About Me

James Jae Heon Lee, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Class of 2019, has majored in Linguistics and International Studies and minored in writing. This website was designed for the Capstone Project in Writing as a finale for the minor program.

 

 

My Motivation Behind this Project

During high school, in New Jersy, I was not interested in reading. Hamlet was the only Shakespeare play I actually read over those years. I was too distracted by social life and social media. I still had much more to learn about the American culture around me, and I did not want to come off as a clueless international student. With SparkNotes, I still managed to perform satisfactorily on the assignments, but I found it more important to fit in than to learn to appreciate Shakespeare, as if those two things were mutually exclusive. Even though I liked film and music, I lacked a real learner's attitude towards them; I cared little about cultivating a comprehensive understanding of them and knowing more of them by heart. I came to college with a similar attitude and did not read Homer for 'First Year Writing - Great Books'.

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I am now trying to establish a firmer ground of understanding. A goal I have in mind is to both know the different ways to appreciate an artistic medium and feel all those kinds of appreciation. I want to describe them, and I want to experience them. Then I want to use the understanding I built to say something original. So I arrive at the question: how will I be able to do that? I began to think that this was a problem of authority; I don't have enough authority to write the kinds of criticism I want.

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Then how should I start building it? The foremost task is to put in the work and give it time. I will need to read again all the books I mostly sparknoted. I still tend to read more slowly in English (until I was twelve or so, everything I had read was in Korean). But it also occurred to me that there must be other barriers for people under different circumstances.

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The first issue that comes to mind is that life is relatively short, and that it has other things in it, too. Many people return home from work exhausted at night, after having had to deal with documents and documents on end with zero "autonomous signification". Some of them soon leave again for another part-time job. Others, who can finally relax for a couple hours, want their sliver of leisure to be pleasurable.

 

Suppose they, though native English speakers, have never gone through a full text of Elizabethan English in their lives. Much less because Shakespeare's language has intrinsic difficulty that only an elite sensibility can penetrate. That is too strenuous a leap for them to be expected to take without some preliminary awareness. And we know that the distribution of that preliminary awareness, in other words, a good educational environment or a sufficient leisure to broaden one's interests, is systematically unequal. 

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If 'education' means 'learning', We can say that the Internet has made it more affordable and accessible. But 'education' means grades and degrees, in both America and Korea, just like the 'Big 3' or the 'Big 4' lists. The numerically processed information regarding literature and other substantial contents of art are very crude and reduced translations that capture only a tiny sliver of the potential of their meaning. Constantly bombarded with new media, we feel compelled to make quick judgments, however superficial.

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It was in this light that I wanted to approach the subject of production and reception of artworks in the age of globalization, and connect it to my main areas of interest, such as popular art, literature, translation and linguistics. There are more things I had the time and energy to discuss, but as long as my readers can find something relevant to the way they appreciate diversity, I will be able to look back and say that this fruition of my undergraduate education at Michigan was a good conclusion to a chapter in my life.

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