I am probably already getting a late start on my second semester of college review, so here I am bundling all my leftover notes about first term.
I haven't mentioned my Hebrew literature class with Professor Safran. I don't know that I have notes. We read mostly Agnon stories, and talked a lot about his interesting religious concerns and in general his mode of creating characters that were "projections of his own inner life", or I suppose of the dilemmas of modern Jewish intellectuals. Alas, almost everyone else in the course could speak Hebrew; I could understand but hardly say a word at the time.
I haven't said much about Expos (Expository Writing). I am sure my notebook is somewhere, but all I have found so far are a couple of stories and my final paper. I was delighted to see some great phrases here and there in my stories. As a fiction writer, I was heavy on interiority, not so much on plot, a bit on relationships. At least twice there was a character named Sam or Sammy who was not the narrator, obviously a stand-in for me (middle name Samuel), or a kind of idealized version of me or who I wished people saw me as!
My final paper on Malamud was pretty good! I remember how hard it was to really come up with a thesis that was interesting and actually borne out by my examples. I wrote about main characters who were somewhat conventional but also dreamers inside themselves, who were then challenged by unconventional characters who disrupted their equilibrium or their projects in profound ways. It's interesting to see what I was thinking about "conventional" Jews the year before I became more observant myself. It was a nicely written paper, tight and crisp and confidence.
My final psych paper was a stretch, an attempt to crystallize a cognitive+social psychology perspective on moral development. I am sure we were encouraged to stretch. I didn't find the analysis terribly resonant today, it was rooted again in the limits of my own experience, though I stumbled toward a couple of things. One was a good attempt to clarify what it would mean to synthesize a cognitive and a social perspective on development. The other was a nice typology that sort of anticipated the David Riesman types I'd read about a few years later. I liked that whoever graded the paper -- not sure if it was Scott the TA or Professor Demick -- really went over the language. This one was more unruly than the Expos paper.
I haven't conveyed yet just how excited I was to study psychology for the first time. I always had wanted to, to explore more about why people do and say and relate the way they do. The course did not disappoint, and I just ate it up all the time. Professor Demick, as I think I've commented, was a terrific lecturer, engaging and completely information-packed. Even though it was specifically Intro to Development, it was such a great general intro to the field that my next course, Intro to Psych, seemed a lot like I was reviewing.
When the school year ended, our family picked me up and we went out to Rockport for some days before going home. I bought two books from Justice that had been excerpted in the sourcebook -- Walzer's Spheres of Justice and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In my memory I read them both cover to cover while in Rockport; perhaps I only started there but I did absolutely read each one. I was determined to have a more solid, less debater/argumentative hold on both liberalism and conservatism, to take the critiques super seriously. Though Walzer is and was more fun to read, Nozick had his entertaining parts, and I slogged through the parts that had more symbols in them.
I guess I'll leave it there, and start to catch up on second semester!
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