Mastering Liberal Arts I

This journal entry is about comparing the writings of Amy Tan, Eric Liu, and Dean Barnlund, who all wrote about intercultural communication and racial conflicts, through different lenses. Amy Tan and Eric Liu wrote about their experiences with dual identities, but Dean Barnlund, a white American man, did not have the same kinds of interpersonal or cultural conflicts due to his identity.

This essay is about how “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” reflects Ann Jurecic’s essay on mindblindness and empathy, titled "“Mindblindness: Autism, Writing, and the Problem of Empathy," through Christopher’s relationships, his tendency to bond with animals rather than people, his distaste for jokes and other figurative language, and his fascination with math.

This essay is about the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldúa, and how her explanation of having a dual identity reflects John Wideman's essay, "Our Time." Anzaldúa describes the difficulties of growing up in a country that is constantly trying to rid her of her language and thus, her culture, while Wideman describes his brother's struggles with his desire to beat the system and live up to expectations. These autoethnographies, although they feature extremely different c...

This essay is about comparing Paulo Freire's analysis of education's role in society in his essay “The Banking Concept of Education" and Walker Percy’s idea of a symbolic complex in his essay “The Loss of the Creature.” Percy relates to Freire’s ideas of how education oppresses society through his explanation of the symbolic complex and the educational package, the troubling connection between consumers and knowers, and the loss of sovereignty.

This journal entry is about how Dean Barnlund's writings on "Communication in a Global Village" relate to intercultural communication and racial conflict today. Barnlund's writings, particularly his concept of the "rulebook" of meanings, truly relate to the discrimination and conflict in intercultural communication in today's society.

This is a journal entry for the Mastering Liberal Arts I class about a piece of popular media that reflects the ideas of cultural differences. The film I wrote about is titled “Crash,” which revolves around various racial and social conflicts.

This essay is about how Dean Barnlund’s essay "Communication in a Global Village" reflects and contradicts Amy Tan's essay "The Language of Discretion." Amy Tan refutes Dean Barnlund’s ideas by suggesting that comparing languages leads to dangerous generalizations, criticizing the Chinese stereotype by Americans, and proving that culture and nationality are two separate entities.

This essay is about Amy Tan's explanation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which essentially states that the way we view the world is directly related to our language. She explains this through her own recollections and experiences growing up with two cultures.