English 101

Due dates: first draft due 9/25/06, second draft due 9/27/06

All work must be composed and revised in your wiki page for the second paper (i.e. Jim Groom’s second paper” link).

You may choose one of the following options:

1. For this assignment you will need to take a trip to the National Gallery of Art. Start off by simply wandering around the museum for a little while — get yourself lost for a bit and just walk around soaking in the sights. Once you’ve got a good general feeling for what the Gallery is all about, begin paying attention to the space around you, not just the art, but EVERYTHING in the museum — its architecture (inside and out), the layout of the galleries, the color of the walls, the language on the explanatory plaques, what’s on the ceiling, the mood of the place, the visitors, the guards, the docents (tour guides), the floors, the lighting, etc. — everything that surrounds the art. Treat the art as incidental. You’re there to look at the museum, not necessarily the art. As you walk around, pay particular attention to the other visitors. Do some of them seem as though they belong more than others? Think about why you responded the way you did? Listen in on conversations people are having about the art. If you can, make a note of what they’re saying. If you’re extra brave, start a conversation with another visitor about a particular piece or artist. Don’t tell them you’re doing an assignment — you’re under cover. When you’re finished, remember what you talked about and how — jot it down. Find a guided tour, and listen in on it. Make a note of the sort of language the tour guide uses. Are the guides mystifying the artwork they’re talking about? How? Once you’ve done all this, you are ready to write your essay. In your essay consider the following question: What argument about art is the museum making? That is, what does the building (and what goes on in it ) say about the art on display? How? — The following might be useful: Let’s assume the National Gallery of Art is, as Berger would argue, a mystification machine. How does it work? Assuming it contributes to the mystification of the art inside its walls, what about it mystifies? Support your argument with your observations and what Berger and Percy say in their essays.

2. Both Berger and Percy talk about how the “packaging,” (the presentation) of a given thing or experience obscures the thing as it really is, and about how we tend to surrender the way we know, see, and experience to specialized experts. Both also talk about recovering the thing from its packaging, of demystifying it. For Percy this recovering is a matter of rescuing our sovereignty from the way a thing is presented and maintained by experts, teachers, park rangers, travel literature and other authoritative forces which shape our expectations; for Berger it is being aware of the class politics which are bound up with art as we’ve come to understand it in the last few centuries. Given all this, write an essay in which you consider whether Berger and Percy are right to argue that we can in fact reclaim our experiences, our history, etc. Draw upon your own experiences to test out Percy’s and Berger’s arguments and to support your own. Be sure to work closely with the text. When thinking about what to write, consider the following questions (you do not need to answer every one of these in your paper): Why is Berger less optimistic than Percy? What’s at stake in either writer’s argument? Does one of them have a better argument than the other? Why is what they say important? Do we even have sovereignty to begin with? How do your own experiences and ideas either support or contradict Percy or Berger or both? Remember to support your arguments with concrete evidence either from the text or your own life.