Paper 3: Living in a Contradiction
Agnieszka Goeller
Basic Composition with Reading (Section RR)
Spring 2013
Reading: Adam Gopnik, “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli” and one of the following:
Sherry Turkle, “Alone Together”
Janet Flammang, “The Taste of Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society”
Why are we so busy if we wish to have time for our friends and other things we keep postponing? Why do we wall ourselves off from others with technology and then complain of loneliness and lack of intimacy? Why do we pine for authenticity, and yet live lives that are often deeply inauthentic, untrue to who we are? Why are we so unproductive amidst tools to increase our productivity? Why do we long for human conversation only to reduce it to utilitarian communication? In other words, the puzzle is how we manage to live in the gap between what we wish for and what we get.
Use specific quotes, examples and details from the text in developing your response. (you have a choice of working with either Gopnik and Flammang, or Gopnik and Turkle)
Here are some questions you might consider to help get started or to develop your ideas. They are intended to help you begin thinking about your paper. Do not organize your paper as series of answers to these questions. You do not even have to answer all of them; however, if you don’t have ideas about these questions, you’re not ready to write your paper.
1. Try to answer at least some of the questions that are at the opening of this essay assignment. Why are we so busy, when we are sick of busyness? What is the ideal that we would like to have? What is the force–inner or outer—that is preventing us from achieving what we want?
2. Discuss busyness itself in terms of a strategy for dealing with a disparity between what should be and what is. Is busyness a kind of compromise (of what?), an adaptation (to what?), or is there a different word that could describe it as a strategy?
3. How can we see Gopnik’s embrace of busyness as “our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us” (160) as a strategy for dealing with the gap between the ideal and the real? What are the larger implications of Gopnik’s approach? How could this approach/strategy be used for dealing with the other problems or gaps observed and discussed in the other essays?
4. Consider the three essays as offering their own perspectives as to how to deal with the gap or disparity described in them. First, analyze if they see the gap as a problem that can be surmounted, or if it is not some more fundamental contradiction that cannot be “solved.” Then, search for hints of an approach suggested by the essay vis a vis that gap/contradiction. Does the essay suggest a very active approach (seeking change), or one that seeks compromise and adaptation? What does Flammang suggest we do to bring reality more in line with what we actually wish for our society? What are the elements in her approach? Could they work for the problems represented in business?
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