What keeps us from changing those viewpoints, and are those viewpoints responsible for keeping people (and points of view) in a place? Are there “formidable forces” arrayed against each of us in our society that make and map the paths we take in our lives?

In
“Our Time,” John Edgar Wideman writes of “the forces
arrayed against” his brother Robby, and argues that many of his
difficulties were attributable to pressures placed on Robby by his
community and culture that was rooted in a history of racism and
oppression. We have discussed on-line, to some extent, the level of
gains made by minorities in the twenty years since the events in “Our
Time” took place; some of you have argued that these have been
significant, but others would contend they haven’t made that much
of a difference. What would John Berger say about this, and the
difficulty each of us have had in changing the ways we see members of
all communities? What keeps us from changing those viewpoints, and
are those viewpoints responsible for keeping people (and points of
view) in a place? Are there “formidable forces” arrayed
against each of us in our society that make and map the paths we take
in our lives?
While
reading “Our Secret,” you saw that Susan Griffin arrives at
some of the same conclusions about how we are shaped and affected by
our families, communities, and our histories, both private and
public. (Indeed, one of her most passionate arguments is that we are
affected by histories we don’t even know.) To put it in Berger’s
terms, powerful forces are at work in shaping “what we know and
believe” and, of course, what we know and believe affects
everything we see, and, according to Griffin, everyone we see.

You
have three options for this assignment, ranked here from least
difficult to most:

1.
For your first assignment, you discussed a time when someone or
something had power over you, and how you came to understand and
respond to that power. For this assignment, I would like you to take
a look at yourself or someone you know and care for and how you or
that other person is affected by the larger expectations placed on
you by society. You may use the Berger essay, the Wideman essay, or
the Griffin essay to develop your essay, but you should try to use
the principles of two of them to help you discuss your experience.
What are the “formidable forces” at work in the experience
you describe? Who or what is responsible for their creation, and how
do you or the person you’re describing respond to them? Do you
fight them? give into them? a combination of both?
You’ll
have to use your imagination here, at least in an intellectual sense,
to both describe your experience and consider how it fits into a
societal or cultural scheme that in part shaped that experience. The
connections between the personal and cultural need not be literal or
complete; they aren’t made so in either “Our Time” or “Our
Secret.” But both Wideman and Griffin see their families and
their communities for the mysteries they are, while acknowledging
that these mysteries are largely shaped and reared in a culture’s
expectations of what a family is, what a community is, what a country
is. I’d like to see you attempt to do the same in your own essay.
Remember, call on Berger or Griffin or Wideman (or all three) to push
your discussion forward, using their essays as context to access your
own. This is a must if you take this option.

2.
Consider the issue of individual responsibility for criminal behavior
in light of the Wideman essay and Griffin essays. Both Wideman and
Griffin, though in vastly different ways, want to argue that
environment does contribute to the decisions people make for
themselves, both criminal and otherwise, and Griffin goes so far as
to suggest that we, ourselves, are in some small way responsible or
at least connected to events, criminal and otherwise, that occur
half-way across the globe. Has your reading and Wideman and Griffin
affected in any way your perception of criminal responsibility? And
are their possibilities for genuine redemption for criminals who
commit heinous acts?” Can you apply current international
circumstances to a discussion of either the Wideman or Griffin texts?
Write an essay that explores the issue of criminal responsibility and
how it is shaped (or isn’t shaped) by exterior forces, using
Griffin and Wideman to extend and develop your discussion. Don’t
forget to establish a clear thesis stating your perspective early in
the essay.

3.
Taken from “Ways of Reading”: “It is useful…to think about
Griffin’s prose as the enactment of a method, as a way of doing a
certain kind of intellectual work. One way to study this, to feel its
effects, is to imitate it, to take it as a model. For this
assignment, write a Griffin-like essay, one similar in its methods of
organization and argument. You will need to think about the stories
you might tell, about the stories and texts you might gather ([some
of which are] not your own). As you write, you will want to think
carefully about arrangement and about commentary (about where, that
is, you will speak to your reader as
the writer of the piece). You should not feel bound to Griffin’s
subject matter, but you should feel that you are working in her
spirit.” (414).

This essay should be a minimum of
1000 words long.

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