Boselli 1John BoselliProf. Beltz-HosekWuthering Heights (Emily Bront)I find it unsettling that Kate Bushs 1978 debut single Wuthering Heights only alludes to Catherine Earnshaws death; while the speaker does use predominantly past tense and notes that it gets dark / it gets lonely / on the other side from [Heathcliff], the songs string- and piano-heavy production and Bushs soaring, operatic vocals manage to bury the sinister in the lush and romantic. In the novel, the stakes for Catherine (or more accurately, Catherines ghost) are much more than simply being so cold, with her need for Heathcliffs forgiveness shackling her still to the mortal realm. But why sacrifice the supernatural element that so defines Emily Bronts aesthetic and leave the violent passion of lines like let me have it / let me grab your soul (Bush)?In wanting to appraise the song on its own terms and not for what I feel it could be or should have been, I wonder how to what degree Bush calculated this reinterpretation/omission, and if she felt the source texts Gothicism would be considered too obvious an artistic choice for a female singer/songwriter eager to make a mainstream impression. One could counter-argue that there was not a single part of Wuthering Heights audiovisual package that did not read as heteronormatively feminine, from the Orientalist (associated with femininity) record sleeve, to the sensual music video where Bush, maenad-like, dances alone on the moors (Bush). The Kate Bush of today would not care much about being on-the-nose, as long as it were true to her vision, but the Kate Bush of Wuthering Heights was only twenty, and may have preferred to acquire a fanbase before shaking up her approach.

John BoselliProf. Beltz-HosekNight (Elie Wiesel)In his 2006 Time Magazine interview, Wiesel laments post-Holocaust genocides in Rwanda and Darfur and Cambodia and Bosnia, for they confirm that human nature cannot be changed in one generation. Wiesels understanding of genocidal thought as part of human nature (which is also a malleable quality according to his words?) allows humanity to absolve itself, accepting genocide as an inevitability of cultural epochs. Yet I feel it is this popular impulse to discuss genocide as a particularity, a locatable moment in time, that distances us from recognizing the quotidian means by which genocidal violence is normalized at the institutional, discursive, and cultural levels. Even the term genocide eludes relevance for Western Europeans, referring to a frame outside of Western culture and whiteness, conjuring dark-skinned mercenaries wielding machetes and infants slamming against Indochinese trees. Western cultures often invoke African, Asian, and Eastern European genocides to reinforce white supremacy, citing other races unique tendency to destroy one another as indicative of their own natural primitivism. In America, we are not encouraged to recognized policies such as zero-tolerance discipline, stop-and-frisk, and criminalized survival economies of petty theft, drug trade, and sex work as the appendages of the school-to-prison pipeline (itself the appendage of greater racialized oppression); better said, we are socialized to accept many of its underlying beliefs, e.g., personal responsibility, law-abiding citizen, and private property, as fundamental to our national character, despite these terms being less than fifty years old in popular consciousness.

John BoselliProf. Beltz-HosekCivilization and its Discontents (Sigmund Freud)Though shared by many others[and] millions more, I believe the oceanic feeling must be insular in order to create this sensation of belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole. By external world, I do not take it to mean tapping into the core essence of humanity, but rather the solipsistic belief that none of this exists but for me. Like God at rest on the seventh day of creation, the individual feels that this unity issues forth from within himself, and so other lives must exist with less reality than his own. I find the appropriation of the oceanic feeling by various Churches and religious systems to build their congregations ironic then, because these orders become associations of people drawn together based on their narcissism, not a communal sense of awe and worship of a central deity or doctrine (Freud 11). And yet I understand how that kind of order can function. When I wrote poetry, I truly did believe that the typewriter keys were taps into some kind of knowing I had to midwife into existence, and when I completed a poem or even a verse, I no longer felt inert. Entirely inexperienced, I imagined it felt post-coital even. But when that Romantic sensation became more appealing than the actual grunt work of creation, I began reading more books about poets and not by poets; I found friends in my schools literary magazine like myself. We talked composition, and rarely brought work to discuss with one another, despite eviscerating the work of younger students. We created a Ponzi scheme of poetry production, promising returns on the poems we had been writing. When they never surfaced, we never noticed.

John BoselliProf. Beltz-HosekTo the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)Despite being a queer woman, Woolfs limited feminism reminds me that one may belong to an oppressed community without understanding that oppressions complexity and intersectionality. In keeping with Alice Walkers devastating critique of A Room of Ones Own, I believe that Woolfs race- and class-exclusive feminism is invested first and foremost in the emancipation of white women from the performative demands of being the Angel in gentrified homes. As someone constantly looking to improve their activisms scope, I cannot help but struggle with the use of the feminism label on her work and work like it, because even if the label refers to the classic definition of binary gender equality across social, political, and economic lines, it a) borrows the Western frame of gender being a male/female division, ignoring the vast history of native and indigenous cultures with different and multiple genders, b) excludes trans and genderqueer existences (even her Orlando: A Biography, perpetuates the sex-gender linkage, and c) excludes those whose life chances are most compromised by the systems.To be clear, I do not only take umbrage with Woolfs work; I also feel that such privileged activism, i.e., White Feminism, is class-bound, not uncommon, and not necessarily malicious; racial and class groups were and continue to be deliberately spatialized geographically in order to splinter cross-class experiences of the same oppressive system into seemingly disparate, community-specific issues. As such, coalition work becomes nigh impossible. John BoselliProf. Beltz-HosekAmadeus (Peter Shaffer)In her dispute with Shaffer about his churlish, historically accurate Mozart, then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is almost comically bourgeois, demanding respectability from a composer as a necessary precursor to his social importance. When watching the film adaptation of Amadeus, I only admired Mozart more for his authenticity, for his refusal to cow (entirely) to the social binds of his day. It made his work seem more honest, because there was less subterfuge in his presentation. I cannot abide by the complaints like Thatchers that encourage those useful under capitalism to whitewash their social media profiles so as not to deter consideration from future employers, and I am especially hostile to the idea that one must be properly professional in order to be credible or reliable, because of how socially and racially constructed those qualities are. So much professionalism, e.g., writing and speaking in Standard English (made supreme by a long history of British and American imperialism), dressing in expensive but drab suits (to properly distance the workforce from the poor and blue-collar), and mastery of arcane bureaucratic paperwork (privatizing knowledge that should otherwise be publicly available) is attained by class privilege. A marketable university education has become a pay wall to employment that many disenfranchised communities cannot access. In part because their policies are written and executed in ways that create inequity, but also due to their processes being compulsorily professional, our countrys legal, healthcare, and employment systems thus continue to be sites of socioeconomic/racial oppression.

Works CitedBront, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.Bush, Kate. ""Wuthering Heights"" AZLyrics.com. Musixsmatch, 2000. Web. 5 May 2015.Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 1989. Print.Shaffer, Peter, and Richard Adams. Amadeus. Harlow: Longman, 1984. Print.Wiesel, Elie, and Marion Wiesel. Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. London: Hogarth, 1967. Print.