Aldo's Uni English Musings

     I support including AI-generated stories and art in courses that focus on analyzing and discussing different kinds of media. However, I do not support any assignment in these kinds of courses that encourages students to use AI tools on any part of the work that they submit. Traditional tests, essays, and presentations have stuck around for so long because they’re the most effective ways for humans to show what they think and learn, and attempts to shoehorn new technologies into that stage of the learning process without careful planning have failed students in the past. Rather, I think that a limited amount of AI content should be either included in media-literacy units to help students learn to spot it on their own, deconstructed to point out bad writing habits, bias, and hallucinations, or analyzed like a regular human source should any of it have some artistic value.      Recognizing AI content is quickly becoming an essential media literacy skill, ...

  “Good evening, Surveyor #4103f01c-d7ea.” A poorly synthesized voice filled with grating buzzing artifacts blared from a speaker somewhere close behind me. A tingling sensation rushed down my body as my eyelids started to flutter, slowly bringing the blurry mess of light that surrounded me into focus. I began to look around. I was laying on an unpleasantly firm bed installed in the corner of a long and narrow room, lit from above with blinding white lights and lined with a chaotic web of pipes, colorful wires, and tiny blinking devices. An enormous metal door sealed the end, and a row of storage units of various shapes covered one of the long walls. But what captured my attention most was one of the several small, circular windows dotted along the walls. I laid awkwardly on my side and stared obliviously at the tiny points of light whipping by outside for an embarrassingly long time before a cascade of memories and realizations came rushing back into my head.  I was barrellin...

     Both Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X were influential figures in the fight for civil rights. Separated by the better part of a century, they still took similar paths through life. They began in dangerous and demoralizing conditions, but fixated in their adolescence on learning to read and educating themselves despite numerous barriers. Both used this skill to develop an understanding of the problems facing Black people in their times, and eventually both became prominent advocates for the whole of their race. But within these general periods of their early lives, their individual experiences varied significantly, taking their beliefs, goals, and tactics in two very different directions. Booker T. Washington felt that racism could be eventually beaten through forgiveness, incremental change, and programs which worked "inside the system," like vocational training, while Malcolm X argued that significant change would never occur without constant, aggressive activism ...

     It is widely known that conditions in the Jim Crow-era South were viciously oppressive and harmful to Black people, as well as anyone else without white skin. Even today, many ideologies of this time, like the idea that giving other people rights "costs you yours," continue to actively hurt the same communities as they did nearly 100 years ago. And throughout history, natural disasters have only further shown the effects of systems of discrimination through the disproportionate harm they cause to marginalized communities. In "Down by the Riverside," Richard Wright places a fictional yet realistic Black farmer, Mann, in the real and deadly Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 , mainly to protest the immense inequality in the South under Jim Crow. But also, at several points, he uses Mann's thoughts to present his idea of a world free of the racism that caused the story's violence and injustice in the first place.     One such passage where these goals are app...

The African-American vernacular tradition — the system of oral and literary expression developed by Black people in the United States and exemplified by their folk tales, religion, music (blues, jazz, spirituals) and unique dialect of English — is at the core of much of the literature we have read so far in this class. These elements of the vernacular tradition are frequently used both directly in our texts and alluded to, contributing to an interesting, authentic, and uniquely Black style of literature. In an era where slavery was still within living memory for many of its most prolific writers, this field gave Black people a kind of voice they never had before and allowed them to share and relate to each other's experiences and further their culture. But before the literacy rate of African-Americans skyrocketed following the Civil War, their vernacular tradition was mostly driven by oral expression, like folk tales, sermons, and especially music. Multiple influences combined to f...

Never in Lee Harvey Oswald's childhood, the story of which is told in Don DeLillo's Libra , does he have a father, or even father figure, who is around long enough to matter. His mother's first husband, Edward, walked out on her when she was pregnant with Lee's half-brother John Edward Pic; his biological father Robert died suddenly of a heart attack during her pregnancy with Lee; and her last husband, Edwin, cheated on her. (4-5) Furthermore, Lee rarely gets much recognition, respect, or validation. In the South, he is viciously harassed for his "Northern" speech, while in the North people mock his perceived Texas accent with a variety of colorful nicknames. Without engaged or supportive parents to help him with any of his trauma, he becomes isolated, sad, and even aggressive, and is sent to a youth home after he begins skipping school. Because of his constantly changing childhood and adolescence, Lee seems to feel lost an...

     Kindred is a book that may as well be a play for how much acting it contains. Butler uses all of the main characters to thoroughly explore this idea, along with its inherent fakeness as well as its failings in the context of the time-travel narrative she sets up. Rufus, for example, puts on a different, fake-strong persona as his father deteriorates and dies and he becomes the leader of the plantation, but it collapses whenever he's with Dana to reveal the scared and somewhat traumatized boy inside. Kevin is Dana's husband back in 1976, but is forced to become her "master" during their journey to the past, quickly accepting this role that seems incredibly cruel on paper, but is ultimately necessary to protect Dana. Yet when he's hidden by the branches of an oak tree behind the Weylin home, they have a conversation where Kevin thoroughly explains his disguise so their stories can match, letting it drop for a moment. Dana herself is very similar as well. She i...