Week 8: Comparative Reading

Find a passage that is pretty far away from the one that you read last week--maybe not even on the same topic and tell what is the same and different between it and the one that you read last week.

Ex. Brechin looks at a tall building and started reading about underground mines.

Rosa looks at the Golden Gate Bridge and started reading about the little fire symbol on Girl Scout pins.

Brittany compares subway tunnel sex in Howl to 1950's bedroom decor.

What should happen when you start asserting those violent comparisons is that a whole field of implications should start to pop up. You may want to start with by thinking: if these two things are connected, then what else is also connected...

The comparison can also help you to read for the choices that the writer of your primary passage didn't make.

Ex. Does gay sex have to be underground or is that undergroundess in Ginsberg's poem a specific reflection of the ways in which sexuality was repressed in the bedroom and an explicit connection with a political movement?

Does Ginsberg's turn to the somewhat machinic subway metahpor also make an important connection between women being forced out of the WWII industrial factories in order to give jobs back to men? Does it say something about mechanical relationships to sex?

What else could happen if we make wild connections?

Try to also have some fun with this.

Weeek 7: Comments on the close readings of your peers