In this essay, you will represent and closely analyze a written text (a “lens” text) and find a contemporary visual text (i.e. an “exhibit” text) that engages with your chosen lens text’s ideas. Your chosen visual text should serve for rich analysis and interpretation and help you establish an occasion — a reason for close-reading this text — in the form of a problem or question. The problem or question you formulate can be anything you find puzzling, troubling, or strange about your chosen exhibit—something you genuinely wish to explore. Then, you’ll use at least one of our shared lens texts for this progression (Berger or Sontag) to analyze your exhibit text. Your goal is to help your readers gain new insight into the problem or question you identified, and make an original argument in response to it.
By the end of your essay, your readers should gain some new, deeper understanding about your problem/question and your chosen texts that they would not have considered before reading your work.
During this progression, we will practice representing and analyzing written and multimodal texts, for both explicit and implied meaning.