Hello BBB Class!

Your only work for Tuesday is to write a short (500 words) response paper on the film you saw,  East Side Story.   If you did not see the film or can’t remember anything,  you can write on any one of the chapters in Innocent Weapons that you have read.  The generic prompt for this response paper is:

Carl Jung (psychologist who identified the notion of a  “collective unconscious”) once said that the West is fascinated by Russia because it is like “looking at our alter-ego in the mirror.”  In other words, what strikes us as strange/alien/exotic in the “Russian mirror” (like socialist musicals, or socialist propaganda about children) turns out to be a reflection of phenomenon that are paradigmatic (=form an underlying basis of thought and symbolism) in our culture. In your response to either some part of the movie or the book, think about what aspects of the Soviet phenomenon shed light on aspects of parallel phenomena in American (or Chinese, if you want) culture.