Fresh Mind

Last week in ASTU, we talked about an excerpt from Klay’s Redeployment. First of all, I just want to say that before reading and discussing it in class, I’ve had bad impressions of military men because for me, soldiers are tools used by the government to do their dirty work for them. Second, I want to tell a short story as well. I have met a soldier before in Winnipeg. He told me with pride what he does for a living (probably expecting me to say ‘Thank you for your…read more

Hello Everyone! This week and last week in ASTU, we discussed poetry. I didn’t really appreciate poetry before last week. But when I was reading W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”,  I became fond of it. I’ve heard of Auden before last week with names like Orwell, Dickens, and Austen, so I thought he was a novelist. I really admire their work and his poem since it felt like I was travelling through time. Maybe it’s because he uses words we don’t often use now or maybe it’s because he mentioned Nijinsky…read more

This week in ASTU, we talked about the first chapter of Judith Butler’s Frames of War. Although I had difficulty reading it at the beginning, I really enjoyed it. She claimed in her book that we are all connected and our survivability depends on one another. Other than this, she critiqued the US’ reaction towards the 9/11 incident and the democracy it was trying to preach. I liked many things about her way of thinking since I’m a pacifist myself. I know it’s a strong word to claim just like…read more

Welcome to Term 2 of ASTU! When the class began last week, we discussed the novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This may be familiar to a lot of people since Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock starred in the film adaptation of the novel. Although I expected the book to centre in the 9/11 terrorist attack, it focused on the coping of a young boy named Oskar who lost his father in the incident. There has been a debate whether the book believed that 9/11 is…read more

Hillary Chute’s The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis dissects the genre of graphic narrative used by Satrapi. She analyzes the elements, the style, and the juxtaposition of comic books that made Persepolis effective. Violence is depicted as ordinary from a child’s imagination through the minimalist style. Although the illustration was simple, Chute explains how it shows the ‘power of the radically inadequate’. It then questions the realistic representation of violence and how it has been normalized. Satrapi’s depiction of violence is different from mainstream media. She argues that…read more

I just finished reading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi for my literature class. This is a graphic narrative of the author’s childhood experience in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. What drew me to the book is the protagonist’s perspective of the horrific events and the way it was told. What struck me the most, however, is the quote: “To Die A Martyr Is To Inject Blood Into The Veins Of Society.” I read this quote a number of times to try to decipher what it means. When I did make…read more

Last week, in my Literature class, we started reading Farhat Shahzad’s The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning. By the title itself, Shahzad studied the role of communities in students’ memories in a learning environment to help educators improve their teaching strategies. How communities present facts influence your interpretation. An interesting topic that was conducted in Shahzad’s research was the War on Terror. Where you’re from, who you surround yourself will affect your view on that topic. In my Sociology class, you and your communities’ view is called…read more