Students always benefit from more rhetorical analysis. This is a simple statement that our disciplinary identities, the connotations that automatically form in our brains as rhetoricians and writing teachers, perhaps might function to cloud. What I mean to say here is not that (or not only that) students benefit from more rhetorical analysis assignments being … Continue reading Re-Framing RetroActive Composition
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
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
Peter Handke's memoir "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams" details the life and eventual suicide of his mother, which he attempts to portray in the narrative as having been an "exemplary case" of voluntary death. This is my response to the dense, sparse narrative in which Handke refuses sentimentality and resists analysis; the text ventures into places rarely … Continue reading Peter Handke’s “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”
Jacob Richter 