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Some paper proposals
March 2, 2015 | 2 Comments
- I was thinking about doing a paper about oversharing and generational gaps involving Soviet immigrants and their Americanized children. With the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a huge influx of soviet citizens in the 1980’s and 90’s. These immigrants escaped a country where “oversharing” even innocent details could lead to a prison sentence at best, to death at worst. Their children were raised in America, where sharing your thoughts and feelings and talking things through are more the norm. I would like to research into this gap between parents and their children who are more open to sharing and expressing their feelings. As primary source documents, I plan to interview Russian immigrants and their children in order to understand this cultural divide. Particularly helpful for this assignment would be that I know how to speak in Russian (here is my secret of the day).
- I thought to do a project on what the Old Testament has to say about oversharing, in particular gossip. We all know that gossip is bad, but what about in specific situations, such as danger to life, or to warn a person about a bad business venture? What happens if personal resentment is a part of the equation? I will look specifically into what Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, known as the Chofetz Chaim wrote about gossip. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan lived from 1839–1933, and wrote a tremendous amount on the opposite of oversharing in a book titled, Guarding One’s Tongue. How does Rabbi Kagan’s work coincide with the Twenty-First Century need to share, overshare, and gossip about everyone and everybody? Specifically, what would Rabbi Kagan say about Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Blogs, etc…?
Comments
2 Comments so far
This is just my opinion. The first topic seems to be more viable. There seems to be a more delineated difference between those who share and those who undershare. Also, I’d imagine that there would be a good number of sources and secondary works written about the experience of recent Russian immigrants. The time-span mentioned seems more compact; so there seems to be a more viable recipe for a more rigorous analytical focus. Also, the thesis seems to more clear because it makes a noticeable distinction between the communicative and the uncommunicative.
With your other project, I’d imagine that the analytical focus would be more diffuse. The Bible, as I recall, is written in a short, matter-of-fact way. Thus, the Bible is interpreted in a variety of ways to this day due to this shortage of words. There is also the issue concerning the time-span. As I recall, the Bible claimed that Abraham moved from Ur to Israel around 3,000 BCE. The end of the Old Testament seems to approximate the period in which the Greeks came into contact with the Hebrews and unsuccessfully tried to make them eat pork. Thus, it would be more difficult to focus attention on just one person who overshared and how that person affected other people with her oversharing because, chances are, not that much is mentioned about that person in the Bible.
You mentioned a Rabbi and his thoughts on oversharing. This may be more workable, but what type of things do the gossipers says about the gossiped? If a variety of aspects are mentioned about the gossiped, then it may be difficult to pin down a whole paper on gossiping since there may be many types of gossiping. Arguably, some of the gossiping or oversharing may not be negative traits of the gossiper; indeed, it may be a good thing because it facilitates communication. However, the ambiguity associated with the issue may dilute the potency of the thesis. Relating the rabbi’s thoughts to contemporary cultural standards may make it more difficult to write a compact paper based on just one thesis because it adds another component to the recipe.
I agree-I think the first topic is very promising and could work very well.
Interviews are a bit more difficult; you would need IRB approval.