For my final reflection post, I have decided to lend my insight on Professor Carrol's lecture on Rasquachismo and "A Day Without A Mexican." I understand that a lot of you are not familiar with lectures in the humanities. With Social Sciences (like our class), and Natural Sciences, lectures are rather straight forward. We get slides, people often say "You will need to know this for the exam" and such.
Since I am in the humanities, I have had my share of lectures and classes like Professor Carrol's. With humanities, the point of the instructor is to help students create their own ideas. Humanities explores things such as art, literature, philosophy, and things that are often completely subjective. Things cannot be straight forward in humanities lectures because, frankly, the humanities are not that straight forward.
So, what does this have to do with class? Through this paper, Professor Carrol was explaining that "A Day Without a Mexican" is in itself rasquachismo, in the sense that it was taken from the play "A Day of Absence." I think we can all agree on that. However, the manner in which she presented it should be viewed as her expressing a theory, like a literary theory presented in a paper.
I implore you: Do not be upset with Professor Carrol's lecture. She taught how anyone in the humanities would have taught. Like stated before, the humanities are designed to help people create their own theories on the subjective. So, be subjective.
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2 comments:
I understand the reasoning behind the style presented by humanities type lectures, and I think these methods can be very beneficial when they are properly presented. However, when these methods are not used correctly there is often a gap between the material presented and the way that the audience perceives the information. I think that the material provided in the lecture could be best understood through an in-depth discussion following the presentation. With a long reading, many people are likely to only pick up certain pieces that can later be combined and elaborated on in a discussion type setting. The possibilities for making connections are seemingly endless with this type of lecture style, but the meaning that is attained is likely to be useless without collaboration that can lead to better understanding from all perspectives. Sharing of ideas is essential for the capacity to come up with one's own original ideas and conections between materials, and time constraints in the lecture peiod made it impossible to see the true capabilities that the lecture style has to offer.
I get what you are saying about how people can only pick up certain bits of information. However, I must implore you to look at the paper as you would any text, whether it be academic or literature, for work or for pleasure. Let's face it: Only a select few people can really pick up and remember every single little piece of information that is presented in a text. Think about the last novel that you read and really understood. Did you have to remember every little detail to understand the message that the author was trying to convey? Does it matter if Hamlet was wearing a black vest or a brown vest? Does it matter if Robinson Corusoe met Friday on the east side of the island or the west side of the island? Does it matter if Captain Ahab's peg-leg was made of oak or pine? No. The only thing that matters is that you were able to pick up the meaning behind the text. The same thing goes for Professor Carrol's lecture.
As for your comment about the possibilities for connections, I will agree that this style of teaching does make endless possibilities and that it is useless without different perspectives. But that is the point of studying literature, and, in this case, film as literature. We can never really know what an author's (of, in this case, filmmaker's) intentions were when he or she was writing a text/film. The idea is to figure it out the best that you can. So, endless connections are not a bad thing because every theory that is created brings us closer to figuring out the author's intensions. For example, there have literally been hundreds of thousands of essays on Shakespeare's Hamlet (I personally have written four in my lifetime). Every little thing that someone writes about the play brings us closer to understanding what Shakespeare intended to convey. One idea in one writing leads to another, then another, then another, and so on. As long as there is literature, people will still write about the play. The same thing goes for anything, play, novel, poem, and, in this case, film. We can never really know what an author's intensions were, but with our own theories and theories that are created from other theories, like Professor Carroll presented, we can get just a little bit closer to understanding what is being conveyed.
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