August 2009

College students say social networking makes them more narcissistic, a national survey reports today — and they also believe their generation is the most narcissistic of all.

They also think they invented sex. Found in USA Today

The Economics of Fantasy: Rape in Twentieth Century Literature by Sharon Stockton.

She says that rape is being talked about in literature because men aren’t getting to be adventurous. They don’t have “individual authority” so rape shows up to… reestablish that. (Stockton 3)

What the heck?

“…the aestheticized rape narrative is a significant part of Western fantsy, and that a study of that fantastical narrative reveals particular things about the way white masculinity represents itself” (Stockton 16).

Okay, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me and it doesn’t relate to my article either. She argues that rape is a capitalistic experience, which is ridiculous even if she is trying to argue that it only takes place in capitalistic societies.

Sabine Sielke. Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1770-1990. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2002.

“Reading Rape is an exploration of representations of rape, of what I have come to call the rhetoric of rape, not an analysis of rape as a social fact” (Sielke 1).

“rape narratives relate to real rape incidents in highly mediated ways only. They are first and foremost interpretations…” (Sielke 2)

“Since texts mean just as much by what they leave unsaid as by what they say, by what is absent as by what is present, those texts that explicitly employ rape in turn raise questions about their silences, their absent centers, about what they chose to obscure” (Sielke 3).

“…the (feminist) deployment of rape has nurtured its own silences that are as meaningful as the silences with which dominant culture has veiled sexual violence” (Sielke 4).

“Instead of reproducing a rhetoric of victimization, my own agenda is thus to recontextualize and challenge readings of rape, paying close attention to the relation between rape and representation” (Sielke 4).

…I argue that the central paradigm of a rhetoric of rape is not simply one of rape and silencing, as feminist criticism suggests, insinuating that this silence can be broken, that we can and should read the violence back into the texts. Since silences themselves generate speech, the central paradigm (4) is rather that of rape, silence, and refiguration. If our readings focus on refigurations of rape as well as on rape as refiguration, we acknowledge that texts do not simply reflect but rather stage and dramatize the historical contradiction by which they are overdetermined. At best, readings of rape therefore reveal not merely the latent text in what is manifest, explicit, and thus produce a text’s self-knowledge; they also evolve a new knowledge pertaining to the ideological necessities of a text’s silences and deletions. (Sielke 4-5).

Literary texts translate pain into art, transform the unspeakable into figures of speech whose structure and function both disfigure and bespeak their cultural (5) work. They tell stories and translate tales of violation into nationally specific cultural symbologies and conclusive narratives. As such, they both form and interfere with the cultural imaginary. … Literature is central here not so much because, unlike the discourses of the social and natural sciences, it has allowed marginal voices to enter into the conversation on gender, race, and sexuality at an earlier time. Literature may have accommodated ‘other’ perspectives, but their otherness has nonetheless been channeled and limited by the institutional frames in which they appeared. Likewise we no longer share the (formalist) faith in the powers of fiction and its particular aesthetics to represent and level conflicting cultural forces, or assume that literary texts are generically more ‘telling’ than other discourses and thus manage to subvert and crumble cultural hegemonies…
I do hold, however, that the analysis of literary texts is particularly revealing for a study focused on the rhetoric of rape, because, on the one hand, (some) literary texts conclusively narrativize and, by way of dispelling contradictions, manage to ‘naturalize’ sexual violence into seemingly consensual views on gender, sexuality and the world at large. … At the same time we have to acknowledge that the questions we bring to our inquiries into literary texts-such as issues of rape and representation-are motivated, mediated, and framed by our present concerns about identity and difference. Accordingly, the texts, their textuality, temporality, and tradition tell us as much about themselves as about the ways in which we project our selves. (Sielke 5-6)

Bal, Mieke. Looking In: The Art of Viewing. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 2001.

…rape makes the victim invisible. It does that literally-first the perpetrator covers her-and figuratively-then the rape destroys her self-image, her subjectivity, which is temporarily narcotized, definitively changed, and often destroyed. Finally, rape cannot be visualized because the experience is, physically as well as psychologically, inner. Rape takes place inside. … The need to listen to survivors then, becomes doubly urgent, as the only way to reach a solution to the juridical dilemma rape represents. (Bal 100)

…rhetoric, by shaping meaning, constructs reality through the construction of the meanings it offers reality to work with. That is to say, the rhetorical analysis does not stand in opposition to the real issue of rape. Rather, it partakes of it, the rhetorical figurations helping to construct the views of rape dominant in the culture in which the rhetorical discourse or image functions… (Bal 101)

“…the problem of how to view rape and how to act upon that view is far from being solved” (Bal 108 ).

But what is the point of discussing rape through paintings and novels? For one thing it is important because these works are public, intersubjectively available for scrutiny; but is it really possible to move back and forth between the real issue of real rape and the representations of fictional rapes in ‘high’ art? The crux of this problem is the relationship between meaning and experience. Analyzing such a relationship might shed light on my ongoing appeal to empathy with the victim of rape. (Bal 110)

This next is exactly what Weber is doing with his novels, I think. Or at least the rape act as revenge, as publication. Not the victim’s response, because that is not Honor’s response.

…it is crucial that we recognize that besides being violent and aggressive, rape also has the following characteristics: first, rape is a language, a body language. It speaks hatred caused by fear and rivalry. As a speech act, it is the “publication,” the public appropriation, of a subject. It turns the victim into a sign, intersubjectively available. The speech act of rape signifies the arbitrary relationship of sign to meaning… Therefore, the primary meaning of rape for the perpetrator is revenge, a crime of property; the victim becomes anybody’s property because she is no longer one man’s. Second it is important to remember that the goal of rape is the destruction of the victim’s subjectivity, a destruction necessitated by the problematic self-image of the rapist. This destruction is accomplished by the alienation from self that ensues as a result of the experience of hatred being spoken in one’s body by means of another’s, by forced contiguity. As a consequence of the semiotic nature of rape, the victim, a member of the semiotic community in which the rape takes place, understands and internalizes the message of annihilation absolutely. She is destroyed, hence unable to participate in semiosis anymore. Just as her body has become appropriated, so too her semiotic competence has been usurped and her semiosis becomes the other’s. As a consequence, the most characteristic result of rape is the victim’s agreement with the rapist’s hatred of her. The victim is not only (109) blamed by others, she also blames herself, because she is not addressed, not spoken to, but spoken. (Bal 109-110)

In the following quotes, I find that the works I am examining do pretty much the opposite of the expectation and findings by Higgins and Silver. It is not that I disbelieve or doubt them. I do not. I think, though, that my preference is for a more accurate presentation of rape as violation. I neither read nor remember assaults which are as described by Higgins and Silver. Also, I suppose, my understanding of silence by sexual assault survivors is quite different from how Higgins and Silver would interpret those same silences. However, these quotes would be more useful to say “This is what has been done; this is not what I have found” than to prop up my work.

So they show that I have entered a conversation, even if I disagree with their conclusions.

Rape and Representation. Eds. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver. New York: Columbia, 1993.

“…who gets to tell the story and whose story counts as ‘truth’ determine the definition of what rape is. Focusing on the tales told (or not told) by voices within texts, by authors, and by critics… ” (Higgins and Silver 1).

“…analyses of specific texts, when read through and against each other, illustrate a number of profoundly disturbing patterns. Not the least of these is an obsessive inscription-and an obsessive erasure- of sexual violence against women…” (Higgins and Silver 2).

“How is it that in spite (or perhaps because) of their erasure, rape and sexual violence have been so ingrained and so rationalized through their representations as to appear ‘natural’ and inevitable, to women as to men?” (Higgins and Silver 2).

“One of the feminist strategies… is to show how art and criticism share the well-documented bias of rape law, where representations of rape after the event are almost always framed by a masculine perspective premised on men’s fantasies…” (Higgins and Silver 2).

Over and over in the texts… rape exists as an absence or gap that is both product and source of textual anxiety, contradiction, or censorship. The simultaneous presence and disappearance of rape as constantly deferred origin of both plot and social relations is repeated so often as to suggest a basic conceptual principle in the articulation of both social and artistic representations. Even when the rape does not disappear, the naturalization of patriarchal thinking, institutions, and plots has profound effects: just as victims of rape often end up blaming themselves, the texts … present women telling stories that echo or ventriloquize definitions of rape that obliterate what might have been radically different perceptions. (Higgins and Silver 3)

Again, I think they have chosen works which support their belief system. I am not saying those works do not exist. They do. What I am saying is that there are other works which support the woman’s right to own, describe, and tell about her assault or, at least, portray the assault with significant horror and distress that it is obviously bad.

“…rape and rapability are central to the very construction of gender identity…” (Higgins and Silver 3).

“What are the rhetorical strategies whereby rape gets represented in spite of (or through) its suppression? Equally important, what happens to women who go public about their violation? If they escape the dominant fate of silencing and erasure, what price do they pay?” (Higgins and Silver 4)

Again, “dominant” fate? This may have been true in earlier years and it is still true in many places, but it is no longer true in 2009 in the United States. Would I think it was still the dominant fate in 1993? Perhaps. But no longer.

But the act of rereading rape involves more than listening to silences; it requires restoring rape to the literal, to the body: restoring, that is, the violence-the physical, sexual violation. (Higgins and Silver 4)

On page 5 they talk about “rape and silencing,” but they are meaning a silence imposed from without, not a silence imposed by the survivor. That is a very different kettle of fish.

How rape becomes institutionalized:
“… shifts the emphasis from writing the victim to the institutional discourses in which rape occurs…. each of these discourses provides a context for reading literary representations of rape and each one is shown to “frame” the rape victim by rationalizing violence against women…” (Higgins and Silver 6)

(Speaking of the Honor Harrington series by David Weber) I think that Honor here felt that she was in an institution that would not listen to her. It was not the Navy, but the aristocracy. She did not speak, but they tried to get her to. Weber makes it clear in other places that there were rapes going on, Georgia’s too, which are not punished by the courts. So Honor’s would have been, but she was right in that the aristocracy outside the Navy would subvert the rape onto the survivor.

“By actively confronting rape at the level of literary texts these essays become a force of resistance and change” (Higgins and Silver 8).

Yes, that I can agree with.

Who is speaking has a great deal to do with whether or not the victim, most commonly but not always a woman, is believed and whether a case will be made against the assailant. The nature of the ‘who’ evoked here includes more than gender: race, class, the sexual history of the victim, the relationship (8) of the victim to the perpetrator (e.g., whether he was a stranger or an acquaintance), all play a role in whether a ‘rape’ is perceived to have occurred. (Higgins and Silver 8-9)

From Kath Filmer Scepticism and Hope in Twentieth Century Fantasy Literature. Ohio: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1992.

Why fantasy is religious

…religious discourse has become alien to the secular and sceptical [sic] western societies of the twentieth century. There is real discomfort when religious discourse appears either in the popular press or in literary representations. Believers become marginalised in society. … But even in a secular society, there is still a psychological need (one might even use the stronger word will), if not to believe, then at least to hope. …this need is met in the literature of fantasy.

Twentieth century fantasy has emerged from a long tradition of religion and philosophy, and it has adapted itself to provide gods and heroes whom readers might worship and in whom they might transcend themselves. I do not argue that the literature of fantasy is ‘about’ religion; rather my argument is that fantasy speaks religion, that it operates in the same space and uses the same devices as the discourse of religion and does so largely to the same end: the articulation of hope. (Filmer iii)

Fantasy as religion

The angst of this secular, nihilistic age is explored in the growing number of science fiction and fantasy texts which address, as worthwhile fantasy has always done, human concerns, psychological and spiritual. Within the constraints of these genres there is now a discourse which addresses itself to these concerns in a manner which suggests that religious discourse has been displaced from its contextual siting in the social rituals of worship to the private experience of engagement with a written text. I do not mean to propose that the authors of science fiction and fantasy texts are “putting religion into the story,” as it were, although it is clear that some authors do so. Rather I believe that the discourse of the fantastic is itself a form of religious discourse, with all the features of didacticism, persuasion and emotive language which have traditionally been associated with the discourse of religion. (Filmer)

…the literature of fantasy and science fiction has a significant part to play in the religious concerns of the late twentieth century, and that the discourse of religion, marginalized not only by a consumerist and materialist society, but also by the anti-theological discourse of certain contemporary literary theories, is legitimized in these genres. It is said that energy never dissipates, but merely changes its form; so the linguistic expression of the most profound human needs is displaced from religion to literature, but to a certain kind of literature which makes available the symbolic forms by which ontological and metaphysical concerns might be addressed. (Filmer 5)

Fantasy subverts

…while fantasy also “deconstructs” and undermines certain assumptions about the world, it also sets in place a new iconography of the sacred which in turn subverts the sceptical imperative which many believe lies at the heart of fantasy literature. (Filmer 7)

What fantasy literature does, then, is to instigate a process by which ‘suspended’ belief can be accommodated, and if belief is not fully recoverable from the experience of reading, then at least it can be compensated for by the articulation of hope. (Filmer 8 )

To check out later:
Nathan A. Scott, Jr “Poetry and Prayer.” esp. 208

From What Will They Learn

Benefit of core curriculum:

Another important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a “common conversation” among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other. As Columbia University notes on its website, common general education courses “create a community of intellectual discourse that spills over beyond the classroom and into dormitories, dining halls, and the many cafés that surround the campus.”14 Without this common conversation, the campus risks becoming less a community of scholars and more a disjointed jumble of isolated groups. (5)

Reading and writing is necessary.

In considering what should be included in a well-rounded college education, most people will agree that the primary goal is for students to learn critical habits of mind. These skills are not taught in any one class, but are built and refined over time as students wrestle with great thinkers in many fields of knowledge. A necessary prerequisite for studying the human world is an ability to communicate in it. Therefore, it is essential that students become proficient in their reading, writing, and speaking. (7)

Students should take composition.

Composition. An introductory college writing class, focusing on grammar, style, clarity, and argument. “Writing-intensive” courses or seminars and writing “for” a discipline where the instructors are not from the English or composition department do not count if they are the only component of a writing requirement. Remedial courses and SAT scores may not be used to satisfy a composition requirement. (10)

I am happy to note that the university my son is attending received an A for requiring 6-7 of their core courses.

I would be thrilled that of the top 100 schools 72 require composition (22) except for two things.
1. Why not 100 of them?
2. They do it because their students don’t know how to write.

found via a colleague on Facebook

From Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion 1981 Metheun and Company. New York.

Structured upon contradiction and ambivalence, the fantastic traces in that which cannot be said, that which evades articulation or that which is represented as ‘untrue’ and ‘unreal’. By offering a problematic re-presentation of an empirically ‘real’ world, the fantastic raises questions of the nature of the real and unreal, foregrounding the relation between them as its central concern. It is in this sense that Todorov refers to fantasy as the most ‘literary’ of all literary forms, as the ‘quintessence of literature’, for it makes explicit the problems of establishing ‘reality’ and ‘meaning’ through a literary text. As Bessiere writes, ‘Fantiastic narrative is perhaps the most artificial and deliberate mode of literary narrative … it is constructed on the affirmation of emptiness… uncertainty arises from this mixture of too much and of nothing (p.34). (Jackson 37)

If I wanted to examine Justin (Briggs) or Pavel (Weber), this would be a good work to look at. Specifically around 49-57 it would be helpful. Quote from Jameson’s work p.120 on the mode of romance.

In Defence of Fantasy: A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature since 1945 by Ann Swinfen. Published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in Boston in 1984.

What is fantasy?

The essential ingredient of all fantasy in ‘the marvellous,’ [sic] which will be regarded as anything outside the normal space-time cotinuum of the everyday world. Pure science fiction is excluded, since it treats essentially what does not exist now, but might perhaps exist in the future. The marvellous [sic] element which lies at the heart of all fantasy is composed of what can never exist in the world of empirical experience. Elements of the marvellous [sic] may irrupt into the normal world, but more often the reader is carried, at least part of the time, into another world… (Swinfen 5)

Why do we read fantasy?

Fantasy draws much of its strength from certain ‘primordial desires’ for the enrichment of life; the desire to survey vast depths of space and time, the desire to behold marvellous [sic] creatures, the desire to share the speech of the animals, the desire to escape from the ancient limitations of man’s primary world condition. (Swinfen 7)

Escapism is good, Pt 2
This is from Kath Filmer Scepticism and Hope in Twentieth Century Fantasy Literature. Ohio: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1992.

…fantasy provides a certain fulfilment for its readers through the experiences of Escape, Recovery and Consolation. [In "On Fairy Stories"] Escape, Tolkien writes , is not a term to be used with scorn or pity, as it is in some critical circles; rather the term describes not “the flight of the deserter” but rather “the Escape of the Prisoner.” Fantasy gives us the opportunity to escape to the ‘real’ world, to catch visions of the marvellous and the wonderful, to produce in turn the experience of Recovery. (Filmer 26)

From Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction by Lucie Armitt, New York: Routledge, 1991.

Increasingly women writers and critics of science fiction are offering new and alternative readings of stock themes and preoccupations.
…
One of the primary concerns of the science fiction writer is to challenge received notions of reality as it currently exists, and two of the most significant foundations upon which reality is based are time and language (forming the means whereby reality is compartmentalised [sic] into comprehensible units). (Armitt 7)

What is the point of science fiction?

to illustrate the significance of language and its structures to the structures of power, stressing the importance of women writers deconstructing not only the language of discourse but also the language of narrative, if existing power relations are to be challenged and subverted. (Armitt 7)

What are problems with science fiction?

Science fiction, like any other form of genre fiction, is particularly susceptible to the (often idiosyncratic) marketing strategies of the ‘popular’ paperback publishing industry. At times this can result in a very obvious tension between the book as a saleable commodity and the creativity of the writing contained therein. (Armitt 8 )

Criticism: Escapism, duh

One of the criticisms frequently launched against science fiction, in common with other fantasy forms, is that of escapism–something which is apparently deemed a lesser preoccupation than those of the realist modes.
…
Women are not located at the centre of contemporary culture and society, but are almost entirely defined from the aforementioned negative perspective of ‘otherness’ or ‘difference’. As such, the need to escape from a socity with regard to which they already hold an ex-centric position is clearly an irrelevant one. More appropriate perhaps is the need to escape into–that is, to depict–an alternative reality within which centrality is possible.
In addition to this, however, good science fiction (whether based on a technological or a socio-political foundation) places great emphasis upon the intrinsic link between perceived reality and the depiction of futurist or alien societies. Thus whatever the approach, and whatever the gender, the depiction of an alternative reality is only the first step of an essential reassessment process (9) on the part of both author and reader; making strange what we commonly perceive to be around us, primarily in order that we might focus upon existing reality afresh, and as outsiders. (Armitt 9-10)

“… the science fiction novel provides a forum for fictionalising frightening possibilities, as well as utopian dreams” (Armitt 10).

She says that what has been labeled science fiction is very slippery. Many are what I would call genre-challenged texts. “One approach to this is to define the boundaries within which one wants to work, and then to select material within those boundaries for inclusion” (Armitt 10).

“…the role traditionally assigned to the female within the text–victimised, powerless and sexually threatened” says Sarah Gamble in “Shambleau… and Others” in Armitt’s book (37). She is specifying a particular text, but I think this can often be extrapolated to texts in general.

Ursula LeGuin, in “A Citizen of Mondath” from The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1980) by LeGuin and Susan Wood, wrote:

That is a real danger, when you write science fiction. There is so little real criticism, that despite the very delightful and heartening feedback from and connection with the fans, the writer is almost his only critic.
…
What almost all of us need is some genuine, serious, literate criticism: some standards. I don’t mean pedantry and fancy academic theorizing. I mean just the kind of standards which any musician, for instance, has to meet…. The mediocre and the excellent are praised alike by aficionados, and ignored alike by outsiders. (29)

Susan Bassnett in “Remaking the Old World” in Armitt’s book, wrote about LeGuin’s work “nor can it be neatly categorised, either in terms of ideology or in terms of genre” (51).

“All writers are a product of a particular culture at a particular moment in time; the values they bring to their writing, the conventions they espouse, the critical statements they seek to make have a context” (Bassnett 52).

Adding a new course has been a bit tricky at my school. So many of the classes are open to anyone that when there is one with restricted access the advisors don’t know what to do. One class ended up with only half the students it should have had because the advisors filled the class with students who weren’t nursing majors.

It’s going to make, this semester, with only eleven students. But I should have been able to fill two classes.

I’m looking forward to the class and I hope that word will get out and next semester I’ll be teaching at least one and possibly two of these classes. The more motivated students are to “get” the information you are trying to teach, the more likely they are to succeed and excel.

Note: WAC/WID is Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines.

After reviewing the course description for the humanities, I decided to apply for the position. It is actually very similar to a course that I am presently putting together with Dr. Kagle and Dr. Stiles. So…

A music humanities syllabus divides the history of music into five eras (including 20th century) and gives major composers/works from each.

For example:

Medieval and Renaissance Music
Composers and works include:

Gregorian chant
Hildegard of Bingen
Josquin des Prez
The madrigal

The Global Humanities syllabus is focused on international humanities, particularly from non-European backgrounds. It has excellent ideas for projects, including

For a subject, you should take a contemporary work of art or architecture, short story, poem, piece of music, film, or other work created within the last century (roughly 1920 to the present) that comes from one of the cultures that we have been studying—or take one of these cultural products from the colonial or pre-colonial past. (You may build on a topic that you have used for your Cultural Resource report.) Your purpose in this project will be one of these two:

o Explain how a contemporary artist (whether painter, architect, writer, musician or other) creates works that draw on or comment on the culture and traditions of his/her society’s past.
o Explain how a work (narrative, poem, song, sculpture, building, etc.) from a society’s past can give a new understanding of what it is like to live in a particular culture or society to an outsider.

In addition, your purpose is to demonstrate how this particular cultural work explores the “human condition” within the context of its society. What questions about human life does this work attempt to deal with? What answers, if any, does it provide? How does it try to engage the senses and experience of its audience (viewer, reader, listener)?

Stanford’s Humanities Lab Lecture Series

This syllabus is primarily reading. I can totally see doing literature (obviously), but I would want some music and art. This is also very Euro-centric. While it is excellent as a literary introduction to European thought, I don’t think that is what the focus of the course would be about…. Although it might.

I think this syllabus is more along the lines of what I was thinking about originally.

Course Description and Objectives: In this basic interdisciplinary humanities course the student learns how to examine, compare, analyze, evaluate, interpret and discuss creative works within their cultural contexts. Examples for study will be selected from the world’s great works of literature, drama, painting, sculpture, architecture, music . . .
Students take from the course the ability to identify major categories of artistic forms; compare and contrast stylistic characteristics of selected works; assess the artistic merit of representative creative works; employ the language, concepts and methods of interpretive criticism as it applies to the arts; and find ways to continue participating in artistic experiences.

Course Plan: Lectures, class discussions, cultural experiences and directed observation form the basis of course activities. Examples of human creativity will be presented in videos, recordings, photographs, art objects, performances, PowerPoint, etc. Reading, personal observation and listening assignments aid in class participation and increase understanding of topics covered in lecture and discussion. Exams and reports are used to evaluate the understanding of materials from class activities, reading, and observation assignments completed outside the classroom.

I do like the idea that others have suggested of having events to attend, like the plays in the park, art museums, etc. If there were a list of twenty or so, with varying price ranges, the students could choose two or three to attend.

That same syllabus gave this as the requirements for after the events:

Fine Arts Reports: Choose events wisely! Formal reports must be 600 to 1000 words and follow a logical and organized course; thoroughly cover the topic while avoiding exceeding the 1000 typed, double-spaced word limit. Introductions include when and where; titles and names of the event/activity/works of art; creator of that art; performers; historical significance; and points of interest. The main body discusses individual works including technical aspects; comparisons and contrasts within the framework of the event; and observations. Conclusions bring all to a close with logical arguments and personal impressions; it is an excellent time to state likes and dislikes. Criteria considered in evaluating papers includes relevance of the event to the course, use of background material and course terminology, presentation, expression of opinion and personal involvement, and creativity. It is traditional to validate the report by attaching programs, museum brochures and/or tickets or receipts.

Columbia’s History of Western Art: Humanities offers some interesting suggestions too. Primarily, obviously, with art. That one source that I used with the students, though, would be great. Could I fit that in my cover letter?

I went to the internet and I looked up “why study art.”

Most of the time, the sites were all about studying art for a degree. But then I found an incredible website. It offers reasons for studying Western Art History.

It is amazingly well done. I wish I could buy a copy of it and keep it on my computer so that if it ever goes away I could still have it.

Why Study Art? Enjoy the website. The pictures are incredible and it will make you think about why you like art.

There are also quiz questions and help thinking about writing about art. They are at the original website that showed me the site above.

I followed that page home and found What is Art? Amazing pictures. Simple discussion. As in our book’s essay “Ways of Seeing,” this examines beauty and truth…

Tools of the Artist begins here and discusses the art in terms of composition, line, color, space, shape, detail…

from Davis English