Lesson Plan for Week 7: General Thoughts and Notes

Patrick Mooney, TA
Eng 193, Prof. Newfield
18/19 February 2014  
  1. Thought for the day:
    1. Every time a student sits down to write for us, he [sic] has to invent the university for the occasion — invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like History or Anthropology or Economics or English. He [sic] has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes — to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and an experimental psychologist the next […] I am continually impressed by the patience and good will of our students.

      -David Bartholomae, "Inventing the University"

  2. Return of papers and discussion of what was/was not successful on the papers:
  3. Questions for discussion:
    1. Near the beginning of Roman Polanski's Chinatown, J.J. "Jake" Giddes gets into an argument with a mortgage banker from The First National Bank and yells, I don't kick families out of their houses like you bums down at the bank do! Much of the plot of Chinatown involves Jake's attempt to perceive power relations between individuals far above the social levels at which he normally moves. How do these power relationships relate to property ownership?
    2. Chinatown is a movie about power dealings between white people, but the title of the movie and much of the characters' backgrounds involve relationships with separate, non-white communities. How do these communities relate? How is this similar to and different from the relationships between "Easy" Rawlins and the Los Angeles white community in Walter Mosley's Black Betty?
    3. The novels we have read and the movie we have seen so far in the quarter have been set in Los Angeles. How do the processes of detection that we have seen in these texts depend on a knowledge of Los Angeles and its power relationships?