Response Papers
2013-2018
Response papers for each semester of my Bachelor's studies allowed me to reflect upon my interdisciplinary courses how I can apply the knowledge I gained through them to my main field of study.
Semesters 1 &Â 2 and prior
The comparative element
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During the two years where I studied in the French Studies department of the University of Luxembourg, I have acquired many academic skills: how to write essays, how to compare one literary work with another and these skills helped me to express my ideas in a coherent form. I was also required to take history , media and philosophy courses, which helped me greatly in contextualizing the theoretical framework which we used in French studies. The courses which focused on cinema and cinematographic expression opened my eyes upon the mechanisms of story-telling in films. A memorable comparison was between Guy de Maupassant's short story and its respective film version, and how elements, such as perspective and narrative voice were 'translated' into camera movements, camera positions and dialogues between characters.
In the beginning of my studies, taking history and philosophy courses was useful as it helped to understand the historical context of the literary works which we looked at. This helps to see the intersections between the different studies in humanities and to realize that many of the materials which are analysed and used in history, philosophy and literary studies are essentially the same; the approach and focus for studying them is different.
Semester 3
Literature and Photography
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During the third semester, the interdisciplinary course which gave me a new appreciation of my studies was Histoire de l’Art: Art et Photographie du XXe siècle. This course analyzed different types of artistic expression, photography in particular. Other disciplinary courses such as Imagined Communities and Edward Steichen and American Modernism explored similar fields and gave me tools to analyze photographs and understand the importance of their content, the methods that were used in their creation and also their context. I have chosen to write about this interdisciplinary course because certain elements (concepts, artists, periods) were also relevant in other courses of my studies.
An artist which was often mentioned is the Luxembourgish artist Edward Steichen. Before these courses, I did not know his works but through the analysis of the pictures and their historical context, I started to realize the historical importance of photography as form of artistic expression: it is instantaneous or planned, staged or spontaneous but in all cases tells a lot about the time it was taken. It could be compared to literature as what is represented in a photograph can be interpreted in various ways by the viewer and the effect of a picture on the spectator can be very different than what the artist might have intended to represent. The American-Luxembourgish artist’s Edward Steichen’s work is vast and varied, passing through different styles and technological advances of photography and his work gives us an insight to the American way of life or the ‘American Dream’, which was also mentioned in courses such as American Studies and Imagined Communities. For example, in both courses, images and representations of that time were compared and sometimes even contrasted to the literary creations of the same period. In Imagined Communities, the Great Depression in the USA was analyzed through photographs of Steichen and others, through John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and the movie representation of the novel. These different ways of representing the same narrative give each time a new dimension to this narrative: in photographs we see a moment of the life of the people who try to survive the Great Depression that is captured as well as the landscapes of that time; in the book, we understand the feelings of the people we might have seen in the photographs and learn more about what they have lived; in the movie, we see the atmosphere, the landscapes and people that we might not be able to imagine through the book. For me for instance, the movie representation and the photographs had the most impact and helped me the most to imagine and understand how the world looked like for the people in the novel.
Some of the photographs we looked at during Histoire de l’Art appeared in newspapers and magazines and the course Popular Literature and the English Studies Conference on Periodical Studies also highlighted the historical importance of newspapers. The images and photographs which appeared in newspapers have a special status, as they are artistic creations that are used to inform about events, to sell a product or for other than the sake of art. The publicities and the articles which appeared in newspapers (from the 18th century to today) tell a lot about the time when it was produced: intertextualities, jokes, fashions or personalities which appear in them might not be understandable or known for other generations and therefore I realized how important newspapers and the images in them are to study a certain period of time.
In my opinion, it was important for me to look at images and visual representations beside of written sources in order to understand the different periods we looked at in this semester. Often, the image and the writing completed each other and the narrative became more understandable and approachable for me as often the places which were mentioned (for example regions of the US) were unknown for me. The images and photographs I have seen in this semester gave me a deeper insight into the period in which they were made through the techniques and the technologies that were available for the artists and how they overcome these barriers to create images that capture their time.
Semester 4
SDGs and Media
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The course Complex Goals for a Global Society dealt with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that were set by the United Nations in 2015. During class we discussed how these goals can be translated into real life and the challenges some countries face to adopt these goals. The SDGs focus on ecological, economical and social changes that became necessary to be taken in account in today’s world, such as sanitation, education, equality and infrastructures that are not on an ideal level in all countries. In the course Complex Goals for a Global Society, we have looked at articles and videos that show initiatives that were done by countries with developed financial and economical structures to support countries in need. Most of these resources, such as the TOMS television commercial ‘For One, Another’ is seen from the vantage point of the ‘givers’ but the point of view of the ‘receivers’ is often neglected in such sources. In this essay we will analyze the vantage point of this commercial and look at the effect that these resources strive to make on their readers or viewers, using tools from English Studies classes, namely Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism as well as English for Academic Purposes.
The aforementioned perspective of the ‘givers’ is apparent in the TOMS commercial ‘For One, Another’. During class, this video became highly controversial as many students agreed with and supported the initiative that is presented by TOMS which is based on the principle that with each purchased product, a person in need will also get the same product. However, questions about this seemingly positive and charitable company presented in this video arose: For whom was this video made? Who does truly profit from the sales of TOMS shoes? Is this initiative transparent for the consumers? I can see a parallel between the different interpretations and vantage points that the viewers of this video have adopted and the reading of a literary text that can also be read differently by each reader. The ‘real reading’ remains a matter of interpretation as the company (similarly to the Author) does not give you a clear answer about the goal of the video.
Similarly to Baudrillard’s text, in this video the viewer sees the representation of what could be perceived as reality if the viewer engages in believing that what they see is reality. The TOMS shoe seems to become the protagonist of this video from one side and from another side, many of the images that are shown in the video are unrelated to the shoes and by the use of the montage technique (which was part of the Poetry and the Other Arts curriculum) the viewer makes the relation between the skyline of the favelas, the old-fashioned stove and African children playing football. It creates a narrative between these unrelated images that the viewer perceives as the story of somebody who needs and gets a TOMS shoe but the voice of these people in need is not heard and their vantage point is not adopted, therefore - as it was discussed in class - the viewer cannot access the truth about whether these people truly need a TOMS (or other) shoes in the country and environment where they live.
If this video would be an essay, we could say that it is a persuasive one: the reader / viewer is firstly presented by the general context in the first images of the video; then, a number of scenarios where the TOMS shoes is presented as vital are shown as evidences to the cause of TOMS shoes. A comparison is drawn between the ‘givers’ (a young man skating in a US or European setting) and the ‘receivers’ (schoolgirls in a seemingly ‘needy’ environment) to show the necessity of TOMS’ initiative. The conclusion of the video is the only part where a text is present and where the message and the goal of the company becomes not only alluded to but also written into text. The viewer is addressed as ‘you’ and this creates a feeling of link between the viewer and the initiative by TOMS which incites the viewer to become part of this global movement.
As a conclusion, we can say that the tools we have acquired in English Studies classes can be used to analyze not only textual materials but also visual or other media. Narratives, whichever form they take strive to achieve similar goals of persuasion and these structures can be found throughout popular culture as well as literary texts. Perspectives and vantage points that are adopted in such works contribute to persuade the viewer or the reader and to engage them in the narratives they build up.
Source:
TOMS, ‘For One, Another - TOMS television commercial’, TOMS, published on 21st September 2015, accessed on 23rd July 2017.
Semester 5
Intercultural Communication
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In the fifth semester, the interdisciplinary course Approaches to Intercultural Communication focused on determining aspects by which we can define the concepts of culture and intercultural through looking at different methods of action in situations called ‘intercultural encounters’. In these encounters, two or more ‘cultures’ meet through the participants of such an encounter. Thus the main question that perpetuated during this class, was whether an intercultural encounter is also an interpersonal encounter or solely a meeting of different cultures through different people. Through interviews in research papers written by theorists of intercultural competence, we could look into the experiences of people through their narratives. The class encouraged the students to look at ‘intercultural encounters’ rather in the perspective of interpersonal exchange. Thus the main goal in analyzing intercultural situations was to avoid stereotypes and generalizations about a person of a given nation, ethnic group, or according to its taste in music and other subcategories of what can be looked at as ‘culture’. In this prospect, language was a significant factor of the concept ‘culture’.
Publicities, billboards and advertising were often used as examples of analysis because they reflect linguistic tendencies within a culture and power relations between the languages and the groups of people associated with a language. In a research project, I have looked at the visible languages in a Tokyo metro station, finding Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean on official signs. The theoretical framework for this project was inspired by the method of ‘linguistic landscaping’ which I have learned in classes such as Linguistics in the Real World and Introduction to Multilingualism in the previous semesters. In addition, the approach to the research also consisted of looking at cultural aspects of the linguistic landscape in a Japanese context, such as the use of Japan-specific pictograms depicting what can be judged as ‘Japanese behavior’ (for example the ‘do not rush into the train’ pictogram) alongside with universally recognizable signs.
In this class, different methods of becoming an ‘interculturally competent’ person or a ‘global citizen’ were presented. In one of the approaches, a document of the European Commission was analyzed, called Autobiography of an Intercultural Encounter. It is a document that consists of a set of questions about an intercultural encounter. The aim of the document is to help the person writing the ‘autobiography’ to retrospectively understand a situation where culture presented a barrier. This document relies strongly on the narrativization of the intercultural encounter, detailing every possible aspect of it, starting from where it happened, what the person wore, what were the feelings of the writer etc. It was surprising to see this method of analysis of an intercultural encounter in an official document, as it reminded me of trauma writing, where the writer relives the encounter and the feelings that this encounter perpetuated in a more or less cohesive narrative.
As a concluding observation to the approaches which I learned in this class, and through the discussions and opinions of my (chiefly Japanese and non-native English speaker) colleagues, it appears for many, intercultural competence is closely linked to linguistic competence. In class discussions and in the materials covered, English as an international language was often judged as the most important tool for intercultural communication, whereas skills or attitudes towards a given cultures were often pushed in the background compared to English. This shows that in ‘intercultural encounters’, language, and more precisely English are the most significant medium of communication.
Semester 6
Text and Image
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In the sixth semester, the interdisciplinary course that had the biggest impact on the appreciation of my studies was the course Working in the Media. This course has taught me many skills that transcend the ones that regular lectures or seminars can offer. Through this course I have learned to handle a professional camera and to use my - so far only theoretical - knowledge of frame, perspective and narration. In my studies, theories about narration and perspectives are applied to written texts but through the film project I could recognize how the same mechanisms are used for other types of media.
The main challenge in this course was to tell a story that is temporarily not linear (neither in production, nor in the storytelling), where there is no clear protagonist and where the image and the sound complete the textual parts, such as the script. For this project, my colleagues and I wanted to have a visible, intradiegetic and more ‘personal’ narrator rather than an external voice that cannot be linked to a face. I can see a similarity between this technique and the one writers employ for the narrators and characters in novels, poems and theater Other challenges were also time management, as the filming and editing of this project had many layers: developing our theme, conducting interviews, filming, sound, storyboard, connections in the theme etc. All these tasks required skills that I did not have before, such as how to edit a film, how to film, how to construct a story out of the available material etc. It was very different from writing an essay or debating in a group, because the materials were finite, and the only available materials (in the sense of story, images and sound) were the ones that we created, while in writing, one can add scholarly articles, arguments, sources etc. until the essay’s main question is answered. For this project, it was important to have more material than what would be used in the end product. In this sense, this task is similar to how my thesis was written: there was much more material there, but a selection has to be made. Thus it this film project was similar to writing an essay, where the theme has to be discussed in a concise way, while still providing enough information and personal approach in order to make it one’s own.
To conclude, this project was very valuable for me to see how the theoretical approaches which I thought so far are mostly applied to texts work in similar ways in non-textual productions. Some of these theoretical approaches were used without realizing how similar they are in films (such as the decision of having a narrator that is part of the story, thus we used an intradiegetic narrator in our project). I have also learned to be more outgoing with people and not to be afraid to ask them about their story, such as in the case of one of our interviewees. The most important thing I have learned is that narratives can be created through different media, but essentially, despite technical differences, they are often very similar in the way they convey messages.