"I wasn't always a feminist. In fact, I used to think feminists were sexually undesirable and perpetually angry. (Boy, was I wrong. Feminists are perpetually desirable, and I am sexually angry.)" Anastasia Higginbotham, "Chicks Goin' At It"
So, the school year is wrapping up. This week is final conferences and then registration. The graduating seniors have their senior dinner Wednesday night and Commencement is on Saturday. Soon it will be only summer, summer, summer. Which of course means something different for everyone. For those of us who are already "real" adults, the same jobs that we have worked for years will continue on. Some of us who don't have jobs now, maybe we'll pick one up for a few months. Some of us may even continue working Federal Work Study at Shimer for the next few months. Some of us will be leaving this place forever, scattering in the wind to the four corners of the world. Some of us will work internships whether they are paid, unpaid, or paid through Shimer. Some of us will go home to families that we haven't seen in months. As for me, I will be remaining in Chicago all summer. I have: begun my internship at the Chicago Dramatists, started my FWS job, registered for a summer class, commenced the sad process of looking for new roommates, and started the reading for my thesis (which is where I found the introductory quote). Some people have told me that I am crazy for starting my thesis so soon, but people have started sooner than I! I have a little under a year to complete my project, which is already looking daunting. Currently, I am halfway through the first book on my reading list, Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. It is pretty wonderful so far, I would recommend (at least the first half of) it to anyone interested in knowing a little more about feminism.
I just finished teaching Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in my Humanities 2 class, surely an endurance marathon for student and teacher alike. Perhaps this is what made the epilogue, which depicts Raskolnikov's first step toward redemption (as mediated by the love of a good woman), such a let-down -- after spending so much time in Raskolnikov's twisted head, surely we deserved something more.
Yet the argument could also be made that the epilogue is totally superfluous, that everything has been decided by the time Raskolnikov finds himself compelled (in part by the "peer pressure" of Sonya) to confess his crime. We can already see Sonya's dedication to him and her role in his redemption. We have verified Porfiry's claim that the confession would take the police by surprise, leading us to trust his claim that the sentence will be merciful. And we also know that Raskolnikov is going to continue to be a total jerk about the whole thing for as long as humanly possible. What does the epilogue add, other than the sentimental satisfaction of learning that Dunya and Razumikhin get married?
Even more important, to me, is what the epilogue takes away, insofar as it attempts to narrate what is not narratable. Though something like Christian "doctrine" as such barely makes an appearance, Dostoevsky's narrative here is certainly Christian, and nowhere moreso than in its attempt to capture the mysterious movement of free will: the failure of will that leads to sin as well as the turning of the will back toward God. In both cases, Raskolnikov is pulled along in a way that renders his conscious intentions strangely irrelevant. (Indeed, in the case of the confession, I'd say 90% of the conscious thoughts we get to see are anti-confession.) Various explanations for his crime, such as madness and/or physical illness, are trotted out and ultimately rejected -- the ultimate explanation seems to be that he became proud (though he didn't have to, as shown by the example of the similarly-situated Razumikhin) and he sinned.
The twist is the way that Raskolnikov's pride is so intimately tied up with ideas -- not simply the ideas of "nihilism," but ideas as such. Certainly we are meant to take Raskolnikov's vaguely Nietzschean ideas to be absurd or at least unappealling, but every other alternative is systematically undermined. Every ideology mentioned is either sharply criticized by a sympathetic character, or espoused by an unappealling one. It's not that Raskolnikov got a particularly destructive set of ideas into his head, it's that he got any set of ideas.
And that's why explicit Christian theology is so thin on the ground: Christianity is presented as something other than a body of ideas. The exemplary Christian, Sonya, hasn't even thought to ask the most basic question in theology -- why would a good God allow suffering? -- even though she's in a situation that screams out for such questioning. The closest we come to a theological reflection is the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, which receives no overt explication and seems to have been selected simply to emphasize the miraculous (i.e., ultimately unknowable and mysterious) nature of Raskolnikov's conversion.
The result is that the most important events of the narrative -- Raskolnikov's crime and conversion -- are simply unaccountable (in the sense of Aristotle's alogon). This famously "psychological" novel points ultimately toward the impotence of our psychology for directing or explaining our actions, as Raskolnikov endlessly spins his mental wheels. And so one could say that this response to the threat of nihilism is itself even more radically nihilistic than the nihilists themselves, recommending that we renounce all our ideas, accept suffering, and wait patiently. Surely there has to be some other alternative to the fantasy of being the next Napoleon!
You may have heard of Sam Klein, but due to the slight chance that you haven’t, I’ve composed this introductory blog. I’m rather unusual from most students because I come from a rust bucket city in eastern-south side of Wisconsin, no fancy-pants public school or anywhere exciting. But that doesn’t make me particularly unusual. My parents, in the first half of my life, were living in a lower income area of Green Bay when they had me. Due to the lack of resources, I evidently lost the reading portion of my formal education. Though my parents read to me quite regularly, I had a learning disability that prevented me from catching up to the rest of the kids.
As the education system dragged me behind, I became familiar with a lot of muck that goes on behind the doors of special education. To say the least, there’s a lot to be disappointed about. By the time I went into fourth grade, I was illiterate, and an English professor would probably say to me today: “You still are illiterate!” I wouldn’t blame them due to the quality of my prose. [I used the word “them” to be gender neutral.] But there was a time where finishing high school was the last thing expected from me, and I suppose the same standard still applies for college.
Well, I finished high school. At that time of my life, my parents had bumped themselves up in society. I was in a different city where kids from wealthy families went to the private school I attended. I finished with decent grades, but I was a punk. I thought George Orwell was cool, and because of my interests in books like Slaughterhouse Five, Dante’s Inferno, Plato’s dialogues, etc., I was deemed more or less a heathen by my community – not so much by the religious leaders of that community but more so by the parents who only saw the long hair and the frustration in my life. At that time, my dream of being a pastor was being kicked out of me.
My mom told me something, one day, after having a long conversation with her in the van she used to drive around: “Sam, nothing in life is easy.” This still resonates with me. That is probably why the Great Books spoke so well to me. In Robert Hutchins’s introduction to the Great Books, he writes about the flaws of walking the road of textbook-reading and exam-taking. Education is not meant to be easily memorized and then forgotten. Education should prepare you to educate yourself later in life, to better understand what it means to educate yourself, and to then be a better citizen in this world. I found out about Shimer College, which does all three better than any school I could imagine. That’s when I applied to college.
I have been spending a lot of time on Shimer, working on readings that tend to be a challenge. During my breaks, I usually spend time translating Russian. I’m quite good at it. Recently, in class, I was able to translate a Russian sentence for my class to better understand the translation we were using. And then, I was complimented for doing a good job. After the road I traveled to get here, that meant a lot to me.
In Shimer's Humanities 4 class, we read Kafka's The Trial and watched Orson Welles' 1962 film adaptation. As it's a public domain work, you can watch the film as well, for instance on YouTube:
Generally speaking, the students were disappointed in the changes Welles made to the story -- the way he ended it was a particular source of outrage, but other changes seemed to "flatten" the book and the character of K. somehow. I agree with them, but I actually take that as evidence that Welles has done a very capable adaptation of the novel into a film.
Broadly speaking, it seems that a film adaptation of a novel needs to do two things: it needs to capture the spirit of the book in a significant way while simultaneously answering the question of "why now?" For a popular novel like Harry Potter or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the second question answers itself -- we're doing the movie now because the material is popular now. For a novel like The Trial, that takes more work.
My theory is that Welles answered that question by transforming the plot of The Trial from a grim anticipation of totalitarianism to a direct protest against actual-existing totalitarianism -- a particularly relevant topic in the early 1960s, when the USSR seemed poised to overtake the West. One can see this above all in the ending, when K. remains defiant and accusatory up to the very last and the two executioners opt to kill him with dynamite, which produces a mushroom cloud. Obviously there is no more salient Cold War trope than the threat of nuclear annihilation. The choice of sets is relevant here as well. Where the novel has K. travelling through poor tenaments to reach the court, Welles presents us with bleak modernist apartment blocks that feel very "Soviet" -- and he also has to walk through a crowd of half-naked old men holding signs with numbers, linking Soviet totalitarianism to the Nazi holocaust. Overall, K. emerges as the put-upon American whose resolve sometimes wavers but who ultimately refuses to go without a fight.
This significantly simplifies both the character of K. and the themes of the novel. The ambivalence of K., the sense that he's both unjustly persecuted and yet a total jerk, is absent here. The ambiguity of the novel also significantly dissipates -- for instance, the religious overtones are actively suppressed, above all in the cathedral scene where Welles takes over the delivery of the "Before the Law" sequence. Interestingly, K. interrupts his telling (a full version had brilliantly opened the film), dismissing it as a story "we all know" -- in contrast to the novel, where the story is an obscure preface to an inaccessible law, here it is part of the publicly known ideology. In addition, where Kafka is at pains to distinguish his mysterious court from the "normal" law -- for instance, by having the executioners run away from a policeman in the final chapter -- for Welles, this bizarre court is straightforwardly the law of the land. Accordingly, where the novel's K. was surprised to learn that the lawyer had a "normal" law practice as well, the film's K. discovers that the lawyer has a "regular commercial practice" in addition to the criminal practice K. is using.
In many ways, though, Welles brilliantly captures the spirit of the novel, above all in his choice of sets, which convey the kind of squalor and confusion that attends the court proceedings. His cinematography also gives us a visceral sense of the claustrophobia of the novel's atmosphere, above all in the flogging scene. Welles also handles the sexualization of the Law very capably, bringing out the homoeroetic element in the lawyer's relationship to Block much more clearly than Kafka does.
Yet all of this is always related back to Welles's overarching thesis. Unlike Kafka, for instance, he pairs the squalid interiors with imposing exteriors -- this contrast is clearest in the cathedral scene, where the interior of the cathedral appears to be a stripped-down warehouse. The sexualization in turn serves as a particularly vivid and immediate demonstration of the simultaneously intrusive and corrupt nature of the totalitarian court. It all looks very impressive, Welles is saying, but underneath it all, it's nothing but a systematic obscenity that one must resist at all costs.
In light of this systematic approach, I am much less inclined to criticize Welles's "betrayal" of his source material -- some degree of betrayal is inevitable in any translation between mediums, and Welles's betrayals are far from capricious, even where they're shocking (as in the ending). It's not a straightforward adaptation like Michael Haneke's film version of The Castle -- it's an extended argument for The Trial's relevance to urgent contemporary concerns in his historical moment. One might disagree with that argument, but one cannot deny that it is masterfully made.
What's ironic, then, is that Welles's systematic reshaping of The Trial into a Cold War parable winds up missing the ways that Kafka may actually help us to understand something like "Soviet totalitarianism" -- and that precisely in the moments when K. seems to consent to the legitimacy of this bizarre court. The question one is left with after watching Welles's film is why everyone isn't like K., why everyone doesn't just see right through the injustice and corruption, why everyone isn't a brave dissenter.
We might do well to attempt to understand such things in this era of the triumph of liberal democracy as the self-evident form of government -- and so I propose that a truly contemporary adaptation of The Trial could perhaps take the opposite approach of Welles. This adaptation would unambiguously take place under Stalinism, but all the ambivalence of K.'s character, all the rich overlapping themes, would be left in place. The law before which K. is called wouldn't be the "regular" law, any more than the Party was simply identical to the state -- and this law would still also overlap with religion, and with sexuality, and with family. Most importantly, the audience must not be allowed to settle unambiguously on K.'s innocence.
Greetings Shimer Blog! This is Alexis, here to introduce myself. I have been encouraged for weeks to do a blog post, but have only recently regained the energy to write one that wouldn’t be a bit tainted by the slightly depressed mood that sort of goes along with reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment for my Humanities 2 class.
Now don’t get me wrong, I loved reading it, perversely enjoying the feeling that takes over you as you are drawn into the world in which Raskolnikov and his fellow characters exist. After recovering from being slightly thrown off by the end of the epilogue (I won’t say any more on that as to keep from spoiling the ending to those who have not read it yet), I now begin the process of writing my final paper for Humanities about it.
Anyway, what I am here to write about is something that I will begin this Friday, called “the comp” or comprehensive exam. This takes place during that same time as writing week, except instead of doing a creative project for a week I will be immersed in studiously writing a total of three take-home essays on the subject of whatever reading material that will be given out on Friday. This will be my first time doing a “comp”, but I have been advised to try and do all my reading during the weekend and take notes, as to lighten the stress of writing during the week.The exam also involves a discussion which takes place at the end of the week after the papers have been written.
There is a sort of mysterious nature to this event, as very little information is known about it until the date approaches and you are informed that there will be a meeting at which you will receive the reading material. A subject is chosen by the members of the faculty who are on the comp committee, and is not divulged until the material is given to everyone. A few of my facilitators have mentioned that we will be requested to make up a code name for ourselves that we use on our papers,as to keep the grading as objective as possible.
From what other students have suggested, the comprehensive exam is just that—a test of your ability to comprehend and integrate what you have learned in the time spent here at school, as well a test to make certain you are competent to progress on to the upper level of core and elective classes (the 3’s and 4’s). Generally the comp is taken during your second year at Shimer, although if you are a transfer student such as myself, you will probably take it at the end of your second semester. You must have taken six out of the first seven core classes (1’sand 2’s). From the amount of questioning I have done, I have gathered that this experience will be one of the most difficult yet rewarding challenges as a student here. In light of this, I am looking forward with a little apprehension and also some excitement to participating in this intense and rewarding demonstration of ability known as “the comp”. Wish me luck!
My name is Adam Kotsko, and I joined the faculty here at Shimer in the fall of 2011. I blog at An und für sich (translation: "in and for itself," a phrase drawn from Hegel that puns on the site's address), a blog that covers a wide range of topics within the humanities, including philosopy, theology, psychoanalysis, literature, and popular culture.
Since I started teaching at Shimer, I've occasionally posted reflections on course texts that grow out of in-class discussions, and I've been invited to cross-post some of those reflections on the Shimer blog as well. A couple of those posts should be appearing here in the next couple weeks -- in the meantime, why not read an excerpt from my new book?
Today, I would like to speak on a subject that is of particular interest to myself: Early Entry. For sixty-one years now, Shimer has been accepting students who have not yet graduated from high school, and turning them into Shimerians. This Early Entrant Program is no college-prep course; it is a full-blown Shimer education, with all the privileges that come with that.
Generally, high-school students in their sophomore and junior years apply to the Early Entrant Program, then attend during what would otherwise be their junior/senior year(s) of high-school. As an early entrant myself, I can say without guile that there is absolutely no condescension or sense of superiority from any of the other students or facilitators. Simply put, other than some extra paperwork, you are an ordinary student, albeit at an extraordinary college, with an incredible community. Personally, this program has done a lot for me, including but not limited to rescuing me from what I see as a somewhat-less-than-satistactory education. So, while my opinion is obviously biased, I can recommend the Early Entrant Program without reservation.
It’s a beautiful day in Chicago. The trees are blooming, the sun is shining, and Shimer students are mentally and emotionally preparing themselves for the upcoming final week of classes.
As Adrian, a 2011 graduate and current admissions counselor, pointed out, the term “hell week” is a recently adopted one. Over the course of the last few years, it has gone from being relatively obscure to being published in the weekly student newsletter. It refers to the last week of classes, when all the final papers you inevitably procrastinated throughout the semester are due.
At most schools, the last week of classes is when one prepares for final exams, but since we have none here, I think it’s safe to call hell week an entirely fabricated phenomenon. It’s completely avoidable if you don’t procrastinate. I’m speaking from experience, having survived a hell week last semester. It’s not uncommon to find Shimer students up all night at the IIT library (which is open 24 hours), frantically typing papers until the wee hours of the morning. It is arguably more difficult to write papers than to prepare for tests, but at least you don’t have to worry about your inadequate performance on a test, given your lack of sleep.
One of the fundamental paradoxes of hell week is that since you know that you’re the one who placed yourself in Hell, you can’t really justify complaining about it. I wonder if officially coining the term will lead to future students concluding that hell week, since it is a chosen fate, is a survivable and even ideal circumstance to find themselves in. It will be an interesting and very Shimer-esque experiment to observe the ‘social construction of reality’ through language.
Hello, Shimer Blog readers! As promised I have a picture of my painting with some orange on it:
That is not all though! I have also worked on my pitcher a bit more, which has resulted in something actually resembling a round object and not just a shaded-in white space. Amanda is an amazing teacher and I am consistently surprised at how much my painting looks like art. So, here is my painting at its current stage:
The next steps coming up include a glazing process to give more color to my fruit and vegetable. I also must decide whether or not to include the pattern on the pitcher, which is more of an internal struggle than you may imagine. In case you enjoyed the article I posted last time about women in art, here is another for your further reading: Examining the Exclusion of Women from Art Historical Documentation Next time I might post some of the work I have been doing on my replication of Leyster's The Proposition. Until then!
My recent blog posts would have you believe I do nothing but paint. However, that is not at all true. I also go to three other classes, have some hobbies, and participate in extracurricular activities. Sometimes I even: read for fun (currently Leonard Woolf's autobiographies), try to discover new music (I wrote a blog post on here a few years ago about how terrible my music taste is - it has only gotten marginally better), play video games (almost done with Mass Effect 3, so awesome), learn American Sign Language with one of my roommates (so much fun), and go on road trips (like to D.C. for the national feminist conference).
Other than my oil painting tutorial, I am taking two cores (Natural Sciences IV and Humanities IV) and one other elective (Film Elective: Narration Through Music). My class on musicals is a ton of fun. We all get together Tuesday evenings, watch this films together in Cinderella Lounge and then gather again Thursday morning to discuss them. Between the screening and the discussion we read a related essay (or a collection of essays), and sometimes the libretto, and one of us writes a protocol (a short paper read aloud at the beginning of class to focus discussion).
The class includes students from all grade levels and a few students from IIT. This is the first time this elective has been offered, but every semester Marc Hoffman facilitates some sort of film class. Recent ones have included an Introduction class to film and French New Wave.
To give you an idea of what we have been watching in our Musicals class, I will list a few (photos from imdb.com):
The version of Into the Woods we watched was a taped version of the Broadway show with Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason. I was not a Sondheim fan before this class, but after our discussion on the complex dialogue, interwoven themes and harsh juxtaposition of fantasy to fact, I joined the fan club.
Judy Garland is best known for her role as Dorothy Gale in the Wizard of Oz (another musical, though not featured in this class), but she really won me over in Meet Me in St. Louis. The film is a technicolor explosion about a family that amy have to uproot their lives and move to the big city.
We discussed gender roles, economic class distinctions, family ties, and the role of music in tying together a storyline.
One of the best-known musicals of all time, Singing in the Rain offered a whimsical, light-hearted story about an actor who falls in love with a movie and out-of-favor with his co-star. It offers a lot to discuss about gender roles and relations, the silenced female voice, comodification of racial identity and capitalism's role in art.
Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully filmed, skillfully written and acted with conviction. It sparked discussion about the role of audience in a film, what it means for a movie to be filmed for television as opposed to the theater, and the grey area between good and evil.
Basically, I am taking an awesome film elective and learning a lot more about the world through musical narration.
The opinions expressed by the Shimer bloggers are theirs alone, are subject to change upon each blogger's reflection, and do not reflect the opinions of Shimer College. Shimer is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any of the information supplied on this blog and strongly encourages you to contact the Shimer Admission Office directly if you have questions about Shimer. The entries on this blog belong to their authors and to Shimer College. Shimer encourages and deeply values discussion, but the college is not responsible for what is posted by commenters and reserves the right to delete any comment for any reason whatsoever. Deletions will likely be made if commentary is commercial, irrelevant, abusive, profane, rude, or destructively inaccurate. Shimer students on the regular staff of this blog are modestly compensated for their efforts.
