ENGL 131A
Critical Reading Synopsis/Pulling Quotes/Lines of Inquiry
Agenda
Free… discussion
What was the last “rabbit hole” you went down? If you haven’t gone down any recently, what are some things you’ve been thinking about? As in, what random thoughts have occurred to you outside of an academic context?
Following a Thread
Galerie Arnot, 1914/1915
Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant, 1912
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Critical Reading Synopsis
MVQ: Why are you pursuing this thread to begin with? What brought you here?
Methods: How is the text thinking through its points?
Frameworks: How does the source contextualize itself?
Interventions: What is the source actually saying? (note: varies depending on type of source)
Further citations: Does the text cite anyone/anything else I should pursue?
Following a Thread
Egon Schiele bio synopsis: https://www.egon-schiele.com/
MVQ: Who was Egon Schiele? What was his life like, and what were his contributions to art? How did he influence Expressionism?
Methods: Textual (art, history)
Frameworks: Historicized the contexts of art history in Austria/Austria’s place in world history in the early 1900’s, before discussing Schiele’s life in depth chronologically
Interventions: (IMPORTANT) as a biography, it doesn’t really make any claims, just states historical facts rather
Further citations: Gustav Klint, Expressionism, Symbolism, French Impressionism, Schiele’s art
Following a Thread
When breaking sources down like this, how can I quote properly? Most importantly, why am I quoting something to begin with?
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How is the quote here functioning? Is it doing enough work to justify its inclusion?
Pulling Quotes
From: “What Money Can Buy,” by Bryce Covert, The Nation
As a way to combat poverty, Lowrey contends that a UBI could work in the United States, too. It “could be a powerful tool to eliminate deprivation…. About 41 million Americans were living below the poverty line as of 2016,” she notes. “A $1,000-a-month grant would push many of them above it.”
Lowrey’s argument about poverty is persuasive. By giving every family in the United States $250 a month for each of its children, we would reduce child poverty by about 40 percent and effectively wipe out the most extreme cases. By giving every American about $3,000 a month, we would cut the official poverty rate in half and provide a higher standard of living for all—even for those who are not impoverished. In a review of the existing research on universal cash dispersals in developed countries—the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, for example, which gives every Alaskan resident a cut of the state’s oil profits—economist Ioana Marinescu found that universal basic incomes help people improve their nutrition, education, and health.
Pulling Quotes
As a class…
While Lowrey feels UBI could work in America, we disagree because an analysis into similar UBI programs, like “the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, for example, which gives every Alaskan resident a cut of the state’s oil profits,” has not worked to increase quality of life because Alaska has high violent crime rates
Pulling Quotes
According to Lowrey, a UBI could also address one of the central problems in today’s precarious labor market: By allowing workers to walk away from a job, it could give them considerable leverage over their employers and provide them with more say in shaping the terms of their employment. A UBI, she argues, would
ameliorate the catastrophic loss of worker power…. With a basic income, workers could refuse to take a job with low pay. With a basic income, workers could demand better benefits. With a basic income, companies would have to compete to win workers over.
Here Lowrey encounters the same challenges as Hughes and Stern: None of the amounts being proposed by UBI supporters come close to giving workers the power to walk away from an exploitative job. Lowrey’s version of the UBI would consist of $1,000 a month for every citizen of the country, potentially paid for by a potpourri of policy options. (Hughes promotes an even stingier one: just $500 a month for a limited slice of the populace.)
Workshop
For the rest of class: