And just like that, the Spring semester has flown by and will soon give way to the joys of summer. Before we end, however, I'd like to take some time to outline the final capstone project I'm assigning to my first-year writing students to end our time together and draw everything to a cohesive close: … Continue reading Apocalyptic Turn/Sparking Change
Tag: essay
Writing, Composition and Deliberate Living
Lately I’ve been re-reading an old favorite I first read midway through college, right when I was just beginning to locate myself as a writer: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book raises a number of issues I won’t even begin to detail in this post, but I wanted to pay … Continue reading Writing, Composition and Deliberate Living
DeLillo, Brand Names and Post-Postmodernism
The following is an edited and re-worked excerpt of a seminar paper I wrote for a 21st-Century Fiction class at the University at Buffalo in the spring of 2016. The suburbanization of the post-war United States proved a bounty for corporations just beginning to realize the means to tighten their grasp on the key to … Continue reading DeLillo, Brand Names and Post-Postmodernism
On the Events of Flint, Michigan
I've recently begun writing an ecocritical analysis of slow environmental violence as it ravages communities, specifically those below the poverty line both in the United States and abroad. My reading in my Ecocriticism graduate seminar (where ecology and studies of nature meet literary analysis) have led me to an analysis of Flint, Michigan, informed by the … Continue reading On the Events of Flint, Michigan
Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor”
Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor tackles the clash between exploiters of natural resources, driven by desires for short term profit gains, and those native to the exploited areas with no choice but to live with the ecological aftermath. Nixon asserts his theory of slow violence played out in the environmental … Continue reading Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor”
Jacob Richter 