Andrew Burgess
I wrote this essay in the spring of 2012 as the final assignment in Dr. Vitkus's Literary and Cultural Theory course. I took the class as an elective while I finished up my master's degree in communications. I guess I thought it sounded like fun. What I found, though, was the exceptionally rigorous study of most of the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism and difficult discussions of Structuralists, Post-Structuralists, Russian Formalists, and the like with students far more qualified than myself. But when I came across Fredric Jameson and his thoughts on post-modernism, it all made sense: I could tie in my love for music (especially punk rock) with academic writing. Here is my first attempt to bridge my two favorite worlds.

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This essay came about as part of an African American Folklore class in the spring of 2011. I was in an interesting place in this course, being one of only two graduate students. I found that the exceptionally small class size allowed for lively, candid discussion about topics that are usually uncomfortable in large classes: race, gender, class, oppression, freedom. But when it came time to write about a literary work as staggeringly magnificent as Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, I felt a bit like what Jacqueline Jones Royster calls a "tourist." As such, I chose to explore the novel from an outsider's perspective through the lens of Marx's historical materialism. I'm not sure I succeeded, but this essay found me thinking in new ways.

Projects
Here are some of the projects I've worked on in the past year or two. There's not much reflection here, but feel free to click around and see what kind of trouble I can get myself into.​
In the spring of 2012, I found it especially difficult to write about Foucault's ideas of truth and power, and the right to death and power over life. This essay represents the first time I have thought analytically about a literary theorist, and I think it shows. In his response to this essay, Dr. Vitkus wrote: "Your synopsis of Foucault's theory of power, based on the readings, is excellent. You run into some problems, however, on p. 6 and after p. 8 when you talk about subjective individuals being free to find their own truth." So, good synopsis with faulty logic on my part. I have included this essay in this portfolio as an example of where I started as a graduate student in literature.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, my first graduate degree is in media and communications studies. In the spring of 2011, I took a course in FSU's communications school with Dr. Andy Opel, in which our primary focus was creating documentary films of our own. The one written assignment for the course was a pretty wide-open essay in which we could explore any aspect of documentary film that we wanted to for fifteen pages. I chose the heavy topic of truth in documentary, which felt appropriate since an independent film called Catfish had just been released to great criticism and controversy regarding its claims at truth-telling.