Can we post essays we've written in school on here? I&#

>>9505260
I don't write essays in English, so I won't share any. I got a question for you, thought. What exactly are you trying to say? It seems to be an essay on aesthetics, but it's written in such a terribly unsystematic way that most terms rest on vague intuitions, rendering the content largely unintelligible.
Perhaps I'm just not used to this more literary style of essais.

>>9505336
It's a personal essay on the topic of transcendence.

>>9505369
And why did you decide to write it down? For the philosophical significance or because you think it has literary merit?
(Please don't read these question as being condescending. That's not at all the intention. I just want to understand your essay better)

>>9505384
Well it was for a class but I guess I'd hope that there was philosophical significance and literary merit in it. It was meant to be a thought on creation and destruction and how we find God in between.

Job Gräber, Ryan Bry.

>>9505437
Is it for a theology class? If it is, make more references to theological works. Also, drop the class.
If it's a for philo class, start all over again and (re)read herr Kant first. Primarily the first and the third critique.
I have no experience with essais for English classes, but please spend at least two clear and systematic paragraphs on your notion of god.

>>9505444
le epik doksks

>>9505461
it was for a creative writing class and I got an A.

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>>9505260
I like it, I like what you're trying to do. But the prose and execution is just a tad heavy-handed.
For example, the picture hung on your mothers wall enraged you. But let's be honest, at best the picture only struck you as odd, and most of the things you say the picture excited in you were at best confused and implicit.
I realize you remedy this when you say "Of course, I didn't know these things then." But still the whole passage comes of as too
eccentric or sensational, which would work if the prose was more tasteful. So either improve your prose or write it more from an intellectual standpoint, the way it is it's somewhere in the middle and I can tell right off the bat that you're not saying what you really mean.
Shit takes time and practice though. Just keep at it.
As for God, make a good study the summa, because Aquinas is simultaneously very clever and very conventional with his language, which makes it feel both poetical and intellectual, and it translates extremely well to english.

>>9505260
posting a short excerpt from a history essay,

>On the 14th of January, 1208 CE, a papal legate named Peire de Castlenau was stabbed in the back by an anonymous squire as he crossed the Rhone. He died shortly after forgiving his anonymous murderer. Peire de Castlenau, a virulent denouncer of heresy in Languedoc, would then become the martyred cause of some twenty years of the “sporadic warfare, indiscriminate butchery, and bloody conquest” known as the Albigensian Crusade. The particular heretical movement Peire de Castlenau had denounced, Catharism, had become especially widespread in Northern Italy and Southern France, where the sect grew to challenge the Church of Rome. The Albigensian Crusade, it is estimated, claimed somewhere between 200,000 to 1,000,000 souls. Yet the event was not singular. The story of the Cathars, the Crusade, and the Inquisition designed to eliminate them, was part of a much larger narrative of Church persecution of heretics in the High and Late Middle Ages, the reasons for which are worth investigating.

>>9508436

>The reason why the persecution of heretics greatly increased in the High and Late Middle Ages is an unsatisfying and facile one: there were simply more heretics to be persecuted. However superficial, this is nonetheless the most fundamental reason. The Cathars, the most significant heretical movement of the Middle Ages, blossomed between the 11th and 12th centuries CE. What this entailed was, as the Middle Ages peaked and waned, church and state alike exerted merciless force in order to maintain religious and social hegemony. For the Cathars, this reached its apex in the Albigensian Crusade and later, the Inquisition—two events which all but eliminated nearly any trace of Catharism in Europe. Growth in heresy created a unity between Church and State, which gave the church a strong, secular arm to combat unorthodox beliefs and behaviours. From this, decrees, papal bulls, and ecuminal councils legitimized persecution of heresy as they were accepted with zeal by secular rulers. A rhetoric of heresy developed, which sought to justify persecution by appealing to popular prejudice and perceptions of heretics. Church reformers of the time were aware of heresy’s growth and spread. They sought to re-define what exactly it meant to be a Christian in a Christian community. Heretics, by definition, did not follow these reforms, thus they had to be changed or eliminated. A zeal for violence, especially in the name of God, seized Europe. Rewards for persecuting heretics made it even desirable. The confluence of these factors made Europe in the High and Late Middle Ages what R.I. Moore called a “persecuting society” : a society that found unity and stability in the formalized slaughter of religious dissidents. The eradication of the Cathars in order to secure religious hegemony for the Catholic Church cannot be seen as a solely religious issue; rather, the decline and fall of Catharism reflected a society equipped with the arms to beat down any and all religious dissent—and by any means possible.

>>9508436
>>9508437
stellar opening on that. really enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting.

An essay about /ourguy/

>An unexplored area of film criticism is Paul Thomas Anderson’s association with David Foster Wallace. The significant extratextual factor that links Anderson to Wallace is that Anderson was one of Wallace’s English students at Emerson College. Anderson said in a WTF podcast that Wallace “was the first teacher [he] fell in love with”—he went as far as calling Wallace to run paper ideas by him. When asked why he did not stay at Emerson, Anderson responded that it was because “[Wallace] left” (WTF podcast). Wallace on the flip-side was also aware of Anderson’s presence. In D.T. Max’s biography on Wallace, Wallace called Boogie Nights “exactly the story that he had been trying to write” (316). I am not suggesting Anderson is any less influenced by say Altman or Ophüls, but that Anderson is more than the sum of his cinematic influences, and that the literary works of Wallace serve as an alternative way of understanding Anderson’s oeuvre. I will show how Wallace’s aesthetic-moral principles highlighted in Infinite Jest and Wallace’s own views of art are woven into Anderson’s Boogie Nights. Wallace wants us to realize a world outside ourselves filled with “really human” (IJ 695) people. He stresses the dangers of sinking into solipsism and believing that the self is the “most important person in existence” (“This is Water” 36) through connecting solipsism to substance abuse. Anderson mirrors Wallace’s notion that solipsism is a drug through his depiction of Dirk’s cocaine addiction as a futile attempt to be independent from the external world. The Wallacean “really human” will be explored as a concept and then linked to Boogie Nights primarily through an analysis of Reed. In the final section, I will show how Wallace and Anderson allow for the “really human” naiveté to be mutually compatible with the cynicism associated with self-reflexivity through an analysis of both work’s meta-text properties.

>>9508644
A paragraph near the end.
Both works do not use self-reflexivity to deconstruct art but instead to connect us to their respective characters. In Infinite Jest, James Incandenza creates a film called Infinite Jest that becomes the object of one of the book’s narratives. The first layer of self-reflexivity is established—the film Infinite Jest is titled the same as the book. This layer functions as Barth claims a postmodern work would, examining “the relationship between literary method and the reality it sought to depict… undertaking [an ironic] self-reflexive inquiry into the ontological status of literary inquiry itself” (Boswell 12). In other words, the subject matter of the film Infinite Jest is the process of representation (filmmaking) and not what is being represented itself. This is exactly why Hal critiques the film: he describes it as “abstract and self-reflexive: we end up feeling and thinking not about the characters but the cartridge itself” (IJ 946). That is, the primary subject of Infinite Jest is itself because it is so “abstract[ed]” (IJ 946) that it no longer represents an external world. In this way, the film becomes a solipsistic text.

Wallace denounces meta-texts like the character James’s film Infinite Jest in his novella Westward. In the McCaffery interview, Wallace states his aim in Westward was to “get [metafiction] over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans” (41). He does this blatantly when he says “Metafiction is untrue, as a lover…. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It’s the act of a lonely solipsist’s self-love” (Westward 330). Cynicism and naiveté are mutually compatible. It is just that Wallace’s cynicism is directed at solipsistic meta-texts.
The book Infinite Jest uses self-reflexivity not for its own “solipsist’s self-love” (Westward 330) but to build character. By having Hal condemn the film Infinite Jest, we get to learn more about Hal and his values. The self-reflexive act of critiquing a text in a text from Hal’s perspective develops Hal’s character. We see this again in the “yrstruly” (28) section of Infinite Jest, where Wallace recounts the drug abuse and crime in Boston’s Chinatown from the perspective and in the stream-of-consciousness style of someone named “yrstruly.” The name “yrstruly” self-reflexively refers to the reader every time it is uttered. Wallace frames the “yrstruly” story to develop character as opposed to deconstruct the literary text. Whereas stream-of-consciousness in a Barthesian text could be used to reveal the process of writing itself, Wallace uses it here to characterize “yrstruly” as constantly formulating half-formed thoughts and emphasizing his frisky view of the world. Wallace frees self-reflexivity from having to be about the process of writing and allows it to be about characters and their interactions with the world.

>>9508658
>Likewise, Anderson uses self-reflexivity to develop his characters as opposed to making an inquiry into filmmaking. Both Jack and Anderson are filmmakers, and when Jack declares that he will never convert to video because film is better, he becomes an insert for Anderson (who has a documented dedication to film). A Barthesian postmodernist would be ironic, but Anderson presents Jack sincerely. Anderson treats Jack’s porn as an art that deserves respect. Jack’s dream is “to make a film that is true and right and dramatic.” Jack believes film can be true and not just refer back on itself as a solipsistic text. Pornography does not simply exist for someone to masturbate to. Dirk says that Jack’s work isn’t about “[going] out and having sex with millions of people… it’s about how to get your wife off.” Art for Anderson serves a greater purpose outside “the cartridge itself” (IJ 946). Anderson uses porn as an occasion in which his characters can interact with one another. For example, Dirk’s previously described first shoot does not deconstruct the nature of film, but instead advances the dynamic between Dirk and Jack and allows us to understand Dirk better. We do see the camera rolling, but emphasis is placed on the reactions of the characters more than the film itself. After filming starts, 26 seconds are entirely dedicated to reaction shots of the crew. Even when the film reel runs out and the crew has to switch it, Anderson focuses on Jack’s reaction to Dirk over the process of changing the film reel by panning the camera to Jack until he is center frame. The main action of the scene in a Barthesian text would be the film reel and the process of filmmaking, but Anderson’s primary subject is Jack’s response to Dirk. Therefore, through Anderson’s self-reflexive reference to the film, attention is directed not on pornography but the characters in that film and the “really human” interactions between characters.

>>9508644
>>9508658
>>9508662
Excellent, really made me think because I'm definitely a solipsistic metafiction lover. One thing though, abandon that term "develops character."