Note 1: Those of you working on last week's blogs can give yourself an extra day, because of fall break. Regardless, I'm not going to grade them until Monday night at the earliest.
Note 2: This assignment is, as usual, due on Wednesday.
Assignment: Refresh yourself on McKibben's concerns about the loss of community and/or collective meaning in our culture. Look, for instance, between page 50 and page 60, although not only there. Make your own argument about the "loss of meaning" (or the non-loss of meaning), using both McKibben and Ware as sources (Jimmy's complete absence of community, and near-absence of human contact, are obvious starting points here). Asking yourself some of these questions might help you to generate an argument.
1) Is McKibben right or wrong that we have lost (collective) meaning?
2) Is this change (if you accept it) worthwhile, given the other things we have lost, or not?
3) How does Jimmy's life and situation reflect on the collective loss of meaning? Take, for instance, his lifelong obsession with Superman, his strange fantasy life, his relationship with his mother, etc. as starting points. Is Ware trying to depict modern life in general, or just one sad loser?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Dr. Johns,
Do you want out papers to be about why we believe there is a loss of meaning or non-meaning? I was just kind of confused about what the focus of the argument needs to be.
You might cover why meaning has been lost, although that's at best implicit in the prompt. The first question is simply to ask *whether* meaning has been lost or not -- then you proceed from there.
Post a Comment