The Last Blog and Final Submission

You are asked to add one more concluding blog to your series of eleven. This last blog is an opportunity for you to sum up what you have learnt, and possibly see the links between the different texts. You are allowed to acknowledge your favourites and those which proved more elusive to comprehension. There is no secret code to break, no magic secret, no mystical link, but it should be obvious to you that certain themes connect the choice of texts; hopefully providing a roadmap for your own critical thinking.
Some of these themes you might like to pursue further in your dissertation, which we shall begin to discuss next semester.

Final Submission: You are asked to print out your twelve blogs as hard copy in reverse order to the way they appear on the screen; starting with your first blog and ending with your summing up just as you would a book. Bind your submission to A4 and submit one copy to the Faculty Office on the 3rd Floor of the Tower Block. Use one of the submission forms provided outside the office, and make sure it's marked clearly for my attention.

Date for Submission: First thing before studio teaching Monday 11th January 2016. The submissions will be collected at 11am.

Session Eleven: The Epic II

You will be relieved that this week you do not have a reading task, you simply have to come along to the session and enjoy (?!) a speedy rendering of Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead as a movie. You should note that the tone here, that of the triumph of the individual, is markedly different to that of Dos Passos. You should also note that the publication of both book and release of the film correspond with the period when McCarthyism was prevalent across the USA; when the 'red menace' had to be stopped in it's tracks.

My own opinions on the Roark phenomenon are articulated in the Reputations feature in the December 2013 edition of Architectural Review. Go to architecturalreview.com and it's an easy search once you sign up (for free).

Session Ten: The Epic

The last two texts are in many ways the opposite of each other, but they share the same epic quality, and the same doorstop level in size. Therefore it is impossible to make a reading of the whole book 'USA' or 'The Fountainhead', but for the latter we can at least watch the film, and to appreciate the former we can select certain sections, since part of it's epic quality is to try and do everything; in turn novel, newsreel, snapshot and biography, in turn both fact and fiction; in short 'the Great American Novel'.

In both cases the intension is to lodge both of these books in your mind for future reference. You never know when you might just need reference to them.

The first section I would like you to read/research/google is the chapter 'The Bitter Drink' (pg 806) a portrait of the thinker Thorstein Veblen, author of 'Theory of the Leisure Class'(1899). 

The second his portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright in the chapter 'Architect' (pg1076).

The third his portrait of Henry Ford in the chapter 'Tin Lizzie' (pg769).

These are all sections of the same, relatively short and concise, 'biographical' type.