Finished my first five-day lesson plan today, excepting its final test. I'll write that sucker tomorrow morning before moving on to Big Project #2. The first question will be about Lacan's 'gaze' in Mildred B. Taylor's novel Song of the Trees. Or perhaps I'll give them a passage from Gilles Deleuze or Walter Benjamin to mull over in the context of Taylor's sad tale of white capitalist exploitation of the Southern racial underclass. Something like:
Hey kids! Walter Benjamin said capitalism was "a religion of destruction." He wrote that as a system "it was entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation." How do you think Benjamin would have read the final scene, where Papa threatens to blow up his own forest with dynamite rather than let a white man exploit it for pennies on the dollar?
Or not.
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