STASIS-DESTABILIZATION: MAKING AND SOLVING A PROBLEM

1. Stasis: The way readers probably think things are. The way things appear. The
way that a text presents a problem. The way that a problem has been presented or
developed in class, e.g. On Weinbergers account, translation is X.
2. Concession: Why readers might be right. Some piece of evidence that seems to
support the superficial impression. For example, a translation must be faithful to
some degree (note some is a qualifying word) it is important to translate a
character as hill or mountain and not skyscraper.
3. Destabilization: Some point that shows the stasis to be inaccurate. Some point
that suggests things should be reconsidered critically. For example, However, the
criteria of faithfulness seems to ignore the incommensurable difference between
languages.
4. Consequences: What is at stake in this destabilization? Why does it matter if the
stasis is true or false? For example, rather than thinking of translation on the
model of fidelity, resonance is a better metaphor. By resonance I mean X and Y. X
& Y then help to _________.
5. Position/Thesis: Your answer to the (implicit) question generated by the
destabilization. In some cases, this means tweaking the stasis so that it can
account for the destabilization. In other cases, this means offering a completely
new answer to the question. In either case, the claim/position you generate here
represents the thesis your essay will defend.
EXAMPLES:
See and Be Seen:
Interacting with Images in Metamorphoses and Las Meninas
What is our relationship to images? Traditionally, we tend to hold images at a
distance from reality, asserting that the two inhabit different realms. A scene in a painting
isnt real, and an image in the mirror is necessarily distinct from its subject because we
dont live within the painting or mirror; the world we inhabit is separated from
representation, which only attempts to resemble reality. However, while we may take
such views for granted, Ovid and Foucault attempt to challenge these views by analyzing
situations where there are representations of representations. In the scene where
Narcissus first views his reflection in Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the reflection as
that image of an image (561), and Foucault writes on the experience of viewing
Velasquezs Las Meninas, a painting about painting. Foucault and Ovid argue that images
extend into our reality, and in doing so ultimately question where we can draw the line
between reality and representation.

In his essay The Modern Public and Photography, Charles Baudelaire argues that the
medium of photography serves a documentary purpose that never attains the status of art.
A single, anomalous entry in Hedwig Loebs photo album, depicting her years as a
University of Chicago student at the turn of the century, complicates Baudelaires binary.
The clumsy composition and extreme lack of focus position the photograph
uncomfortably outside of either a clear documentation of reality, Baudelaires desired
domain of photography, or an aesthetically coherent work of art. Unable to fully serve as
either a classically beautiful image or an accurate depiction of reality, Loebs photograph
occupies a middle ground that fulfills a psychological need for preservation and
memorialization.
Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent;
it has regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has
convinced me (and I hope will convince my literary colleagues) that society and literary
culture can only be understood and studied together. In addition, and by an almost
inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of
Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic
branch, Orientalism resembles each other very closely in a historical, cultural, and
political truth that need only be mentioned to a Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly
understood. But what I should also like to contribute here is a better understanding of the
way cultural domination has operated. If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the
Orient, indeed it eliminates the Orient and Occident altogether, then we shall have
advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the unlearning of
the dominant mode.

PROBLEM
1. An INSTABILITY
2. The consequences of that INSTABILITY, presented
a. Sometimes presented as the COSTS of leaving that
instability unstable
b. Sometimes as the BENEFITS of stabilizing it
c. Sometimes as both COST and BENEFIT
3. READERS who constitute a discourse community defined by
their interest in a topic who will accept or are open to
accepting the cost/benefit.