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Allison Fink's picture

Presentation

I don't remember exactly what I said, but the main points were:

I got to think more through taking this course and it's very interesting about the complex nature of truth but I'm still confused about what the truth means and the difference between truth and storytelling, or perhaps the point is that we can never arrive at truth but only get a personal account based on pattern recognition. Or we decide what we want to believe.

I got to think about how we should direct our storytelling, and how interesting it is how the fairy tales reveal our view of the world and don't discount the evil parts of human nature, and is this a better thing to expose a child to? I experienced how scientific views imply entire world views: Darwin: do ideas evolve? Galileo: is it all up to us after all in God's eyes, if the Earth is not the center of the universe? And how do our brains make up stories if they decide what to perceive from what's there and fill in gaps?

I found the writing in this class to be very frustrating a lot of the time because I felt I was using the same voice all the time and just trying to get the pieces to fit together but not being creative or seeing things beyond a rigid and stuck point of view. I thought that I needed to have a balance between the conscious, which directs the path, and the unconscious, which allows more freedom to see beyond the path. I felt that I succeeded more in writing by just using a piece of paper and writing my impressions on it. I felt that the point of college is to be more engaged in asking questions and pursuing them, and that the night before I had allowed things to come together to some degree.

 I really liked the first performance with the meetings with Anne. I laughed hysterically at the sheer ridiculousness of the awkward moments when we were first getting to college and college writing. I also really enjoyed watching Ashton's presentation. It was so creepily graphic.

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