The style discussion.

I’m a little bit hung up on the discussion of style.  A quote from my notes: “POLEMIC— root: battle, disputatious, raging, aggressive--- Do we want our criticism to be like this?” 

My brain sometimes goes fuzzy in class when we have discussions because I feel like I have to make a judgment call on the reading.  Either I liked it or I didn’t.  I know that sounds ridiculous but maybe that’s just years of people asking that simple question.  I know my opinion is supposed to change while I’m learning, but after last class I just felt confused. 

Someone will say something like, “Arac is being sarcastic and talks down to everyone” and then someone else will point out him being intelligent in this other way and by the end I feel like my opinion about him gets wishy washy. I think my brain likes black and white.  And there’s so much grey area.

We talked in class about criticism being polemic or “weak”.  Then someone in class made a comment about how we want a classroom to be a nuanced discussion, with people agreeing with some parts of the discussion and disagreeing with other parts.  This sounds like how I might want criticism to be and maybe I’ll learn to adopt this way of criticizing criticism.