Resources for Writing: The Discoveries – A Casebook
THE STRATEGIES
As the introduction makes clear, this section recapitulates the whole text by providing an essay in each strategy, plus a story, on a common theme: Discoveries. The purpose of representing these strategies is to demonstrate how they may be seen as thinking strategies, or ways of organizing and manipulating information on a particular subject. Indeed, the point of the section is to use readings to illustrate that thinking and writing are organically linked.
The section has been placed at the end of the anthology to give students the opportunity to master these techniques, one at a time, before they are asked to use them as planning strategies or to mix and match them in a more sophisticated writing strategy. But you could just as easily use this section at the beginning of the course to introduce and underscore the relationship between thinking and writing. Or if you prefer to organize your course thematically (see Thematic Contents), you can use this section as a way to blend your approach with rhetorical strategies.
THE READINGS
Although any theme could illustrate how effective writers use different strategies to explore different aspects of the same subject, discovery is a provocative topic—these range from personal discoveries about one’s own nature and aspirations to exploring uncharted regions of the world, disentangling questions from history or science, or understanding the ordinary things around us.
Andrew Sullivan writes about self-discovery in the realization that he is gay. He looks for causes in order to determine whether homosexuality is a lifestyle or an orientation.
Colin Evans gives the clues the FBI used to find the kidnappers of Oklahoma oil millionaire Charles Urschel. The 1933 case was solved, in large part, because of the powers of observation and ingenuity of its victim.
Lewis Thomas surveys the categories of medical technology, and discovers that the best technology is the simplest because it is inexpensive and treats diseases completely. His essay makes a strong argument for more basic scientific research, so that medicine can produce more technology that is so perfect patients can take it for granted. Similarly, Witold Rybczynski’s essay on the importance of the machined screw in the building of civilization suggests that some of the most common technology around us is the most valuable.
John Fleischman writes about the archeological work of Sharon Stocker and her predecessor at the University of Cincinnatti, Carl Blegen. In 1939 Blegen excavated a ruin in an olive grove in Greece that may be the palace of King Nestor, who is described in the Odyssey. The discovery of charred bones from an animal sacrifice on the site may authenticate a passage of Homer’s that has long been thought to be an anachronism, thus suggesting that Homer was a better historian than many anthropologists formerly believed. Dava Soebel also writes about an historical discovery when she reveals what caused English “mechanic” John Harrison to invent a dependable, portable clock for use in navigation onboard ocean-going vessels.
Richard Doerflinger and Peggy Prichard Ross argue opposite sides of the stem cell research controversy. Likening the use of fertilized embryos to abortion, Doerflinger tries to bully conservative politicians who have shown fledgling support for this potentially life-saving technique. Ross is suffering from a form of brain cancer that might someday be cured if stem cell research is funded. Her impassioned plea for hope for future victims includes the disturbing information that no one knows what causes the disease she has, but 20,000 American get it each year.
The final reading in this section, a short story by Arthur C. Clarke raises moral issues as well. A science fiction story set aboard a spaceship sent to explore the remains of a brilliant supernova, the text is mostly the internal monolgue of a Jesuit astrophysicist. The priest discovers more than he wanted to know about God when he realizes that an artistic and advanced civilization was destroyed by the explosion that created the Star in the East that heralded the begining of Christianity.
THE WRITING
The pattern of writing assignments in this section is both similar to and different from the other writing assignments in this anthology. As in the other sections, the assignments in this section follow a three-part sequence: (1) writing that asks students to respond to the subject and strategies of an essay by drafting a similar composition, (2) writing that requires students to analyze the rhetorical strategies in an essay, and (3) writing that invites students to use an essay to argue similar or related assertions in another rhetorical context.
The pattern also is different because each selection is followed by three richly contextualized assignments rather than the six that conclude the other sections. In addition, it is different because each assignment encourages students to cycle back through the text looking for specific essays and stories that might serve as additional resources for comparison.
Andrew Sullivan, “Virtually Normal”
Purpose
Writing about his own experiences growing up homosexual, Andrew Sullivan says his essay “is an attempt to think through the arguments on all sides as carefully and honestly as possible, to take the unalterable experience of all of us, heterosexual and homosexual, and to make some social sense of it.” Sullivan emphasizes that he can’t speak for other homosexuals, and what he knows about the topic is confined (as it truly is for everyone) to his own experience. One purpose of his essay, however, is to understand himself, to see if any element of his upbringing or adolescent development contributed to his adult emotional and sexual orientation. He says, “Like many homosexuals, I have spent some time looking back and trying to decipher what might have caused my apparent aberration.” He narrates his memories of “the first time it dawned on [him] that [he] might be a homosexual,” when a girl accused him of being a sissy for not choosing to play soccer in the rain. He analyzes his relationship to each of his parents and recalls his early pre-sexual attraction to a second cousin, a shirtless man on television, and a fellow high school student who undressed beside him in the locker room. Repeatedly he finds that, although he did not want to be “one of them,” he was undeniably gay, perhaps from the very beginning of his life.
Sullivan is careful to acknowledge that he writes from personal experience, not an entirely scientific perspective. He explains, “When people ask the simple question: What is a homosexual? I can only answer with stories like these.” Yet, the evolution of his self-awareness as a homosexual suggests that sexual orientation is not usually a matter of choice for individuals. At some point, he was forced to admit to himself that he “could no longer hide from [his] explicit desire . . . an undeniable and powerful attraction to other boys and men.” He says that “when people ask me whether homosexuality is a choice or not, I can only refer them to these experiences [his own].” His admission naturally suggests that no one else really knows, either. Sullivan therefore finds it suspicious when “purportedly objective studies” reduce “opaque and troubling emotions . . . to statistics in front of strangers.” When a conservative think tank asked him what made him believe that homosexuality is usually an orientation rather than a choice, he answered, “my life.” Ultimately, Sullivan is convinced that “for the overwhelming majority of adults, the condition of homosexuality is as involuntary as heterosexuality is for heterosexuals.”
Audience
Writing mainly for a supportive audience, Sullivan tries to explain to heterosexual readers (which by his own reckoning make up 95-98 percent of the population) what it is like to grow up gay. He says, “I relate my experience here not to impress or shock or gain sympathy but merely to convey what the homosexual experience is actually like.” He wants heterosexuals to understand what he calls “homosexual hurt,” resulting from the difficult situation of having to choose one’s friends and lovers from the same social group. He says that he learned early on “that love was about being accepted on the condition that you suppressed what you really felt.” He writes of his relationship with his father and male friends that he came to constantly “be careful, in case they found out.” Complicating matters for young Sullivan was the complete lack of role models or even any mention of homosexuality among his family members, in his schooling, or even in the media to which he had access. This led him to understand that he “would have to be an outlaw in order to be complete,” that his own “survival depend[ed] upon self-concealment.” Through candid and frank discussion of his own adolescent experiences and feelings, he tries to explain how growing up homosexual is fundamentally different from growing up straight.
Of course, Sullivan is aware that not all of the world is empathetic with the homosexual experience. He reveals that he once won the admiration of other boys in a debate competition by making a joke about homosexuals. Of his friends and himself, he says, “we had learned the social levers of hostility to homosexuality before we had even the foggiest clue what they referred to.” Certainly, homosexuality has been one of the last forms of diversity to be protected by political correctness or common courtesy; it has remained okay to joke about or disparage homosexuals in situations where nearly any other overt form of discrimination would be considered unthinkable. Sullivan acknowledges that to many “The homosexual experience may be deemed an illness, a disorder, a privilege, or a curse; it may be deemed worthy of a ‘cure,’ rectified, embraced or endured.” Nonetheless, he counters, “it exists.” Although he realizes that others may not agree with him, he is as powerless to change human nature as they are.
Strategy
Sullivan’s essay is essentially narrative, yet it is also argumentative, and it draws upon causal analysis frequently in exploring the roots and evolution of his own homosexuality. In a particularly complicated passage, he examines his distant relationship with his father and his corresponding closeness to his mother. This follows “a typical pattern of homosexual development,” but it also raises a sort of chicken and egg conundrum. What is causal? Do overbearing mothers shape homosexual sons? Or are homosexual sons more likely to identify with their mothers? Are homosexual boys threatened by their fathers or fearful of not living up to their expectations? So little is known about the cause of homosexuality, and causal analysis of it yields more questions than answers.
There are underlying similarities between hetero- and homosexual people, as there are among all human beings. Sullivan notes that while growing up he felt most acutely like himself, not like “one or the other gender category.” He acknowledges that being accused of being a sissy is common among “all young geeks, whatever their fledgling sexual orientation.” His fears that he might never start puberty, and that his voice might never break are probably common to heterosexual boys as well. Likewise the “sexual implosion” of puberty happens to “gay and straight kids alike.” Sullivan writes about the confusion of all people in sorting out their feelings for same-sex friends and loved ones, saying, “It is not always—perhaps never—easy, for either the homosexual or the heterosexual.” Still, undeniably, there are huge differences between homosexual people and the majority of the population. Rather than attempt to dismiss that,
Sullivan tries to confront it. He says “There’s a lamentable tendency to try to find some definitive solution to permanent human predicaments—in a string of DNA, in a conclusive psychological survey, in an analysis of hypo thalami, in a verse of the Bible—in order to cut the argument short.” His own experience, and that of everyone around him, gay or straight, proves that each human life is too complicated for simple explanations. He says that homosexual experience is different from heterosexual life and “Anyone who believes political, social, or even cultural revolution will change this fundamentally is denying reality” because “the isolation will always hold.”
PHOTO ESSAY, “The Senses of Place”
Purpose
The excerpt from Patricia L. Price’s Dry Places: Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion asserts that “Places . . . are narratives.” The essays included in this section of the book invite readers to compose narratives of their own or to recount time-honored tales about the places depicted. From the imaginary landscapes out of the minds of artists to the unblinking eye of the camera, we are reminded that perspective and point of view are everything in the capture and presentation of an image. The visual texts reprinted range from the quaint representational world of Grandma Moses to the dark realism of Edward Hopper and from the grand-scale tragedy of the wreckage of the World Trade Centers to the shattered family attested to by the grave of “Baby Sonne.” The living signified by the names of homeowners on make-shift signs pointing to summer cottages, the dead in the baby’s grave, and many centralized and marginalized positions in between are signified by the narratives implied in these images. The private places painted by Rowlinson and Mason contrast with the labyrinths of Hogue’s feminine landscape and the maze of office cubicles photographed by Tom Wagner. All of these are places where people’s lives play out, and the myriad individual and over-lapping stories people live and tell themselves take place
An essay implies a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This photo essay is no exception. It starts with signposts leading in opposite directions, and its audience is free to turn left or right, or to plough right into the bramble, making their own way through the tangle of information that follows. Five paintings invite us to consider the role of the individual in dreams, contemplations, and interactions with others and the landscape. For instance, even the one-dimensional painting by Grandma Moses shows the impact of the population on the snowy hills, its houses situated and painted against the stark white snow, its streets ploughed, and its train making its benign way through the town. The Hogue painting of Mother Earth hints at the reciprocal relationship between people and the natural world—the Earth like a fertile woman with an abandoned plough at her knees. Look closely at Ruth Fremson’s photograph of Ground Zero, and you will see hundreds of people working the site, framed by the bleak and monumental ruins of the Trade Centers. The power to destroy is balanced by the power to build, as evidenced in the Coles Hairston photograph of “Building an Offshore Rig.” The even greater power to imagine is represented by Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Harry Potter. Everything is framed and made meaningful by mortality. Every photo in the essay is a story unto itself and part of a larger story as well.