Riley's Blog

In a country devastated by the attacks of 9/11, Spahr’s poetry emerges and helps us recognize the connections between each other. In her collection of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Juliana Spahr implements the trope of skin in order to show the connectivity of “everyone with lungs”. Skin is used paradoxically. Spahr describes skin as “a boundary separating yous from the rest of yous “(19). We are each contained in our own skin, therefore bounded in it, separate from others because of it. However, it is also the first…read more

Though I was too young to remember it, 9/11 is one of the major contemporary events of this generation. After September 11th many things would never be the same, predominantly the discourse used from news casts to political rhetoric representing the American response to the tragedy in which they victimized themselves and created a culture of fear. In response to the attacks, American’s seemed to experience nostalgia and a renewal of patriotism which caused the United States to take on the role of the aggressor in the Middle East with…read more

Recently, after reading the first chapter from Judith Butler’s Frames of War, I have been considering the idea of “precarious lives” and how some lives are differentially more at risk than others. Butler realizes that “we mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” because of, what she calls, a “cultural reflex” (Butler 36). The “cultural reflex” we have, is born from the culture we grow up in and reflected in the societal norms we unconsciously obey, in short we are almost “invited” to view…read more

Generation Z is one of the first generations that contains people who don’t have any personal memory of 9/11. No personal anecdotes, or charged emotions mirroring the ones they experienced that historic morning. I’m one of them. However, because of the stories of relatives and the annual screening of 9/11 footage on the news, to me, it seems like I’ve always known about and remembered this day. In the same way that this generation is first full of non-remembers, it is also the first generation of people who grew up…read more

Our class has just finished reading Obasan, a novel written by Joy Kogawa based on real-life events, chronicling the Canadian internment and persecution of Japanese during the WW2. In ASTU and in other literature classes, we are preoccupied with what’s written inside the book exclusively, the plot, themes, characters, imagery, etc. However, when we visited the Kogawa Funds at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library inside IBLC at UBC, we delved into Kogawa, the real people, and events surrounding the publishing of her book. I looked particularly at the…read more

The day after the election, the day after I went to bed knowing that everything was going to change, I woke up and the instinctive change I thought I would feel wasn’t there. Actually, that morning, November 9th, was the first time I’d woken up to see sun shining through the thin slits in my standard, metal, dorm room blinds. As I walked over to the mirror rubbing my eyes, wondering why I was so tired, I stopped amidst the dappled light and looked at my reflection, especially the pronounced…read more

In the introduction of her book, Tangled Memories, cultural studies scholar Marita Sturken introduces the culture of memory, that is, “a field of negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history”, in America (Sturken 1). In other words, cultural memory is akin to collective memory, a shared pool of knowledge that is constantly reshaped and reworked in order to form a narrative or identity for that culture. She writes that American political culture is often portrayed as amnesiac and arguing that in her own view this representation…read more

As the “storm” rages outside, on this dark, gloomy Saturday morning, I am finally able to take the time I wanted to read through this week’s selection of my classmate’s blogs. Our ASTU 100 class just finished reading Michael Ondaatje’s “historiographic metafiction”, Running in the Family. For our class the text induced questions of identity, memory, genre, and “truth” and, further still, how these topics blurred together and intermingled throughout the text and our own lives. Through the haze of repetitive scrolling and clicking on each personal blog page, reading…read more