SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Friday, September 17
INTD 105 17
Fall 2021
Prof. Doug Baldwin
(No.)
The dean’s office invites students who are looking for a major or thinking of changing majors to sit in on certain classes whose professors have opened them up for that purpose between September 27 and October 8.
See https://www.geneseo.edu/dean_office/students-exploring-majors and particularly the “Open SEM Week” section for more information and to register if you’re interested.
Geneseo seems to be reiterating and perhaps cracking down on its policy on mask wearing, specifically:
How does a person’s language affect perceptions of them? For example, what is your own experience, how do Jupiter’s and Legrand and the narrator’s uses of language in “The Gold Bug” affect your understanding of them, etc.
What characters say has a big impact (e.g., some of the dialog between Legrand and Jupiter clearly shows that Legrand feels, and Jupiter accepts, Legrand’s control over Jupiter).
But how they say it (e.g., vocabulary, sentence structure) also makes a big difference, e.g., reading even a few words from Jupiter suggests that he is uneducated or unintelligent, while a few words from Legrand or the narrator convey intelligence and sophistication.
This is true in real life too, i.e., how a person uses language tends to quickly make a big impression on people they meet.
How does this play out in the particular case of African American Language? Does reading Jones’s blog change your views of Jupiter?
The blog motivates people to think about where Jupiter’s language comes from in terms of his culture and upbringing, to see his language as not just a sign of poor education or inferiority.
Maybe Jupiter picked up his language while he was enslaved.
(This, too, is a good lesson for real life: language is a reflection of culture and experience, not of intelligence.)
I’ll officially assign this Monday, but you can look at it and start thinking about it now if you want.
Continue the past week or so’s conversation about racism in American entertainment in writing.
Specifically, pick a piece of current entertainment that you are familiar with and analyze it in terms of how it interacts with (i.e., supports, challenges, modifies, etc.) the thesis that racist caricatures have been and are an ongoing element of American entertainment.
We’ll peer critique drafts a week from Monday (September 27), probably via Zoom. Final versions are due October 4.
See the handout for more information.
Continue the conversation about language, perception, and the use of language in caricatures.