Assistant Editor Kimberly Gomez Managing Editor Alyssa Machado
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WR Journal of the Arts & Sciences Writing Program Issue 2 ■ 2009/2010 Editor Deborah Breen Assistant Editor Editorial Board Members Kimberly Gomez Diane Allenberg Managing Editor Jura Avizienis Alyssa Machado Kristin Bezio Cover Designer Amy Chmielewski Emily Avedissian Maria Gapotchenko Design & Layout Karen Guendel Christina Lau Alyssa Machado Bradley Queen Copyeditors Writing Program Director Michael D’Alessandro Joseph Bizup Lesley Yoder http://www.bu.edu/writingprogram/journal (ISSN 1948-4763) Contents Editor’s Note 1 Kimberly Gomez Prize Essay Winners Protecting Speech or Copyright: A Question of Balance 4 Benjamin Cohen Dostoevsky and Gogol’s Acknowledgments of Writers’ Limitations 13 Georgianne Maroon Rethinking Humanity: the Chimera Debate 20 Jielin Yu WR 100 Essays Two Sides to Every Story 32 Micaela Bedell Darkness Visible: Dante’s Clarification of Hell 36 Joseph Kameen WR Blanche Dubois: An Antihero 42 Lauren Seigle Dorian Gray the Escape Artist 49 Jesse R. Sherman WR 150 Essays Fish Farming and the Boundary of Sustainability: How Aquaculture Tests Nature’s Resources 56 Courtney Carroll Bulgakov’s “Moonlight Sonata:” The Thematic Functions of Grand Opera and Lieder in The Master and Margarita 65 John Collins Tied By Cords Woven of Heart-Strings: A Study of Manhood in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick 77 Veronica Faller Violent Media and the First Amendment 88 Stacey Goodman The Portrayal of Despair in Poland after 1989: Stasiuk’s Nine and Klein’s The Shock Doctrine 96 Gabrielle Migdalski Editor’s Note Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s as- sistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. — Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action In this issue of WR, we focus on students’ efforts to enter into the scholarly conversations experienced at Boston University. Discovering, participating in, and even enhancing, an academic conversation remains a primary goal of university education. This task is not always easy, whether we are teachers, researchers, or students; on the contrary, immersion into any ongoing discussion can be daunting. Not only do we need to find our place in these discussions, we must also establish a common ground and develop the skills and confidence to participate so our ideas are heard and our claims can emerge. Literary theorist Kenneth Burke illustrated this point precisely when he compared the academic conversation to a crowded, intense, and vigorously involved conversation in a parlor. In doing so, he created a metaphor that illustrates not only the milieu of academic 1 WR argument, but also its method: the contribution of others’ intellectual oppositions and qualifications to the refinement of one’s views. The ability to engage in and contribute to an academic conversation is essential not only for academic success, but also in professional and per- sonal life. Thus, the practice of engaging in creative academic conversation becomes a craft: we listen and discuss issues with our peers, colleagues, and mentors, digging into subtext, hoping our claims are absorbed and consid- ered, and above all, presenting our ideas in written form. This year the Writing Program continues to explore ways of enabling student writing at Boston University; it is a movement inspired by the metaphor of the academic conversation. Our program assists student writers as they attempt to enter this conversation so they may express their claims, their ideas, and more importantly, develop confidence in making their contributions. By engaging in this process, students gain the ability to craft substantive, motivated, and balanced academic arguments. They engage with texts, reading with comprehension and critical discernment. Just as Burke imagined the stimulating conversation in his metaphorical parlor, our students enter the conversation by responding productively to the writing of others while expressing their own complex ideas. And beyond their writing and research on topics, they also reflect, through the use of portfolios, on their own development as writers. The essays in this collection epitomize the ongoing development of the Writing Program, as students explore the range of topics, from litera- ture to the social and natural sciences. In selecting the twelve essays for this issue of WR, the committee selected essays (from 375 submissions) with varied styles and themes from within different disciplines. What is presented here truly showcases the range of the Writing Program: we pres- ent the prize-winning essays first, followed by essays that reflect students’ growing engagement with the academic conversation as they follow the assignment sequence from the beginning of WR 100 to the capstone essays of WR 150. Thus, the selected essays illustrate how students’ writing grows along with the intellectual challenges of the assignment trajectory. Indeed, what this issue of WR demonstrates is that our students are learning to become communicators, thinkers, planners, and innovators who truly own a place in the academic conversation. The twelve students, whose work represents the undergraduate community of the Arts & Sciences 2 Kimberly Gomez Writing Program, have entered that room of great thinkers, philosophers, poets, and debaters; they have found their place in the conversation, and in doing so, show us that the stimulating intellectual discussion that is critical to university education and civic life is—as Kenneth Burke reminds us— “still vigorously in progress.” — Kimberly Gomez, Assistant Editor 3 From the Writer I chose to write this essay about the implications of copyright law on free speech because of its relevance to modern society. The question of how to best enforce copyright restrictions has become a key issue in our increasingly digital world, where highly advanced, easy to use methods of copyright infringement are readily available. While writing this essay, I was constantly confronted with varying ideas of where the copyright line should be drawn. These were interest- ing to me because I have to deal with issues such as illegally downloading music, decryption of DVDs and CDs, and use of copyrighted materials in an educa- tional setting. Studying these topics, I found myself not only writing a paper, but looking at my own thoughts on the subject and how I treat it in my life. The arguments on both sides of the debate did more than just contribute to my paper. They also gave me new insight into a deep and complex issue, and I can now utilize this knowledge in my everyday life. When it comes to revisions I would make if I were to write another draft, the first thing I would do is more research. There is a vast amount of further information on the subject available, especially in the realm of music download- ing through programs such as Limewire, which I did not have the opportunity to really address. In addition, I feel that I could have gone further in developing the arguments of how the DMCA has worked correctly to protect free speech. There was a lot more about the two cases I mention that could have been said and discussed to further the argument for the value of the DMCA. The last major revision I would make is expanding on the examples of the music industry using the DMCA to obstruct technological advancement. Due to time limitations, I was able to find several examples and briefly summarize them, but further devel- opment of these incidents would strengthen my arguments. — Benjamin Cohen 4 Benjamin Cohen Prize Essay Winner Protecting Speech or Copyright: A Question of Balance Over the last fifteen years, the world has seen vast expansions and improvements in the realm of technology. Computers and the internet have become a prevalent part of society in modern America. Along with the internet, many other technological developments have changed the world we live in, such as DVRs and iPods. As technology and the internet have evolved, however, the law has had to evolve as well, and often this has led to complex issues, such as how to control internet piracy of copyrighted works. In response to this issue, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which made it illegal to circumvent digital rights management (DRM) systems or create or sell technology capable of circumventing DRM systems (United States Copyright Office 3–4). Through this law, the courts have ruled that internet distributors of online file transfer programs can be held liable for the copyright infringe- ment performed with their software (Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer Studios v. Grokster). However, scholars, researchers, teachers, and programmers have argued against the act, claiming that the restrictions against the creation of DRM-circumventing technology put overbroad restrictions on freedom of speech by constricting the fair use doctrine for digital media, discouraging intellectual and educational progress and discussion, and stifling further technological advances (Schaffner 145). These rights to speech cannot be discarded simply for the benefit of copyright owners and their works. The debate over whether the DMCA places overbroad restric- tions on free speech begins with the question of how copyright protection relates to speech.