Author Archives: mia spare

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Hey readers!

As this is my last blog post I will be reflecting on our year in ASTU. My classmates have all written their final blogs, some describing their experiences in ASTU and some pondering more questions about the literature we have been reading and the concepts we have been discussing in class. ASTU is a course that has allowed us to expand our minds as students and explore an entire world of academic research and writing. Before this class I never truly understood the extent of academic writing that’s available to us, extending to every possible subject and idea you could imagine. Despite the seven literary texts we read and analyzed and the handful of academic articles we explored, we still only scratched the surface of what is out there. To highlight some of the interesting topics we explored in ASTU I’d like to draw from my classmates blogs, showing which ones truly stood out.

As the theme of our class was “Memory and Trauma”, many students reflected on how this particulate lens opened their eyes to current and past global situations. Isaiah mentions in his blog how he originally understood trauma as a phase, and a state which exists only in the saddest parts of a person’s mind and experiences. However, through reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he gained a new understanding of trauma, “The realization that I came to more fully, however, was that trauma doesn’t exist only in your dark corners, it can become the dominating force in all areas of your life and personality”. This realization that Isaiah had contributed to a broader understanding of the process of living with trauma, and he concludes that “Getting past a trauma is about accepting that the trauma is a part of you but that it doesn’t need to consume you”. Through analyzing characters in Foer’s novel such as the grandparents, we were able to understand the all consuming properties of traumatic experiences and their impact on entire populations.

Along with the theme of trauma came the theme of memory, which wound its way into countless discussions and novels throughout the year. One novel that stuck out to a few students as having significant properties of memory was The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsim Hamid. Both Clara and Jackson read the novel and thought of their family’s and their own experiences of immigrating to a new country. Jackson’s blog compared his experience with Changez’s “As an international student who also studying in the continent of North America, me and Changez shares many similar experiences of living away from home regardless some differences in the setting”. Jackson was able to relate to the feeling Changez had when he went back to visit Lahore, Pakistan and saw his home as being shabbier and more run down than he remembered. Jackson said he had a similar experience when returning home to his apartment in which the elevators work slowly and are in need of maintenance and the smoggy weather made him sick. Just as Changez had realized that it was him who had changed more than the place itself, Jackson also stated “Me and Changez have found both of our birthplaces become unfamiliar but indeed is because we had changed so much during our adaption of western ethnics and culture”. He said that it’s not easy to blend into an entirely different society from what you’re used to.

Clara’s blog focused on her parent’s immigration to Canada from Korea when they were young. Her father moved to Canada when he was eleven years old and her uncle has tried to keep her in touch with her heritage. Clara relates to The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the sense that she has had questions of her own identity as a Canadian or Korean, like Changez’s dilemma between Pakistan and the US. In her blog, she asks questions such as “If I consider myself Canadian can I lay claim to being French, Korean, Deutsch and Scottish? Is it the the percentage of your ancestry that is from a certain place that determines whether you can claim that heritage?”. Hamid’s novel allowed us to explore questions of identity and belonging in our globalized world, to which the answers are blurry and confusing. Through the literature we have explored we have opened our minds to concepts we may have never considered before. I know personally that I have asked more complicated questions this year about memory, trauma, identity, grief and global citizenship than ever before in my studies.

Kate’s blog mentions another important aspect of our ASTU class which has been the practice of reading academic articles and writing our own. At the beginning of the year we read our first academic article “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning”, by Farhat Shahzad and I can guarantee you that we all struggled greatly with reading it. Kate described reading the article “like I was reading a book written in a different language”. However, throughout the year we have developed the skills needed to interpret and analyze the articles, highlighting their important aspects and labeling the processes specific to that genre of writing. While learning the importance of genre we have adapted to the strange yet intriguing world of academic writing, and slowly dipped our feet into the pool of knowledge.

ASTU has been a truly amazing class, causing us to think on matters we never would have considered if not personally confronted with through literature and academic articles. I feel, like many of my classmates, that I am leaving my first year with a newfound love and appreciation for the world of academic writing and world literature. I’ve had a great year and I hope you have too!

Signing off for the last time,

Class blogger,

Mia Spare

 

Class Blog: Our Immunity to Violence

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Hey everyone! This week I write to you as a class blogger. I truly enjoyed reading my classmate’s interpretations of our discussion this week, and have some input I would like to add myself. This week’s main focus was on the avant-garde, black and white style of Satrapi’s Persepolis, and an article by Hillary Chute: The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Both pieces of work inspired a wide range of interpretations and responses from my classmates, however the one I would like to draw attention to- and extend upon- is the normalization of violence through media in our modern world. 

Erin began the body of her blog by addressing the alarming speed at which the character Marji in Satrapi’s graphic narrative Persepolis was forced to grow up, “She is exposed to harsh political realties and violence by the age of ten, thus compromising the childhood innocence many of us took for granted.”, Erin writes. Violence is a regrettably frequent theme in Marji’s life; a truth evidently expressed through the combination of traumatic experiences and everyday occurrences in a single panel of visuals. Erin stresses the abnormality of such violence by drawing on her own experience of growing up in California. She writes, “The North American reader of Persepolis cannot fathom the intensity and frequency of violence in a young girl’s life”. The combination of violence and normalcy contrast almost as well as Satrapi’s chosen style: black and white children’s drawings.

Through the, as Peter stated in his blog, “juxtaposition that comic books enable”, Satrapi was able to convey horrific violence through the unwilling scope of a child’s imagination. These unrealistic and simplistic (black and white) depictions of brutality-such as the image from Persepolis of a man who has been cut into perfectly clean pieces- help to prevent the further promotion of violence as normal. Peter’s blog argues that Satrapi uses this child’s point of view as a tool so as not to desensitize the “horrific violence we would see in an actual photo”. I agree with his claim that in Western society the MIddle East has become synonymous with violence; with almost all media coverage on the Middle East relating to war or a heinous act of terrorism. I also believe that these horrible occurrences have become so common to the public eye that we have become horridly desensitized to the violence that wracks our world and threatens to strip us of our humanity.

Therese’s blog adds a new perspective to my argument of desensitization by citing a couple of popular movies from her childhood, the first being Rambo(2008). She describes Rambo as being one of the most violent movies she’s ever seen, and emphasizes the traumatizing nature of its realistic violence, “Lives weren’t valued. Nobody  mourned. Killing became ordinary.”. I found these words to be incredibly thought provoking, driving me to recall some of the more violent movies i’ve seen, and realize that the realistic acts of violence they portrayed were never followed by an adequate level of mourning or terror by the actors. There is even an entire genre of movies dedicated to turning violence into comedy ( ie. Tropic Thunder, Kick Ass, The Dictator, Scary Movie..).I realized that the movies we watch are normalizing violence to the point of replacing our tears with laughter.

Thankfully Satrapi realized the same thing while writing Persepolis, and allowed her style of writing and drawing to evolve away from the normal portrayal of trauma. Kate uses the same picture of a man cut into pieces to argue that “by drawing this image from a child’s perspective, it almost shows the trauma more effectively and horrifically than simply describing it with words or a more realistic image.”. Kate elaborates her claim by explaining how seeing the drawing from a child’s perspective helped her to process the trauma being shown. Through her use of simple black and white contrasts, Satrapi allows us to understand the violence without glorifying it-a tactic that is far too under valued in our society. My class’s discussions of Persepolis and Satrapi’s use of non traumatizing portraits of violence have left me with some questions: Have we as a society become desensitized to violence past the point of return? And based on the amount of power that the media has in our society, will things ever change?

To recap this weeks blogging, Erin emphasized the amount of violence that polluted Marji’s childhood by comparing it to her childhood in California, while Peter focused on the violently skewed view that the West has of the Middle East. Kate and Peter both talked about how they found Satrapi’s style to soften the blow of the violent images, and Therese brought in violent movies from her childhood to help portray how incredibly desensitized we as a society have become to violence.

Thanks for reading guys!

Mia