TA Practicum

This will give just a taste of what the graduate student teaching assistants work with in our fall practicum. Michael Faris, one of last year's teaching TA's who is now working for the Writing Intensive Curriculum and sadly missed as one of our teachers, presented an exercise about rhetorical analysis of images for this year's incoming cohort. The ensuing discussion intrigued me, especially all the comments about how powerful the woman looked, whereas to me, she looked stony, impassive, enduring, resigned. Maybe a woman who does not look eager and seductive is seen as powerful because she is self-contained? The model in this photograph seems entirely inwardly directed. Among the various comments on her "bloody" hand and eye, no one mentioned the possibility that she, like Oedipus, had taken out her eye - refusal to see what was around her. Only one eye, however. The left one.