Another nice turn of phrase

[robinturner]

Most of my second-year writing tasks follow standard formulae, such as "How valid is X's idea of Y?", "Apply theory X to situation Y," and so forth. However, I like to throw in a few offbeat questions for the more imgainative students; for example, whenever I do Plato, there's an option to write a Socratic dialogue, and one of my assignments on Locke's Second Treatise of Government was to write a letter to James II explaining why Locke should be hanged.

This time, as one of the options for their final essay, I gave students the chance to write a letter from Nietzsche to Marx. So far I've only read one paper on this subject, but it has some wonderful lines. Despite Nietzsche and Marx being contemporaries, he decided to set it in the present day, with the ghost of Nietzsche as the author. This enabled him to write "I experienced all I could, and now I am dead. The last experience didn't make me stronger but simply killed me."

I wish I had more students like that!

Comments

[ironed_orchid]

I love students like that. I had one last year write a dialogue between Socrates and Epicus on death, which he constructed as a piece of absurdist theatre in which S and E argued over the corpse of a clown that crashed through the roof... and it despite all this it worked.

More recently, although not in my class, I had the great pleasure of reading the letter that fuckallinfinity wrote to Sartre and Lacan at the end of this post