[CPLS X3122] Big Brother: Poetics of Power

Professor Usher's Big Brother class was so refreshing. I took it last semester and really miss it now that it is over. It was a daring and exciting class where I felt invited to try out ideas and take intellectual risks. There was a good balance of lecture (approx 30-40 minutes per class) and other activities. Unlike many lectures that repeat generalities or seem disconnected from what I've just read, each of Professur Usher's lectures began with the text we were reading or with the film. The small details that I might have passed over were shown to be important. It was the first time that small details and big ideas, for me, were connected in a literature/film class. One other reviewer mentioned a lecture talking about a vase in a film that Prof. Usher supposedly interpreted as a vulva--I didn't miss a single class and such a comment was never made. Prof. Usher does stick to the details, for sure, and his comments on papers always criticized generalizations, but that is the point--to look at texts and films for what they're actually saying or might be saying rather than merely being content to talk about "stories" and the general picture. I learned way more here about reading and writing than in First Year Englih. If you're interested in politics, literature, and film, and if your're willing to abandon generalizations in order to really read, then this is a class for you.

This class was a waste of time. Prof. Usher may be a nice guy and all, but he certainly is not a good teacher. Every single class that I attended consisted of:

1. 30 minutes of him rambling on hurriedly and incoherently about some obscure detail of a sentence or passage in the works we read (this was not necessarily a chunk of time, but rather small 5-minute interventions between other "activities")

2. 30 minutes of trivia, useless anecdotes and "class discussion" -- were you turn to your neighbor and pretend to discuss intelligently some random and again obscure topic just marginally related to the readings or class

3. 15-30+ minutes of a presentation where the students discussed, once again, some obscure article just marginally related to the spirit of the works and the class. As long as it sounded like a GRE vocabulary section, any presentation was a success.

Prof. Usher is a smart guy, no doubt about it. He is also a generous grader. Yet the class did not add to my knowledge at all, and it was about the "poetics of power" as much as it was about "lesbian utopias" (no, really!) -- as interesting as a concept as that might be.

In the end, all I took away from the class is an ability to "analyze the text closely" -- which in liberal translation is to see who can come up with the wildest and craziest interpretations of why a certain author used this particular noun in this particular sentence, or why this movie director chose to have the camera zoom in slower or faster. For example, on the final (three hours of in-class writing), one of the options (granted, there were plenty to choose from) was to write an entire essay on a movie captioning depicting a guy walking up the stairs. Another movie caption was a picture of a TV with the image of a guy on it.

Why did the director choose that particular vase in the corner? If you think to yourself "well, that's one vase that came with the order they placed when they bought stuff for the movie" or that the director did not even choose it, then you do not belong in this class. If however the vase reminds you of Big Brother and makes you think of a vulva, and you think it was suggestively placed there to indicate not only an oppressive environment but also the sad death of many who challenged the system -- yet without excluding the possibility that the vase is actually a visual depiction of the main actor's biographical past -- then you're in luck; this IS the class for you.

A ton of BS, no real substance, but an easy A.