Responses to Classmates' Posts

1.  Laura on Bachelder's relationship to Passionate Politics.
           I thought Laura's analysis of Bachelder's relationship to emotion was particularly strong, because she did not simply discuss ways that Bachelder manipulated and accounted for emotions in ways mentioned in Passionate Politics.  Instead, she discussed ways that Bachelder's own emotions affected his writing.  She mentions how "Bachelder could be interpreted as portraying his love for Sinclair and the love of his followers who continue to resurrect him as irrational," giving the impression that though Bachelder is clearly satirizing Sinclair, he is at the same time falling into his own trap, trying to get his point across by resurrecting an outdated, ineffective figure.  She also points out how elements of U.S.! conflict with principles set forth in Passionate Politics.  It was interesting how she pointed out the following sentence from Passionate Politics:  "a social movement begins to make headway against its targeted injustice, when its activists are subjected to a well-publicized atrocity."  She then points out that "even though Sinclair keeps getting murdered in heinous ways, Americans are just getting more and more accustomed to his murder and then eventual resurrection rather than becoming drawn to the socialist movement."  Sinclair's murders are incredibly well-publicized, but his murders do not give him the moral capital that Passionate Politics and much of our class would suggest he should gain.  Overall, Laura's post was impressive in analyzing the way that Bachelder at once manipulated, subverted, and was affected by emotions.

2.  Jenny on Bachelder's use of farce.
          Jenny did a good job both of identifying the specific mode of satire used by Bachelder in his imagined syllabus for a class taught by Sinclair, and of connecting his strategy to her own tactical media project.  She picked quotes that highlighted well the absurdity of Sinclair's class, such as the course objective of using "journalistic techniques and sexual repression to write social engaged, morally outraged fiction with unambiguous endings." These perfectly ridiculous statements, which are entirely laughable to the readers, are presented as being totally earnest for Sinclair.  Thus, Jenny can, and did, do the same in having people read off offensive Yik Yaks.  The Yik Yaks were meant with some degree of sincerity by the people who originally posted them.  However, the people who read them off in the video, and the viewers of the video, were meant to see the statements as ignorant, ridiculous, and insensitive.  Thus, she made the interesting step of taking real things said by real people and manipulating them into a farce.