In Sekhar Deshpande’s article, “The Confident Gaze,” it explains how National Geographic is a magazine that tries to appeal to the western eye as it portrays life in foreign parts of the world. It explores cultures and religions as well as individual people, mainly exploring their daily lives and the poverty they live in. Deshpande claims, “This power to transform the most repulsive results of human actions around the world into images that are digestible is what makes for the culture of the National Geographic” (par. 12). By this he is claiming that National Geographic is so famed, because it can turn almost any picture or circumstance into a beautiful and correctly represented way. It turns death into something beautiful. It turns life into something magical. Later on Deshpande claims, “It is as if the world needs to be posed in the appropriate way to the Western observer, he could not see it in its bare essentialities” (par. 13). He tries to explain that the photographs aren’t raw pieces of footage, but are rather thought out and posed. They are fabricated in a way to be acceptable to the eyes of the Western world and in a way to not offend but beautify other cultures. These photographs may not show entirely the foreign world, but they help broaden views about life that is foreign to our own. Some people may argue that posing and fabricating photographs to beautify cultures, takes away from the reality of the situations. I hold that it may take away from the complete reality but it helps broaden the Western worlds views in a way that is not to radical, yet just harsh enough to get the point across which is ultimately what the buyers want.
Welcome!
Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!
--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!
--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100
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