Month: November 2018

1. My goals with my revision are:

• Make my essay have a better flow/cohesion
• rework paragraphs I’m not happy with
• Make the thesis more clear and make more sense
• Talk about my community’s thoughts on art more

2. The steps I will take are:

• make edits based on peer reviews
• Reread essay to check for things I’d rather change
• Consider moving around paragraphs
• Consider using different quotes/using quotes differently
• Reread essay on final time for surface errors

3. I think my biggest challenge will probably be trying to make sense of all of the different topics we have to cover in one essay. Maintaining any sense of personality and a unique opinion will be difficult because most of the essay will be taken up by mandatory analysis of sources.

4. If I come across a problem that I cannot solve on my own, I’ll try to see if there’s anything in They Say I Say or The Little Seagull that could help me. If I still can’t get my essay to where I want it to be, I can ask my writing lab instructor to help me with it.

I think that, for my final essay, it would be helpful to add some pictures or examples of things that people find beautiful. For example, I’m featuring Tehya’s interview, which has her aunt talking about her love of the Maine coastline, and I think it would help illustrate the point if I included a picture of it, so that when she describes it, the readers can really see what she’s talking about. I also may include pictures of things that I find beautiful. It also may be helpful to link the articles and podcasts I’ll be talking about in my essay, in addition to citing them formally. I’m not sure if Microsoft Word supports it, but if I could embed the podcasts into the essay and include timestamps for the quotes, I could have my readers listen to the quotes as well as read them. I think that adding these other modes of communicating my point will strengthen my essay.

Article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/07/06/beauty-is-in-the-brain-of-the-beholder/#.W-R_m5NKjD4

This article from Discover Magazine is about a study conducted to test how people’s brains react to things they find beautiful. It found that when people find things beautiful (they tested music and paintings) the medial orbitofrontal cortex lights up in an fMRI scan. It also briefly discusses this in the context of average life, concluding that beauty is in the eye (or brain) of the beholder. I plan to use this to discuss beauty in a scientific context. In all of the articles we’ve read so far, beauty has been talked about in an abstract and philosophical context, but I feel that having the grounding of science behind the idea that beauty is a unique experience would help the essay a lot.

Presentations:

Podcast- Interview about beauty

Beauty Interview

I chose these presentations because both of them were inspiring to me, but in different ways. Tehya’s interview was about the natural physical beauty of the coastline, while Liam’s interview was about the beauty of humanity. I feel that, since I have to include 2 interviews, it would be best if they both had unique perspectives from one another and could compliment each other.

In the essay, “La bella vita”, John Armstrong discusses beauty and what makes something beautiful. He states that, “To regard beauty as a luxury adornment or a social signifier was to miss the true potential of the experience.” That is, beauty belongs to everyone. Beauty is not just a painting in someone’s house, or beautiful clothing, or jewelry. While I agree with this statement, I feel that Armstrong’s precise definition of beauty is more specific than that. He agrees with Schiller that for something to be truly beautiful it requires both immediate gratification and rational order. Essentially, “For Schiller, true beauty is whatever speaks powerfully to both sides of out nature at the same time.” I don’t think that both of these two aspects are required for something to be beautiful, and I think defining it that way doesn’t account for how many different things people do find beautiful. Take a sunset, for example. There is no immediate logic or reasoning behind it. And yet, people have been finding nature beautiful long before they knew how to explain it, long before they even considered the rational part of beauty. For some people, the unpredictability and unexpectedness of nature is what makes it beautiful. In addition, nature is a beauty completely divorced from luxury or social signifiers, as for the most part, it belongs to everyone, and everyone can appreciate it.