connection between the two theories.

Blog Post 7

The presentation were all really well put together and i enjoyed watching and listening to all the different theoretical theories. It was interesting learning the new theories with different approaches from each of the groups and then learning how they applied it to a certain piece of literature. They were all  easy to follow and learn from unlike other presentation i've seen in the past. The use of engaging material and video clips made watching and learning the material more entertaining and helpful overall. The two presentations I really got the most information retained from would be the Queer theory and New Historicism.

The Queer theory group did an awesome job describing the theoretical framework as well as applying it to their  literary piece. I learned from this group what exactly is queer theory which is the challenging assumptions of sexual identity, gender, and sexual differences, maintaining that our identities are not connected to our supposed essence but to what we do and who we are. On top of all that i learned the term social constructivism which is basically how people formulate ideas about certain words and change its meaning. I also enjoyed this presentation because they incorporated many movie clips from Brokeback Mountain which helped implement these ideas.

New Historicism was the other theory which i found interesting since i like the idea of history being subjective rather than objective. It opens the mind to new view points and helps us understand what was really happening in certain texts. Of course with this literary criticism I learned the most influential figure for it was Greenblatt since the group really put some emphasize on who he was and what he did for new historicism. The examples given to us like the Nazis and the pilgrims where really interesting to learn about because it cemented how the past is really not just viewed one way. This taught me that the their are many discourses on how to view the world ultimately.
-Leo

Blog post 7 Michelle Smart I really enjoyed the presentations. I thought that it was very beneficial to hear how other student learn and how they connect different literary theories to different pieces of literary work was very interesting. I learned a lot from my fellow students in this manner. They were fun and engaging. Not only is it hard to get up in front of an entire class but trying to teach the, something that we are going tobe tested on is a pretty hard thing to do, but I love a challenge. I really liked the New historic group. They were one of the brave ones to go very first. I really washable to understand that this theory does not take what historians think to be the ulitimate in truth when incomes to history. I think it is a very brave way of looking at literature and we can learn a lot more from seeing the other side of the coin of history. The Post Colonial groups were also ver informative. When I went through this theory in the Bresslers book I did not really understand what was going on. These groups helped me to realize that there is a difference in the colonizer and the colonized. And this is the stories of the colonized. I loved the break down of "Counter Parts" by James Joyce. The way the group brought out the British control from the way this man worked to even the young man he got into a fight with, helped me understand the control in these stories and what about them stands out. Thanks guys!

Blog Post #7

I really enjoyed doing the presentations as well as learning from them. It was a fun and creative way to learn different types of analytical theories using our own methods. They were all very well done but the two that stood out to me was New Historicism and Queer Theory.

I wasn't sure at the beginning of the presentation what the difference between New and Old historicism was but the group did a very good job elaborating and explaining the differences. I like how New Historicists perceive history as subjective and try to acknowledge different points of views rather than the Old, which views history as concrete. The example referring to the Nazis and the Holocaust really stuck with me. As we all know, the Nazis commited horrible acts but with a New Historic point of view it really opened my eyes to the possibility that many of them probably resented what they were doing but were either not in the right state of mind or so bound by fear to do anything else. The group did a very good a job at engaging the audience which made things easier to understand.

I enjoyed how the Queer Theory group incorporated the use of the film in order to help us understand different parts of the theory. During the first scene when they kiss, was a great example of double-consciousness. On one hand they live their lives as cowboys with the "macho-man" reputation with a wife and kids and on the other hand they are homosexuals that are in love with each other. They cannot mix their two lifestyles together because of conflicting issues as well as the fear of how society would view them. This can be seen in the second clip when he tries to get a job, he is denied because his boss knew about him being gay, although he had previously worked their and was more than capable of doing the job.

Blog Post 7

I really enjoyed the presentations! I think everyone did a fabulous job in articulating what their theory was about. I found the presentations to be really informative, because i will admit that some of the theory's i had heard of but i didn't know much about them. Two of my favorite theory's were queer theory and post colonialism theory.

Queer theory are the theoretical & critical writings concerning things like gender identity & sexual desires. Queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self & upon gay/lesbian studies close examination of socially constructed nature of sexual acts & identities. This theory was discussed using the film Brokeback Mountain. This film really does stumble upon some of the issues that come across in queer theory, such as stereotyping, social constructivism, binary operations, etc. But for me binary operations stood out because of the fact that it kind of deals with what is right and wrong according to society (morally speaking). I loved the fact that the presentations had videos as visual aids because it was easier to connect with.

Postcolonialism theory consists of a set of theories in philosophy & various approaches to literary analysis that are concerned with literature written in English involving colonialism and imperialism. Our group used Aria by Richard Rodriguez as an example of post colonialism. This story ultimately dealt with the assumption that in order to gain a public identity you have to loose your native identity. The term that really interested me in this theory was the idea of "unhomeliness", because personally i could connect with the idea of feeling caught between two cultures.

Chaz's Final Blogg post

The group presentations were really good this year. I have had many other classes with group projects and presentations but I didn’t learn near as much. The most valuable thing to me was the analytical critique in different types of criticism. It really helped seeing the mechanics of each story unfold for a specific type of critique. The two that I found the most interesting were Post Colonialism and Queer Theory.

Post Colonialism is different view on events historically. We are always looking at information from the point of view of the colonizer and rarely the colonized. Post Colonialism isn’t made up of just one element but encompasses many from English literature from many different countries. “Aria” by Richard Rodriguez was used to describe this type of Theory. I liked the term The “Other,” which was very poetic in  of its self. We had orientalism, that unveiled European stereotypes that negatively depict Asians. The term of unhomeliness really stood out as well. There are many foreigners that feel as though they are caught in this principle.

The Queer Theory is very relevant in today’s society. The term queer is becoming this word that encompasses all things that may be termed as homosexual. Broke Back Mountain was a perfect example of this. The story shows how many become uneasy at the thought of a queer relationship. Our group did New Historicism, which could focus on certain events in history that may have been very important in the queer society. All in all this was a great class. I learned the most out of this English class than all of the one’s combined to this point.