Visual Culture in Mid-Nineteenth Century Paris

It’s hard to underestimate the extent to which Paris – and, very quickly in its wake, other major cities in Europe and America – began to reorganize the sense of what it is to be and live in a city. There are many facets of this, but in this blog I wanted to share the extent to which society (or at least urban society) became an increasingly visual culture, in which the world is understood in terms of what can be seen (and so in terms of what is material), where being seen (in the right way) becomes more important to more people (it becomes important to the bourgeoisie and not just aristocrats and the extremely wealth), where seeing things drive the consummation of material goods and services related to leisure and pleasure, and where there is even the idea of “visual consummation,” meaning that one takes delight in simply seeing things.

The prostitute, which became increasingly present in urban society, catches this play of materiality and capitalism: the prostitute is a human reduced to “meat for sale,” an “object circulating in the marketplace,” a “thing” to be consumed (Sanyal 98). This reduction is aided by the rise of the fashion, jewelry, and cosmetics industries, which industries are tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie. These aides help the female to transform mere flesh into a desirable commodity – an object of desire. At the same time, the prostitute is also very much a sign or symbol of the times (this is explained in the next paragraph) and is used as such a sign in art and even as a sign or symbol of the artistic process. For instance, the prostitute weds the material (flesh) and fashion (art), thereby transforming the material into something more significant; Baudelaire (who makes this connection explicitly) see the symbolist poet in similar fashion, insofar as he attempts to transform the material (especially our sense impressions) with art (whether word, paint, or sound) into something more significant.

Insofar as she is transformed by art and is a “meaningful sign,” the figure of the prostitute captures the essence of civilization, which is differentiated from ‘mere’ nature by the presence of signs that point to the dimension of human subjectivity, which is the means by which the human transforms nature into art and culture (Sanyal 104). She is also a sign of the development, in the nineteenth century, of “spectacular displays of commodity culture” (Sanyal 105). These include major expos (expositions universelles, which are world fairs), department stores (especially the rise of window displays, which present both the goods to be desired/consumed and even models (mannequins) to show you what you can/should look like once you’ve ‘consumed’ them), arcades (a shopping environment in which one can see and be seen – and one sees goods, others pursuing those goods, and those goods being worn/consumed), and even public morgues (as citizens would go the Paris Morgue, which corpses were displayed for visual “consummation” by a bored public always on the look-out for something to divert and delight them – especially something that stands out from the many impressions one receives each day in a modern environment).

The images in this post give you some examples of this visual culture. The one at the top is of the Paris morgue, as is the one below. The next two are of the Paris International Exposition in 1867, and the two after that are of Paris shopping arcades. (572 words)

Reflection on the Dry Run ID Assessment

This blog post was written awhile ago and not posted: it was written after the first full dry run of the new Humanities II assessment tool, but I wanted to wait until I had feedback from my teammates and from all of you. Overall, I would say that I am happy with it, but I worry that some of you are nervous, and for good reason. However, by limiting it to four and by letting you choose almost everything having to do with it, you should have much greater control over things, especially as you work things out in the coming week.

As I said in class, it seems to me that part of the problem is that people are still trying to write essays. This makes sense, given that I described this assessment tool as the structure of an essay – or as everything that needs to be in an essay – without being an essay. Also, you all wrote essays in Humanities I. However, there are important ways in which this is not an essay. The simplest way of putting the difference is this: we do not need (and do not want) the filler. You earn no points for the filler – and if you are resorting to filler, you are leaving points on the proverbial assessment table. We want to push you toward greater precision and concision.

There are a few things that will help. First, we’ve had another lab that focused on the practice of making the connections and achieving the insights that we are after, and we have more to come. This process will be a bit more real now that you know more fully what we are after. Second, you will likely study fully before the actual midterm, and your study time will (ideally) be more productive because you have a clear sense of what you will be doing and (looking forward to the next point) of how it will be graded. Third, you’ll have had the disciplinary midterms, each of which reinforces things you need to know for the ID midterm. Fourth, you have now gotten some feedback from us. In particular, we have shared what it is that we are looking for when we grade, and I still plan to create a sample “A” assessment as a template. We also discussed different quality answers (down below) in class, and I hope that that helped.

Note that it is quality – not quantity – that matters. For example, last year the highest scoring essay writer (in all my sections of Humanities, whether I or II), wrote less and finished faster than everyone else. This person was always the first one done – and this person made every word count. This is what we are after. Thus, look at the trios of sentences down below. Each attempts to say the same thing in three sentences. It’s hard to judge them in an absolute way, since they only make full sense in the context of (a) answering a focus question and (b) connections to literature and music, but they give you a sense of the difference in quality that we encounter.

Take, for example, the following four trios of sentences.

D: In the Great Wave we see simplicity at work because there is just a wave and a mountain and some boats. These things really show us that we should focus on what is permanent. Life changes but things like nature stay the same. [This is poor, but you at least understand the very basics of what you should be doing when you analyze a piece in the context of this class.]

C: In the Great Wave, Horuki makes an excellent painting that uses just a few simple elements, such as a wave and a mountain, in order to show a more abstract and complex meaning. It shows us that the present moment is transitory and that what is important is more permanent. What is truly important is emptiness, and so there is a large empty space in the painting. [In class we noted that, depending on the connections made with the focus question and other pieces, this could be seen as a low B.]

A: In his The Great Wave, Hokusai uses the simple elements of two waves, a mountain, and three boats to convey the extent to which we get caught up in the present moment and lose sight of what is permanent. The wave represents what is impermanent (transitory) and the mountain represents what is permanent, but really what is permanent is emptiness, which really symbolizes everything, and so there is empty space in the woodprint. The woodprint has an asymmetrical design that helps to create this crucially important empty space. [In class I had this listed as a B, but upon reading it – and comparing it to the next answer – it was clear that this was the most we could expect in terms of excellent. It would likely be an A. It might be a B if the connection to the focus question and other pieces is not clear.]

Nuts: Hokusai’s The Great Wave is a colored woodprint primarily composed of three simple elements (two waves, three boats, and a mountain), and he uses these simple elements to economically convey a deeper meaning insofar as the wave initially dominates our vision while what is more enduring – the mountain – is smaller. However, a reflective viewing reveals that the wave, while it is what seems most pressing (especially to those in the boats), is impermanent (mujo) and will pass, and this inversion suggests that smallness of the mountain signifies the extent to which we overlook what is permanent and enduring. This realization then in turn points us to the empty space established by the asymmetry of the large wave and small mountain: together these two natural elements create awareness of the mysterious emptiness that signifies the true nature of all reality, and it is this alone that truly endures. [We decided that this was clearly just Mr. Professor-Man speaking and not anything that an actual student would say or could be expected to say.]

There’s more to come: I plan to post a blog reflecting on our recent lab on Romanticism, and I am still working on the sample “A” assessment for you. In the meantime, thank you for all your feedback and hard work.

[1,056 words]

Milton's Garden Arguments, Fugues, and Ritornellos

It’s late and so this post will be very brief, but I wanted to share the fact that my thoughts kept returning today to the similarities between Milton’s Garden Arguments (the arguments that take place in the Garden between Eve and Adam and then Eve and Satan and then again between Eve and Adam) and some of the Baroque musical concepts at which we’ve looked. What struck me was how ideas or themes arise in the Garden and then are repeated, imitated, and inverted throughout Book IX. This ideas of themes being repeated, imitated, and inverted (among other things) is strongly reminiscent of the ritornello (in our Vivaldi concerto) and the contrapuntal fugue (in our Bach fugues, which we didn’t quite get to, although we did get to some of the fugue concepts). As Rob pointed out, the very word “concerto” contains the ideas (via its meaning in Latin) of debating or contending (which everyone does in the Garden) and (via its meaning in Italian) achieving unity or agreement (acting in concert), which is what, in a sense, Satan and Even and Adam do in the end (they all agree that the two humans should eat from the Tree of Prohibition). I thought that this was very interesting. Also, the initial argument between Eve and Adam is repeated three times, with each speaker inverting to some extent what the other is saying. Further still, Satan inverts God’s logic, and Eve, thinking to herself as she contemplates the fruit (while hungry), imitates and thus repeats Satan’s arguments. And Satan’s arguments are all variations on a theme (‘if eating from the Tree is bad, then God is bad’), which echo Eve’s earlier arguments with Adam (if going off alone is bad, then the Garden is not in fact that good). The theme of Book IX thus seems to be that the Garden and God are not as good as they seem – and are only good if the fruit can be eaten. What we find in the Book are all variations of that theme.

Blog 1: Revising the Assessment Tool

Assessment is a tricky business – and it is increasingly a business, with outside organizations that require us to assess and those that can advise us on assessment. Some schools even have assessment officers or even assessment offices who/that are responsible for helping faculty to devise and revise assessment measures. This push toward more and better assessment is motivated by the desire to measure what goes well in college and what does not go well – and to determine what sort of difference a college education makes in your life, how it makes that difference, and how that difference can best be made. With so much money at stake – and students going into heavy debt in order to get a college education – it makes sense that we would do this. But money aside, we in the Humanities place intrinsic value on what we do (meaning that we value it for its own sake) and so want to do the best possible job that we can in helping you to understand the Humanities and, in doing so, helping you to gain the insight and skills and increased literacy and awareness that comes with such understanding.

Our primary assessment tool in Humanties I and II (HUMN 2001 and 2002) is an extemporaneous essay exam. Typically, you are asked to write an essay or two in response to a question that you may – but often do not exactly – know in advance. In this essay you compare and contrast cultures, and you analyze specific artistic productions of a culture. You receive a numeric grade that is itself a number formed from three numeric grades given independently by three different professors. In general, you receive no specific feedback (i.e., no feedback directed toward your essay and its particular strengths and weaknesses) and so have no clear sense of why you earned the grade you earned. There are reasons for this: with respect to the final score, it can (for a variety of reasons) get tricky when the exact grade of each instructor is known, and with respect to the lack of comments, it can get tricky if all three instructors comment and, more importantly, there is not enough time to comment on so many essays (many instructors have to two or three sections and so have to read eight to a hundred-and-twenty of these) in a timely fashion (since midterm and final grades are due so quickly, and, to complicate matters further, the team has to grade one stack and then quickly pass it along to teammates).

There are things about this process that I value. I think that the essay does indeed require you to do what we want you to be able to do as a result of this course, and I think that it shows whether or not and to what extent you have done this. However, it comes with certain consequences. First, the grading is not transparent. Second, there is no clear means for helping you to improve. Third, it is very difficult for an outsider to quickly assess this assessment. In other words, the essay has you do many things all at once, and each assessed part is not clearly broken out. This also makes it hard for students: students leave points on the table in part because they get caught up with composing and in the process skip over some of thinking for which we are looking. (We see a lot of filler – or things that might make for a nice Composition essay but are not necessary for our Humanities exams.) What is worse, you might not know whether you’re doing this, and if so, where and how you are doing it (“it” meaning ‘leaving points on the table’).

The assessment tool that we are attempting to devise – with your help – attempts to get you to do all the things that you should be doing in the essay, and it breaks them out into discrete parts. Thus, as Elizabeth noted in class, it is indeed an essay broken into parts. This should, we hope, have many advantages. First, it makes clear what should be there, so that if you skip some part of it, you do so knowingly. Thus, for instance, you shouldn’t lose points for failing to define terms in an essay, or making the historical context (background events and trends) clear, or not having a thesis – although many students do fail to provide those things in their essays. Second, students sometimes write unbalanced essays, meaning that they put too much into one part of the essay and so lose out on the points to be earned elsewhere. This sheet should help you to balance what you write. Third, you won’t have to worry about compositional skills, such as transitions and topic sentences and they like. Fourth, it is easier to practice the assessment with these sheets, whereas there’s no real practice (with feedback) with the essays. Fifth, the grading will be transparent: it will be clear where you do – or fail to – earn points. Lastly, since each sheet will focus on a specific discipline, we’ll each grade the one focused on our discipline – so we won’t each grade every one – and this will make grading go faster. In fact, we plan to grade as a team so that we can ask each other questions and calibrate our grading as we go. This is a large part of what will enable us to grade assessments throughout the semester and not just as midterm and final.

The assessments will still be tough, as should be clear from the bit of practice that we’ve done. You’ll have to know your stuff – historical context, period concepts, thematic questions, the focus pieces, and how to analyze those pieces. But our hope is that what we’re doing gives you greater awareness of what is going on, more control over what you are doing, and a more transparent sense of what you are graded on and how and why you earn the grade that you earn.

Introduction

In this blog I plan to reflect on what we’re doing in class and why. I sometimes do this when I teach, and sometimes some students find it somewhat helpful. When I do blog along with a class, it is typically because I am devising or revising a course. For that reason alone, it is worth keeping such a blog. It helps those students who read it insofar as in such a blog I seek to make more transparent what I (or in this case, we, the team) are doing and why we are doing it.

Ultimately, we have a set of student-learning outcomes (called “SLOs” in the scholarship on this stuff), and we believe that those outcomes are valuable for you in the short-term (insofar as they will help you in college) and the long-term (in your life after college). Ideally, all assignments are oriented toward the learning outcomes, and some directly assess those outcomes. Reading questions, for instance, are designed to aid in student comprehension of reading, and this comprehension is a necessary building block; without this block – and others – you will not be able to build the higher-order skills and thus achieve the desired SLOs.

The primary means by which we assess whether and to what extent you’ve achieved the SLOs is, in all sections of Humanities 2001 and 2002, the interdisciplinary essay exam. Our team is seeking a new means of assessing those outcomes – one that will replace the essay exam and, ideally, assess you in a way that makes that assessment more transparent, that makes what we want more clear, and that helps you deliver what we want, which is another way of saying “achieve the desired SLOs.”