Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

ibliography, and a final report, which itself went through a
drafting process. The journey that was the students’ research
projects ended with in-class research presentations during the
last three or four days of the course.
Now that I have described the progression of my courses’
units and essays, I would take a step back and try to offer my
rationale - my philosophy - behind them. I based the courses I
taught at the University of Delaware, as well as most of those
before them, upon that thematic foundation of “Identity,
Individuality, and Perspective” because I have deemed this
essential conversation of the “self” that it establishes a
fertile breeding ground, so to speak, for the arousing of and
confrontation with perplexity and relativism. However, this can
only – only – happen if the conversation is formulated in such a
way that it exists, dynamically, as a dialectic. A liminal
space where what was before concrete and set in stone – again,
“fixed and immutable,” “absolute and unshakeable” – in terms of
perceptions of the “self” faces the possibility of disruption,
of dissolution. A “contact zone” of the sort announced by Mary
Louise Pratt in her “Arts of the Contact Zone,” where “cultures
meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of
highly asymmetrical relations of power” (34) and where, amidst
this conflict, the writing “self” “undertake[s] to describe
[itself] in ways that engage with representations others have
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