Please submit your blogs as a set, including a concluding blog and preferably arranged first to last, as a hard copy to the school office for Friday 11th January 2013 (for full time students) or Monday14th January 2013 (part-time students). I will only mark hard copy submissions.
I hope you have enjoyed the course and remember we continue next semester with the second part of the critical thinking module in preparation for your dissertations. Happy holidays!
Critical Thinking LSBU 2012
Monday, 17 December 2012
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
Aman has charts!
Just in case any of you are having difficulty finding Spengler's charts, Aman from Studio 8 photographed them yesterday.
Thanks to Aman you will find them below:
They have been posted in the facebook group. For those that don't have access here is the link:https://www.dropbox.com/s/ea0gtot9rfdi0sp/Diagram%20Photos2.pdf
Thanks to Aman you will find them below:
They have been posted in the facebook group. For those that don't have access here is the link:https://www.dropbox.com/s/ea0gtot9rfdi0sp/Diagram%20Photos2.pdf
Saturday, 1 December 2012
Session 10
For this session I want you to familiarize yourselves with the argument of Oswald Spengler in The Decline of The West. The best way to do this might be to study the three charts at the end of Volume One; Contemporary Spiritual Epochs, Contemporary Culture Epochs and Contemporary Political Epochs. Unfortunately they are too large for my our scanner so I have to ask you to forage for them on the internet.
Secondly and by way of contrast, I want you to read almost any article by John Lanchester, a regular and readable contributor to many journals, especially (my favourite) the London Review of Books.
Spengler postulates an argument that even if it were to be true, is most unhelpful, but it does ask you to confront a fatalistic nihilism that pervaded an area of thought between the wars, and might readily be brought to an understanding of the work of Mies van de Rohe.
Lets see what you might make of both characters and their opposite viewpoints.
Saturday, 24 November 2012
Session 9
The passages this week are from this big book, USA by John Dos Passos. Each are short biographical chapters 'Tin Lizzie' (Henry Ford) 'The Bitter Drink' (Torsten Veblen) 'Architect' (Frank Lloyd Wright) and 'Adagio Dancer' (Rudolf Valantino). The book itself is an intensely modern attempt to express the vibrancy of the new world via biography and scraps of newsreel as well as traditional storytelling. If you would like to indulge yourself in the qualities of Dos Passos's storytelling, you would do well to read the central section around pages 1010 on entitled the 'The Big Money' charting boom prior to the wall street crash, the death of the man who had it made and the rise of a Hollywood starlet. It's a story grippingly told.
It is not unusual to find this period of dramatic transformation in the USA characterized by considerable human tragedy. Think Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby for a portrait of the high end. The low end is a wretched struggle for rights of one kind or another, even a living wage, within the context of the american dream.
You might want to take a look at my own blog 'Architecture and Other Habits' (pauldaviesarchitecture.blogspot.com) where I discuss unofficially some of the texts in this course as they strike me this time around.
Sunday, 18 November 2012
Session 8
We shall we watching the film The Fountainhead for this session, you are not required to watch it in advance. However it would be useful for you to get some background on the author of the book and the screenplay, Ayn Rand, beforehand. She has been hugely influential to contemporary American politics.
As I outlined in the last session, we now change emphasis a little. Having provided you with plenty of samples of critical method in the first part of the course, it is time for you to flex your own critical muscles. Don't worry, there's no change of format at all, I simply require you to blog as you have been doing, but instead of description coupled by bemusement, I'm hoping that you can show capabilities in comprehension and evaluation which might even be a bit more fun, as if you were writing for a critical magazine for instance. So from here on, I will not be looking for you to simply describe the story, but for you to demonstrate an overall critical viewpoint. Of course you can borrow one, but you still have to make it your own (as they say on X Factor) utilizing your contextual understanding of what Rand and Hollywood stood for, stand for, and maybe even the ongoing consequences of this particular cultural product. And do not think for a second that your discussion has to be one sided, the most entertaining blogs are those clouded in ambiguity, yet where shafts of illumination fabulously appear.
Thursday, 15 November 2012
Advice on blogging
Invited to look at some of your blogs, here's some advice:
- Try to define how you are going to start, what is roughly the middle, and what your parting shot is before you start.
- Try not, therefore, to see the blog as a chance to ramble on, instead rather to be succinct.
- Most of your entries seem too long simply as a consequence of the two points above. If you try and master your ramblings into style, the content flows effortlessly along. Hence, if you've got a basic starting point, middle and end, and you are likely to be more confident and the words will flow more easily and overall the piece will become more stylish.
- Don't be afraid to chop stuff which is looking tedious (this is a kind of golden rule, if you sense it doesn't fit, chop it out.
Saturday, 10 November 2012
Session 7
Your text for this week os Evelyn Waugh's short novel Decline and Fall, a parody of life in England in the inter war years where many archaic traditions live on while new thoughts drift in the wind. The architect figure of Prof Silenus is of particular interest, he seems to have quite a taste for deco rather than strictly modern, but we shouldn't worry about the style too much, it's attitudes that we should enjoy, that and Waugh's barbed wit. The cartoon below by Karl Arnold is of the same period.
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