Response to Family Viewing

After our in-class screening of Family Viewing (1987), directed by Atom Egoyan, the cluster of words you identified to describe the theme of video in the film included confusing and disturbing. Here's your chance to articulate what made the film inspire this unease.

Write a response to the film Family Viewing (directed by Atom Egoyan, 1987) in the form of an essay. Your response should be ~300 words. See this document to find out What is a Response Essay?

Peer Review Worksheet for Essay #1

Click here for a pdf of the peer review worksheet for short essay #1. Fill one out for each essay that you are editing over the weekend, using either the forms provided or on separate paper. Great discussion on surveillance and power today!

Panoptic Spaces

Michel Foucault ends his Panopticism essay with the provocation, "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" It's not only in prison that people are subject to the "disciplinary mechanisms" of the Panopticon, where people are regulated, classified, and hiearchized by the condition of feeling watched.

Describe in detail a panoptic space that you have experienced. How is the space constructed? In what ways does the space shape how you feel and behave?

Also, the Cal Student Store now has 18 copies of Writing Analytically available.

How You Write

This week on our blog, let's take a break from image/text analysis and talk about how you write. Since your first short essay assignment is coming up, I'd like to hear a bit about your writing process--your rituals and habits. What kind of non-assignment-related writing do you do, what do you get out of it, and how does it affect your academic writing? Diary, letters, lyrics, poetry, email, IM, blog...? What sort of environment do you write in? Home in bed, desk in the library, cafe...? Middle of the night or mornings? Music? What kind? What sort of apparatus do you use? Longhand, legal pads, notecards, computer, quill, pencil, pen or keyboard...? What other processes help you to write? Snacks, coffee, friends, parents, starting at the end, talking out loud, doodling...? Most importantly, in what specific ways do these things affect your thinking and your writing?

Also, please purchase Writing Analytically as soon as you can, as we will be using it throughout the semester. Ned's had 4 copies and the Cal bookstore had 1 as of this afternoon--and more are on the way. Barnes and Nobles has it for cheaper.

Un Regard Oblique

Look at Robert Doisneau's photograph, Un Regard Oblique (1948). In light of John Berger's arguments about "ways of seeing," how would you interpret this photograph? In particular, what do you make of the different gazes embodied in the photograph--that of the man and woman by the window, that of the woman portrayed in the painting, and that of you, the viewer? In other words--who is looking at who, who is aware of being looked at or not, and what is seen and what is not seen?

Also, check out these color reproductions of the Franz Hals painting that Berger analyzes against the analysis of the art historian. They are much more detailed than the reproductions in the book.

Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse, 1664
Regentesses of the Old Men's Almshouse, 1664

Also, I'm reading your freewrites now and they are great--you came up with some really simultaneously complex and spontaneous ideas in such a short block of time.