Greetings, all. You may be needing a chuckle or two over the coming weeks to alleviate the stress. Here are a couple offerings. First, via The Daily Show, consider Sir Archibald Mapsalot's contribution to our discussion of postcolonialism (via a cartography lesson that reminds of the confluence of maps and power). Then, following our discussion of teaching this past Thursday, there's this rather hysterical take on "What it's like to be a new TA".
By the way, returning to The Daily Show, and on a more serious note, I referred in class to a recent Huffington Post article (actually an interview with Chris Hedges) about Stewart and Colbert (a pair understood elsewhere to be "a postmodern response to a modern media universe") that claims they've destroyed satire because they've been coopted by the system and the entrenched power interests. Hedges argues that only by stepping outside of the mechanisms of power are we in a position to stage any kind of true revolt. All of this reminds me just a little of Greenblatt's essay that we read (and only briefly discussed) a few weeks ago, particularly that moment when he posits that "the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social energy; a gesture of dissent may be an element in a larger legitimation process, while an attempt to stabilize order on things may turn out to subvert it" (308-9).
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