Joey Liu, Period 6, 10/04/23

Joey Liu

Period 6

10/4/23

In today’s class, we covered the second part of our Stained Glass Project. Specifically, we were greeted with Ms. Fusaro’s special twist: How can we use our critical theories to reimagine literary texts? So, we had volunteers who came up to the class to present. 

One of the presentations I found notable was by Wyatt Tan. The “text” he reimagined was Disney’s Mulan and he viewed it through the New Historicism Lens. The movie emphasized Mulan’s journey as a woman trying to pass as a man to fight in the Mongol Conquest and promoted independency for women. I found his reimagination particularly interesting because in Western culture, a lot of emphasis is placed on the self. Oftentimes it’s about the individual and all that the self is able to accomplish. I liked the fact that Wyatt took a dive into the communal aspect of society by bringing up how an alternate version of Mulan could include a group of women instead of just Mulan herself. Of course, in the New Historicism lens, this would be more historically accurate because Mulan was not the only woman who fought alongside men.

In addition to Wyatt’s Mulan, I also found Liz’s choice to be quite serendipitous. Attack on Titan is a popular anime that essentially covers a storyline about human’s living in isolation while surrounded by hungry Titans. In the postcolonial lens, Liz dissected the series and made the analogy that the actions of the Eldians in the show were an allegory for Japanese imperialism during WWII + its effects on the Japanese people. To make this fit even better into the postcolonial lens, she reimagined the story to focus more on Marley (nation beyond the walls) so the effects of Eldian imperialism are better conveyed. 

Both of these presentations along with some others have really helped shape my critical perception of texts in general. Not only am I able to better identify different points of view in the text as a reader, I’ve also been able to identify certain nuances and concepts in texts that I may not have otherwise been able to notice had I not gotten the literary lens practice presented in class. For instance, I have applied these lenses to the recent SAT I took. Given a set of 2 passages to read, I dissected both of the passages in a deconstruction lens to successfully pinpoint any inconsistencies that would appear in the questions. Using the reader response lens, I was able to make inferences based on my experience and reaction to the two passages. Specifically, the topic covered was objectivity in journalism. I quickly conjured up the notion that objectivity is near impossible in journalism because of our inherent biases. I used that line of thinking to help me analyze both passages and answer the questions. The skills I’ve learned have helped me become a skilled and well rounded reader overall.