Students are often told to produce something “original,” “novel,” or “innovative” in their academic writing—yet these expectations can feel daunting. Faced with longstanding scholarly conversations and the rigor of research, “originality” can feel like a demand to invent something entirely unprecedented. But what if academic creativity doesn’t require starting from scratch? What if, instead, it lies in reinterpreting, rethinking, and reimagining what’s already there?
Inspired by our very own Jordan Fraser Angel, this year’s theme, Inventive Interventions, explores this idea. We invite you to see academic writing not as a solitary act of invention but as a form of participation: stepping into an existing conversation with a fresh perspective, another possible question, or a surprising connection. By reframing academic writing as a space for creativity, we hope to show that interventions can be both rigorous and generative—grounded in the insights of others and yet alive with personal curiosity and voice.
This issue builds toward that vision through a deliberately structured progression. We begin with close-reading papers that reinterpret a subject—be it a text, a work of art, or any object that sparks questions—by attending to their subtleties and offering the writer’s unique angle. Next, we move into papers engaging with a specific theory or two, demonstrating how writers rethink their chosen topic with these theoretical frameworks in mind. The third section presents papers in dialogue with more expansive scholarly conversations as writers create their own shelves of curiosities within existing libraries of scholarly thought. We conclude with a section focused on reimagining academic creativity, featuring two pieces by Writing Center Fellows—including our very own Lucia Brown—that shed light on how to engage with open-ended assignments that especially foster student innovation. Throughout this issue, you’ll find models for all kinds of students—first-years in Writing Seminars, students in the HUM Sequence, juniors beginning Independent Work, STEM majors working on scientific research—because the Writing Lexicon truly spans across courses, disciplines, and class years alike.
Tortoise is unique in that we aim to emphasize the writing process as much as its “finished” product. Working closely with each writer, we intentionally crafted excerpts from their larger papers to highlight specific strengths, which are accompanied by commentaries from both the writers and the editors they collaborated with. These commentaries provide insight into each author’s writing process—their challenges, discoveries, takeaways—as well as the editor’s perspective, which draws on their own experience as a Writing Center Fellow and student. Our journal is both an anthology of exemplary student writing and a pedagogical resource to return to whenever a glimpse into another writer’s process might spark inspiration for your own. We hope this issue will inspire you to experiment with your own inventive interventions!
The following excerpt is from my term paper for ART 431: Art, Culture, and Identity in Medieval Spain. Students were able to explore an object of their choice from medieval Iberian visual culture, framing their argument within the relevant course themes of culture, religion, and medieval notions of race in the Iberian Peninsula. Through visual and historical analysis, comparison, and critical engagement with current scholarship, my classmates and I contributed to a lively discourse about the nuanced ways in which social and cultural groups co-existed in medieval Iberia.
Excerpt
In the extravagantly illustrated Rylands Haggadah, a dark blue-skinned, wide-stanced figure barges forward, wielding a curved saber above his head and tucking a bright red shield close to his torso (Fig. 1). He is the mischievous “Wicked Child,” serving as a symbolic example of how Passover seder participants should not engage with the commandment to remember the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Though the figure has traditionally been interpreted as portraying the threat posed by rejecting Jewish tradition, I argue that he serves a dual role in the work as a soldier and enslaved individual, representing both biblical and medieval slavery, and reflecting how medieval notions of foreignness influenced the haggadah’s pedagogical program.
Contrasts between the Wicked Son and intellectual figures in the haggadah highlight the Wicked Son’s connection to storytelling and interpretation in relation to enslavement. The Wicked Son and Wise Son’s differing relationships to the physical text suggests their attitudes towards learning, characterizing the Wicked Son as enslaved by his resistance to tradition. The Wicked Son storms rightwards with his sword pointed towards the text itself. In particular, the tip of the sword occupies a gap in the page’s paragraph structure where the paragraph about the Wise Son ends. Therefore, the Wicked Son specifically targets the Wise Son’s text, which advocates for traditional Passover rituals. In contrast, the Wise Son interacts more closely and tenderly with the text of the page. While the Wicked Son attacks the actual text participants use during the Seder, the Wise Child holds a miniature version of the haggadah which reads, in very small print, “What does the Wise Child Say? What are the testimonies, the statutes and laws…” He engages in the very same act as the Seder participants in a self-referential show of authority. Specifically, he points to the word “והחוקים” meaning “the statutes,” referencing his prioritization of Torah commandment and laws. By engaging with the text at hand in a similar manner to the real Seder-goers instead of seeking to “destroy” it, the Wise Son demonstrates the behavior of a free individual while the Wicked Son is akin to a defiant Israelite who does not accept God’s word, one who is not yet free from Egyptian rule and has not received the Torah at Mount Sinai.12
While his relationship to textual interpretation highlights the theme of biblical enslavement, the figure’s potential Muslim identity relates strongly to medieval Iberian slavery practices, in which most unfree individuals were Muslim. Julie Harris understands the “othering” of the Wicked Son to rest mainly in a Muslim or North African identity, shown by the style of his armor and stereotyped physiological features including an upturned nose and sharp teeth, laying important groundwork for understanding slavery’s connection to the figure on a social-religious dimension.3 Harris posits that a Muslim warrior serves as a response to Jewish assimilation in Christian society, as the Wicked Child was once illustrated as a Christian soldier in medieval haggadot, a depiction ceasing to bestow negative character onto the Wicked Son as Jews began to bear arms like their Christian counterparts.4 Therefore, using a Muslim figure would allow Seder participants to more clearly portray the antagonistic Wicked Son through the use of a widely-used set of stereotyping imagery in Iberian material culture meant to imbue figures with an intimidating or strange foreignness.
However, the use of a Muslim figure would also likely have led Jewish viewers to associate the Wicked Son with enslaved individuals in their immediate environment, combining notions of biblical slavery implicit in the figure with a medieval perspective on slavery.5 Jewish families of means in medieval Iberia, while also under Christian rule, could and did own slaves. As such, their understanding of slavery at the time likely combined with traditional interpretations of the Wicked Son. Jane Barlow, approaching the figure with a postcolonial lens, notes how Jewish ownership of Muslim slaves put wealthy Jewish individuals and Muslims in close contact.6 This further supports the proposal that, if the Wicked Son was perceived as specifically Muslim, Jewish viewers or users of the Rylands Haggadah would associate the figure with slavery on an intimate level.
The effect of the above associations with slavery—color symbolism, posture, relationship to text, and possible Muslim identity—revolve around casting the Wicked Son as foreign, which was a condition for medieval enslavement. The Wicked Son’s aggression, armor, and sense of active invasion is deeply tied to his foreignness. Therefore, a Seder-goer who “chooses” the Wicked Son by behaving apathetically towards ritual accepts also his perceived foreignness, opening a door to a fear looming large over the Passover seder: the possibility of becoming unfree. The moral choice presented by the Four Sons suddenly becomes more real as viewers are reminded of current systems of slavery and their proximity to unfree individuals. It is not out of the question for the Rylands Haggadah to emphasize its users’ freedom by calling attention to those close by who are unfree. Doing so within the structure of the Wicked Son turns this message, implicit in dark-skinned servants across several haggadot, into a purposeful educational tool.
Footnotes
Additionally, Harris contends that if the figure is meant to be Muslim, he may be meant to “embody his peoples’ lack of written language and history—a condition diametrically opposed to that of the Jews.” While this interpretation may require additional support, this hypothesis supports the layered meaning of Wicked Child in relation to the freedom to read and interpret traditional texts. ↩︎
Julie Harris. 2005. “Good Jews, Bad Jews, and No Jews at All – Ritual Imagery and Social Standards in the Catalan Haggadot.” In Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams, 26:275—96. The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World. Brill. ↩︎
Pamela Patton. “What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Color, Race, and Unfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia.” Speculum 97, no. 3 (July 2022). ↩︎
In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, as Christians gained more control of the Iberian Peninsula, most enslaved individuals were Muslims captured in battle. Color symbolism associating black or dark colors with barbarity, depravity, and sin emerged as a method to visually and symbolically separate enslaved Muslims from free Muslims.As this visual lexicon proliferated, it became more effective at portraying Muslims as immoral, therefore constructing a rationale for their enslavement. Patton, “What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like?,” 660, 695-697. ↩︎
Jane Barlow. “The Muslim Warrior at the Seder Meal.” In Postcolonising the Medieval Image, 218—40. Routledge, 2019. 232. ↩︎
Bibliography
Aristotle. “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE).” In Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, edited by Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard. Methuen Drama, 2019.
Brown, Carolyn E. “Juliet’s Taming of Romeo.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 2 (1996): 333—55. https://doi.org/10.2307/450952.
Petrarch, Francesco. Sonnets and Shorter Poems. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Peter Holland. Penguin Books, 2016.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1—14. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
Whittier, Gayle. “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752.
Author Commentary / Tali Goldman
I wrote this paper for Professor Pamela Patton’s course ART 431, Art, Culture, and Identity in Medieval Spain. When Professor Patton suggested that I work on the Wicked Son in the Rylands Haggadah, I dove into existing literature on the figure. In class, we had discussed how the figure relates to the medieval Iberian practice of color symbolism, which reflected not the actual skin tone of certain individuals but used dark pigment to communicate negative traits and status, creating a visual lexicon around ideas of freedom/unfreedom. Provided that a biblical redemption from slavery is a key theme of Passover, it was surprising that scholars had not discussed this depiction of the Wicked Son through the lens of slavery, focusing instead primarily on the figure’s aggressive tone.
Slowly but surely, I used visual and comparative analysis as well as secondary sources to reinterpret the pedagogical function of the Wicked Son. Ultimately, a multi-layered thesis emerged. I argue how the depiction and placement of the Wicked Son on the folio—a tense, unfamiliar warrior confronting the very words of the manuscript— not only reflects the Wicked Son as a heretical threat, but casts him as foreign, a characterization which would have been associated with slavery at the time. I was then able to connect a dual understanding of the Wicked Son as both a warrior and unfree person to the significance of freedom as a theme of the Passover seder.By adding to and complicating prior interpretations, I contributed a more nuanced understanding of this figure. While scholars had looked at the image through cultural or religious lenses, I sought to combine multiple approaches, allowing me to understand the social and religious significance of the figure in the very specific context of race and slavery in medieval Iberia, which manifested visually in a wide variety of manuscripts from several religions/cultures during the medieval period. Writing this paper allowed me to approach nuanced and difficult topics of religion, race, and othering—which were understood differently in medieval times than in the modern period—with an art historical lens. In decoding a confusing image, I thought through ways in which the cultural and social reality in medieval Iberia influenced the private lives and traditions of people of several different religious/social practices.
Editor Commentary / Katherine Jiho Lee
One important way in which scholars intervene in academic writing is by examining non-textual, creative sources. In her analysis of the Rylands Haggadah, a 14th-century manuscript, Tali uses illustrations rather than quotes as her evidence to explore how specific visual details were chosen to communicate specific themes and pedagogical messages to a medieval Jewish audience. Focusing on the depictions of the Wicked Son, rather than simply describing what the illustrations show, she intervenes by treating them as a form of argument. This makes it possible to “close read” how that argument is supported and communicated through visual details and cultural connotations, including the Wicked Son’s skin tone, interaction with the text, and stereotypical physical features. By situating this imagery within broader artistic and historical contexts, the author connects the visual representation of the Wicked Son to deeper tensions between historical themes including freedom versus enslavement and belonging versus otherness.
Through this art historical lens, Tali also complicates prior interpretations of the Wicked Son and introduces a compelling motive that runs throughout her paper, merging cultural, religious, and social perspectives to offer a deeper understanding of the figure and its significance. She is able to make an original contribution to the literature by identifying a more nuanced role played by the Wicked Son than that interpreted by previous scholarship. In particular, although scholars have traditionally portrayed this character as a representation of the danger of rejecting Jewish tradition, Tali argues that the Wicked Son also plays the role of soldier and enslaved individual to represent both biblical and contemporary (i.e., medieval) slavery, ultimately demonstrating how depictions of foreignness impacted the pedagogical purpose of the haggadah. Thus, analyzing art as real discourse rather than decoration constitutes one way that writers can make original contributions to ongoing conversations, identify what is new or not obvious, and innovate inventive interventions.
This issue of Tortoise demonstrates how creative thinking factors into our writing in a myriad of ways, even through traditional prompts. How can close-reading change how we understand art? How can theory be employed to illuminate, critique, and understand case studies? How can we imagine our own roles in contributing to a scholarly conversation? And finally, in the EEB paper in this section, how can creativity in the structure of an assignment itself help us practice new methods and techniques?
In my past three years as a Writing Center Fellow, I have noticed a rise in creative prompts coming into the conference room. The freedom and form of these assignments can often be daunting for students. Remember that creativity in writing has no disciplinary boundaries! We have been steeped in creative thinking since the beginning of our writing journeys at Princeton, from forming a motive question to figuring out our own scholarly positions. Academic writing assignments often push us to synthesize ideas, find gaps, think on our toes, and raise new questions—all of which are creative.
Here are a few strategies I use in my own creative academic work and ways I have helped students in the conference room approach that unexpected prompt.
Before you start writing, read the prompt out loud. This can help dispel some of the intimidation around the prompt (even if it’s just a sentence or two long). As you read, try turning the prompt into a to-do list. What are the different tasks you will have to accomplish within this assignment? This list can look as simple as (1) ask a question and (2) answer it in 3 – 4 pages. That’s a start! Then, imagine why your professor would have handed you this to-do list. What skills or knowledge is your professor trying to assess? Has this theme been assessed in other ways already in your course? What kinds of strategies of analysis are you expected to employ?
Based on this list of requirements,free-write a couple of project ideas. A personal motive is an important and often under-appreciated driving force when considering the approach to a paper—a project you care about is usually much more interesting to research and write. Ask yourself what ideas in the readings you found the most engaging. What do you still have questions about? What would you like to learn more about? (A professor once told me that in brainstorming a project, a useful strategy is to look back at the questions I asked in my reading responses). As you jot down ideas, also keep in mind the scope of the project—what might seem too big for a midterm project could end up being a good idea for a final paper.
Depending on the prompt and your project ideas, you may still have questions. Trust your confusion. Imagine trying to go through with one of the projects you came up with, and come up with specific questions for your professor about the assignment. What in the prompt do you need clarification on? If you do not have a rubric or any grading criteria, what are the professor’s expectations? What are the boundaries? Some professors with open-ended assignments require students to pitch their project in office hours. They can provide you with useful directions and point you to resources you did not know about. Think about what else you need on that to-do list to make you confident as you embark on this project, and reach out with enough time for your professor to respond.
As you work with creative assignments, the lexicon terms are still useful, though they may manifest in new ways. Think carefully through your structure, especially. Regardless of the form of your project, structure will still apply, and thinking purposefully through it can do a lot of work for you. What do you want your audience to see or learn most? How can you compellingly tell your story? In what order? To add nuance, think about how you can connect ideas from class into your project. Could a theoretical concept be a useful lens? How does the form of your creative project shed new light on material from your course? If you are concerned about putting a thesis into your creative project, think about what the thread is through your structure; the structure can also be an argument for seeing something a certain way.
Keep in mind that creative assignments can also be an opportunity to push yourself in new ways—while I was making a podcast for a midterm project in a course on the history of Soviet media, I found myself braiding challah, interviewing a rabbi, and moving trays in the kitchen of the Center for Jewish Life. At the end of the week, as I edited the podcast—also something I had never done before—I was blown away by how thrilling it had been to work on the project.
The strategies in this article are particularly designed for when you’re given a creative prompt. But as this issue has shown, though, creative approaches are useful across the board. With the kinds of creative thinking and attention anticipated from our standard writing assignments, maybe the creative prompt is just making this expectation more explicit.
This excerpt is from the beginning of a close reading I wrote for HUM 216-HUM 217: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture I: Literature and the Arts, History, Philosophy, and Religion. This paper was one of five close readings we wrote throughout the fall semester of 2022 and was the only one I wrote on a work of art opposed to literary texts. After visiting the The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York through the class, I decided to write my close reading on a Roman wellhead figural relief sculpture from 150-200 A.D. that depicted the myths of Narcissus and Hylas, titled the Gosford Wellhead. The wellhead connects the two myths on either side through water carved along its circumference, but in analyzing the sculpture’s carving technique and depiction of both myths, I contend that the Gosford Wellhead moreover speaks to a shared loss of control in both myths.
Excerpt
In both the myths of Narcissus and Hylas, the characters seal their demises through water—Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection and Hylas is abducted by water nymphs. This is represented in a second century A.D. wellhead where water flows in carved marble lines along the bottom of portrayals of the two myths. Yet, more than drawing us to recognize the connection of water, the Gosford Wellhead speaks to a loss of control. The Gosford Wellhead centers the viewer’s attention to both characters’ individual losses of bodily autonomy, while also illuminating this point of comparison between the stories.
The Gosford Wellhead is a cylindrical wellhead, carved out of a single block of marble (Hemingway). The middle of the wellhead is concave with ridges on the bottom and top. Mid relief trees decorate the background, while the scene’s figures are depicted in mostly high relief. The wellhead weaves in scenes of Narcissus and Echo—on one side it portrays Nemesis pouring water into Narcissus’ reflection. Echo is laid on the ground behind him, separated by a tree and gazing towards Narcissus. Directly on the other side of the wellhead, Hylas is gripped by two water nymphs. Another nymph lays to their right, looking at the three figures with her body and feet pointing towards Nemesis. The rest of the background is negative space.
While the cylindrical form of the wellhead factors in chance in what scene the viewer approaches, it indicates two focal points on either side of the wellhead—Narcissus’ reflection and Hylas’ face. Approaching the wellhead on the side with Narcissus, both his and Nemesis’ side profiles are both tilted downwards, gazing at Narcissus’ reflection. This angular focus is also supported by Nemesis’ diagonal form and both characters’ feet pointing towards Narcissus’ reflection, altogether compelling us to focus on what traps Narcissus—his reflection in the water.
The sculpture clarifies Narcissus’ lack of control through the fluidity of the water, specifically poured by Nemesis, the goddess of retribution. Instead of capturing Narcissus stumbling upon his reflection in a desolate area of the forest, the wellhead portrays Nemesis pouring the water, indicating that there is another figure catalyzing his demise. The pool of water that Nemesis creates by pouring additionally has no other carvings around it to indicate that it is a pond or lake. Instead, the wellhead emphasizes that Nemesis is not just the one pouring a spring into an already existing body of water but creating the source of his reflection. While his reaction to the water that leads him to fall in love with himself is already in the hands of fate and his curse as according to myth, the wellhead takes it even more so out of his hands, by portraying someone else causing his trapping. The water Nemesis pours is also extremely fluid—the smaller repetitive streams flowing out of the water are carved with wavy lines. The sculpture juxtaposes the moving and infinite volume of water pouring to the comparatively smaller jug that it flows out of, evoking a sense of seeming permanence—Nemesis is somehow able to infinitely pour water into his reflection, infinitely trapping him.
The varying levels of movement expressed by both figures’ body language emphasize that Narcissus’ fate is not just in the hands of someone else, but so is his bodily autonomy. Nemesis is reclined—her diagonal form may indicate instability, but upon closer examination one can see that she is resting on a tree supporting her body and arm. In contrast, Narcissus is frozen mid-movement. His arm is turned upwards, with his palm facing outwards, creating a sense of surprise and that he just stumbled upon this reflection. Likewise, the implied texture of Nemesis’ clothing connotes a sense of movement like the water—the repetition of the fluid folds of her clothing are more emphasized than Narcissus’ clothing, accentuating his stasis. His hair in the reflection of the image does blend into the water, and yet, the one element of Narcissus that has movement is the reflection that traps him. Thus, the sculpture depicts the twofold causes of his trapping—Nemesis and his reflection—as comfortable and mobile, in contrast to his paralysis. This amplifies his lack of control over his movement and bodily autonomy.
In addition to portraying Narcissus’ paralysis, the sculpture enables the viewer to experience it. Narcissus’ reflection is especially high relief, to the extent that the reflection becomes almost horizontally protruding from the wellhead. As such, especially as the wellhead is naturally below the viewer due to its proportions, the viewer can peer into Narcissus’ reflection and experience his point of view, but then move away while he is trapped staring at his reflection. This interactive element of the piece also amplifies the inescapability of his fate—the viewer can look at his reflection from an authoritative position and escape, but he cannot.
Author Commentary / Olivia Roslansky
Prior to writing this paper, I had never written a close reading of a sculpture nor a wellhead. This paper was the fourth close reading that I wrote for the Humanities Sequence during the fall of 2022, my first year. After taking a trip to the Met and observing different sculptures and paintings, I was intrigued to engage with sculpture by applying what I had learned about close reading for literary texts thus far. I was particularly drawn to the wellhead due to its interactive form—to ‘read’ it, I had to traverse it in a circle, observing the different carvings and the stories they told. As I observed the wellhead, I wondered—what does it mean to perform a close reading of sculpture? For our previous close readings of text, I interpreted the meanings of short passages through literary mechanisms such as imagery or alliteration. Moving to art, we received guidance in terms of different elements to pay attention to, like scale, material, composition, and context. We were advised to spend at least 20-30 minutes observing the art, interacting with its features and context. In the time that I traversed the wellhead, I made note of different focal points through the composition of sections of the wellhead and began to notice its depictions of losses of control, and how I was drawn to observe them. While writing my essay, I struggled most with writing a cohesive analysis and structuring my argument. While performing a close reading of a literary text I could analyze a passage in chronological order, but the interactivity of the wellhead implied that a viewer could approach the sculpture from any point, so I felt that I could begin my paper at any point. Yet, upon analyzing the sculpture, I noticed the two portrayals of the two myths on opposing sides of the wellhead, as well as where my eyes were drawn and how I moved along the wellhead, connecting the myths, regardless of where I began. Thus, I wrote the paper in that form—observing both myths and how the wellhead emphasizes and connects them. Ultimately, it was both engaging and challenging to perform a close reading of a wellhead, and it drew my attention to the importance of interdisciplinary writing. While a different form, I was able to apply similar skills I had since developed while analyzing literary work to the sculpture, like in terms of synthesizing the effects of different artistic elements. The sculpture, too, told a story through the two myths, illuminating a comparison between them through its carvings.
Editor Commentary / Nadja Markov
Writing a compelling close reading can be a daunting task for first-year students—especially if the close reading is not that of a text, but of a sculpture. The pictures of the sculpture on the first page of Olivia’s paper were what initially sparked my interest in it. Olivia starts off the essay by discussing the parallels between the myths of Narcissus and Hylas and using this vivid imagery to introduce her thesis. As such, she managed to set the tone for the rest of her paper and spark my interest as a reader very early on in her work, which in turn elevated my reading experience and the amount of information I got out of the text.
From here we can see Olivia clearly defining the object that she is focusing on—describing the sculpture while focusing on the details that will be important for the rest of her analysis. The relevant information about the piece is made explicit to the reader—there is no second guessing about where to look. This also sets the stage for the beginning of her analysis. With the readers familiarized with the piece itself, she can now delve into the details and explore how they relate to her thesis.
Within the analysis itself, we can see that the approaches might be different than what we are used to when doing a close reading of a text—rather than analyzing specific sentences, Olivia is analyzing angles and focal points. Although the medium is different, the methods used are rather similar—we start from a question, and look for answers within the piece.
By looking at the structure of the analysis paragraphs, we can see that Olivia starts them with a sentence that summarizes the most important points of the paragraph itself. As a reader, this helped me understand what to focus on and also provided me with a foundation with which I could follow Olivia’s line of reasoning. Choosing to emphasize certain words in the essay by italicizing them also made her points clearer to me as a reader, as it once again told me what to focus my attention on.
This is an excerpt from my R3 for WRI 155: Time’s Mirror. In the essay, I examine the “traditional wife,” or tradwife, movement, specifically the inconsistencies and disconnects that plague it. I argue that tradwives ultimately embody second-wave feminism: the idea that women can have it all. This is despite conflicting understandings of the movement’s relationship to feminism and tradwives’ presentations of gender and curation of their online personas.
Excerpt
In defense of their return to 1950s-style gender roles, tradwives consistently (if only implicitly) invoke choice feminism, or a woman’s right to make her own decisions, whether they conform to traditional notions of gender or not. However, choice feminism is inherently anachronistic to the 1950s, a period that did not allow for female agency. Similarly, being a successful influencer and a tradwife (i.e. creating an online persona based on the performance of a traditional female role) seem diametrically opposed. On a surface level, successful tradwife influencers promote traditional femininity and all its trappings: submission to male authority, modesty and chastity, motherhood and domesticity. A closer examination, though, reveals a different reality: because influencing is a job in its own right and generates an income, successful influencers don’t actually practice the traditional femininity they espouse; making money and financial independence contradicts it.
This disconnect between practice and reality reveals why there is such confusion in the tradwife community, the media, and scholarship regarding tradwives’ relationship to feminism. Some tradwives claim to exercise choice feminism while others declare themselves resolutely anti-feminist, even as they invoke choice feminism in their justifications and defenses of the movement. The media and scholars, then, are conflicted in their interpretations of tradwives’ attitudes towards feminism, tending to either oversimplify or misrepresent their perspectives. Regardless, successful tradwife influencers, even if unintentionally, publicly embody the idea that women can have it all. Thus, tradwives’ “new,” implied conceptualization of femininity is actually a return to ideas popularized by second-wave feminism and books like Joyce Gabriel and Bettye Baldwin’s Having It All: A Practical Guide to Managing a Home and Career (1981), or Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money… Even If You’re Starting With Nothing (1982) (Szalai2015);
The intersection between the performance of gender and the performance of influencers allows tradwives to conceal this relationship. Judith Butler first introduced the theory of gender performance in her influential book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). They write that “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time… through a stylized repetition of acts” (179; emphasis mine), which mirrors the construction and maintenance of an online persona (such as that of a tradwife). Moore, Barbour, and Lee (2017) developed a framework for understanding this online persona, identifying five dimensions that characterize it. In describing the public dimension specifically, Moore et al. identifies how image-crafting and performance can become an embodied pattern, especially for online celebrities: “The public self is the ‘official’ version that the celebrity offers up to the world, a highly polished, scheduled and controlled version… A performed self… can quickly become a pattern of action which then becomes routine…” (4) (emphasis mine). Moore et al. also identified the performance of gender as a factor in the presentation of online persona: “To present a publicly mediated persona, we must perform our identity, our profession, our gender…” (4).
Combining the work of Butler, who focuses on gender, and Moore, who focuses on online persona, reveals an inextricable connection between gender as performance and influencing as performance. Tradwives’ particular performance of gender—with its emphasis on homemaking and traditional femininity—obfuscates the entrepreneurial, income-generating side of being an influencer. Such obfuscation is facilitated by tradwives’ curation, mediation, and control over their online personas. It enables them to conceal the inconsistencies in their presentations of traditional femininity, the contradictions between promoting homemaking and submission to men while working, earning an income, and making their own choices about their public identities and presentations.
Works Cited
Barbour, Kim, Katja Lee, and Christopher Moore. “Online persona research: An Instagram case study.” Persona Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 1-12.
My first idea was to write about Mormons, specifically Mormon Doomsday Preppers. However, when I realized an astonishingly large amount of scholarship already existed on this particular niche of survivalists, I started searching for a different topic. Somehow, my investigation led me from Mormon Doomsday Preppers to tradwives (there is actually some crossover between the two communities, with both rejecting certain aspects of modern life).
Fortunately, because tradwives are a relatively new phenomenon, there was much to be explored. There were only a few scholarly articles on the subject and endless fascinating primary source material. The data and evidence collection was by far my favorite part of the writing process. I delved deep into the tradwife community, watching their videos, reading their blogs, and perusing their merch. Equally fascinating was the online response, which ran the gamut from outraged—The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, etc.—to celebratory (mainly just Reddit commentators). Tradwives were a polarizing group, inspiring much public discourse. It was the ideal moment to enter the conversation.
However, after watching too many Nara Smith and Ballerina Farm (two popular tradwife content creators) videos to count, I ran into an issue. I had identified a few major, overarching themes or inconsistencies, including the media vs. tradwives’ portrayal of the movement, choice feminism vs. anti-feminism, and content creation as a form of work, but I was finding it incredibly difficult to tie them together. In my first draft, I essentially wrote three disjointed mini essays. Thus, my primary focus during the revision process was identifying the link. I knew it was there somewhere; I just had to “unearth” it. At many points, I second-guessed myself, questioning if I was forcing a connection when there simply wasn’t one. However, I’m glad I persisted, because I think the final result does effectively demonstrate a relationship. Overall, this paper was a crucial lesson in what it means to truly make an argument rather than just compiling and regurgitating information.
Editor Commentary / Jordan Fraser Angel
Although it can certainly be challenging for Writing Seminar students to stake out an original claim in a crowded field of accomplished scholars, in this paper Katriona does something even more impressive: her intervention covers a topic with little existing scholarly discourse, making incisive claims about a subject with few established certainties. Katriona does this intentionally, calling it “the ideal moment to enter the conversation.” Showing inventiveness by researching “a relatively new phenomenon,” Katriona demonstrates how to be an active, contemporary scholar.
In this excerpt, Katriona combines several strategies of intervention. First, she pairs two historical eras, contrasting our present moment with the 1950s, a time period which tradwives claim to emulate. This allows her to establish a tension between tradwife values and the complex anachronisms inherent in their lifestyle. She then goes on to identify contradictions and “confusion” regarding how tradwives are discussed, both by the self-proclaimed tradwives and by the media. It is through this opening which Katriona creates for herself that her intervention truly shines. Later, she strengthens her argument by linking it to the broader scholarly conversation, and she does so in an inventive way, associating a celebrated scholar of gender, Judith Butler, with a lesser-known study of online personas. In this way, she displays how reorganizing the scholarly conversation can be an excellent way of intervening within it.
Indeed, Katriona herself comments on how centering intriguing connections and novel linkages is at the heart of her intervention. In her reflection, she explains that she started with “three disjointed mini essays,” which eventually evolved to “demonstrate a relationship” between tradwives, choice feminism, and online gendered personas. Again and again, Katriona triangulates between many different components, resulting in an original and well-supported understanding of the tradwife sphere.
In particular, Katriona reads tradwives against the grain (to borrow from the language of close reading) to demonstrate how they are, in many ways, the opposite of what they claim to be. Doing this requires flexible and creative thinking, imagining alternative explanations than what initially appears to be true. Katriona highlights this process of inventive intervention through the phrase “disconnect between practice and reality,” and through the opposition of the “surface level” and a “closer examination.” The artist Paul Klee, in his book The Inward Vision, noted that “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible” (Oxford Essential Quotations, Oxford University Press). This quotation explains how creativity and inventive interventions are entwined. To create means to envision a more true—possibly a more real—reality. Katriona’s paper is an excellent example of how academic writing, too, is an act of creation. Through her intervention, she identifies an “obfuscation” and dispels it, allowing readers to see more distinctly the world that she analyzes.
For my Junior Independent Work for the Politics Department, this excerpt performs a literature review on how soft power is defined and exercised from the US/Western perspective versus Chinese/non-Western approach. The excerpt attempts to find its own definition of soft power in order to proceed with gathering the data and developing the methodology needed to empirically test hypotheses on the relationship between gender, income, and the receptiveness of Chinese soft influence in East/Southeast Asian countries.
Excerpt
The following paper seeks to examine how gender and income level in East and Southeast Asian countries affect public opinion on China. Specifically, it questions the primary “dimension of influence,” or how respondents perceive the nature of Chinese influence (e.g., military, political, economic, cultural). My literature review begins by covering the definition, execution, and usefulness of soft power, from both US/Western and Chinese perspectives. This research works to synthesize the three domains to provide a comprehensive study of public views in East/Southeast Asian countries in relation to perceptions of Chinese influence.
Joseph Nye defined soft power in the late 1980s as “the ability to get others to want the outcomes that you want” (Nye 2004). As opposed to conventional military hard power, which is coercive towards other states, soft power is a “co-optive” force that achieves states’ desired outcomes through attraction and persuasion. Nye’s three pillars of soft power are: political values, culture, and foreign policy. Scholars have engaged in many debates around soft power, including its usefulness and whether or not it can be considered independent from military or economic power.
The general consensus among scholars is that China lacks soft power relative to the other industrialized democracies despite its formidable economic strength (Huang and Ding 2006; Lum, Morrison, and Vaughn 2008). The thinking goes that China’s ideology is unattractive and its authoritarian political system prevents the flourishing of its civil society, a valuable source of soft power that the state cannot generate. Additionally, its aggressive actions in the South China Sea, “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, crackdown in Hong Kong, and suppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang have not won it any favor among Western or regional audiences. However, some scholars dispute this mainstream view of Chinese soft power. Some directly point out a liberal democratic bias in the study of international relations (Keating and Kaczmarska, 2017), pointing out that conservative values and illiberal governance, such as in the case of Russia before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, can be attractive in and of themselves and should not be ignored. Furthermore, some developing countries find China’s authoritarian state-led rapid development as a potentially attractive economic model to emulate.
China’s interpretation of soft power is less of an idealistic vision like Washington’s interpretation but rather a more pragmatic approach. To the CCP, the separation between hard and soft power is artificial; this line of argument notes that the United States’ attractiveness flows from its military might and economic heft. Repnikova (2022) recently provided an overarching analysis of Chinese soft power, noting its sustained and urgent effort to enhance its image, stating that “whereas Washington places democratic values and ideals at the heart of its soft-power promotion, China focuses more on practical matters, seeking to fuse its cultural and commercial appeals.” This approach has reaped limited gains in the West, but has resonated across the Global South. China’s substantial investments in public diplomacy include Confucius Institutes, international communication, education and training exchanges, and public diplomacy spectacles. Take the area of educational opportunity in Ethiopia as an example. “In contrast to the small number of highly competitive fellowship programs sponsored by the U.S. State Department, China offers thousands of scholarships to cover the cost of degrees and training programs for African elites and young people.” In other words, where the United States has quality, China more than makes up for it with quantity. Western critiques that such policies are merely economic or material inducements miss the point that although inducements in and of themselves are not soft power, they enhance China’s image as a generous, opportunity-providing, competent, and pragmatic country.
Additionally, a substantial body of research exists on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched in 2013 across developing countries. However, economic incentives do not necessarily lead to more positive opinions. Eisenman’s analysis of China—Africa trade patterns show that although market forces drive trade, anti-Chinese resistance narratives still exist that could threaten China’s image (2012). A recent working paper by Sun, Kapstein, and Shapiro seeks to measure political influence of the BRI in Southeast Asia through sentiment analysis of elected officials’ public social media posts in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia (2023). They find little support for the claim that Chinese investments are increasing its political influence. Moreover, one should be wary not to associate soft power with payments too closely as then the term would lose its distinctiveness as a dimension of power.
Huang, Y., & Ding, S. (2006). Dragon’s underbelly: An analysis of China’s soft power. East Asia, 23(4), 22—44. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03179658.
Keating, V. C., & Kaczmarska, K. (2017). Conservative soft power: Liberal soft power bias and the ‘hidden’ attraction of Russia. Journal of International Relations and Development, 22(1), 1—27. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-017-0100-6.
Lum, T., Morrison, W. M., & Vaughn, B. (2008). China’s “Soft Power” in Southeast Asia.
Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft power: The means to success in world politics (1st ed.). New York: Public Affairs.
Repnikova, M. (2022a). Chinese soft power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Repnikova, M. (2022b, August). The Balance of Soft Power: The American and Chinese Quests to Win Hearts and Minds. Foreign Affairs, 101(4), 44,46-51.
Sun, Y., Kapstein, E., & Shapiro, J. (2023). Chinese Investment and Elite Sentiment in Southeast Asia: An Event Study of Influence Along the Belt and Road. Empirical Studies of Conflict Project.
Author Commentary / Minh Duong
When I began brainstorming my motive for the junior paper, I knew that I wanted to study something on soft power in Asia. China is an emerging power in the world’s most geopolitically important region of the 21st Century, and I wanted to research how it yields its non-military influence in the region. There is a general public consensus that China lacks soft power relative to Western countries (plus Korea and Japan). However, like any great power, China has an incentive to develop and exercise its influence through non-coercive means as the use of hard power has become more costly and less effective over time. Therein lies the kernel of my excerpt’s motive, to interrogate how soft power is defined and exercised through American and Chinese lenses.
As I conducted my literature review, one major challenge was how to make sense of the overlapping and distinct features of scholars’ definitions on soft power. Western scholars tend to see soft power through an idealistic lens as the attractiveness of a society’s values, while Chinese policymakers carry a more pragmatic outlook on using economic and educational inducements as a means to curry favor. In the end, I decided to conceptualize soft power as “as any form of influence that does not involve hard military force, whether directly explicit or indirectly implied” for the purposes of studying the dimensions of Chinese influence on public opinion.
Like any other skill, writing clearly, concisely, and persuasively is something that can be developed through deliberate practice. I would say that just getting started with a first draft and plenty of time for revision is critical. It is an active process of constructing and distilling your meaning and argument, and as such needs time to be organically personalized and refined. The Writing Seminar and the Writing Center can give you the vocabulary and a general framework of principles for good academic writing, so take advantage of the resources available! As the Tortoise would happily say, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Editor Commentary / Laura Zhang
A common question that may arise for freshmen after taking Writing Seminar is: when will I need to use concepts like motive and scholarly conversation again? Perhaps this question originates from the structured expectations of Writing Seminar, like how the student needs to use certain scholars to analyze their primary evidence, or how the motive needs to be phrased as a question in the introduction. Minh’s Junior Paper provides an answer to this post-Writing Seminar dilemma and exemplifies how motive and scholarly conversation can be used for independent work, but in a way that reimagines and makes these concepts his own.
Minh accomplishes many technical feats in this excerpt—he orients his reader to complex theories in International Relations, introduces competing perspectives in the existing literature, and carves out a space for his analysis in the conversation. In the first two paragraphs, Minh breaks down Nye’s concept of “soft power” in a succinct, uncomplicated manner, whilst hinting at the fact that this term has been contested within scholarly discourse. Minh then moves to describing the “general consensus” of soft power and contrasts it with China’s more “pragmatic approach” to soft power. This does two things: it acts as a literature review and hints at his scholarly and empirical motive. Not only is there a tension within scholars’ perceptions of China’s soft power, this tension arises from a Western/Global South perspective divide. Within this tension, Minh positions himself as the bridge—whilst he aligns himself with Nye’s conceptualization of soft power as excluding “military force,” he also views soft power as being interconnected with “economic influence,” also contextualizing the rising scholarly interest in BRI.
Freshmen—and students wishing for an example of how to develop their own method of interweaving motive within the scholarly conversation—can draw inspiration from Minh’s excerpt. His commentary also offers several gems of advice for an independent writing process: he begins with a topic he’s interested in, finds his motive before he starts developing his topic, and then begins to consider his unique contribution to the literature. His motive emerges in his text as organically as his writing process—a true reflection of his writing ideology of “slow and steady wins the race.” Motive and scholarly conversation do not have to look like they do in Writing Seminar—they can be reimagined, as Minh has done, in a way that serves the essay, instead of the essay serving them.
The following excerpt is from my midterm paper for my freshman seminar, FRS117: Tragedy and the Meaning of Life. There was no prompt for this assignment—the only restriction was that we had to write about a text we had read in class so far—so I opted to write about Romeo and Juliet. In this paper, I chose to interrogate why the language of Romeo and Juliet shifts between what I coined to be “conventional” (filled with familiar literary forms and tropes) and “authentic” rhetorical styles. I ultimately contend that a rhetoric of authenticity necessarily reflects the tragic complexities of reality, a reality that cannot be neatly categorized by convention, borrowing Victor Shklovsky’s concept of “defamiliarization” to help me argue that moments of syntactical authenticity heighten the play’s tragic gravitas.
Excerpt
Conventional rhetoric is not just unable to represent reality, but it fails to represent tragedy, which for Shakespeare is an integral part of reality. This idea crystallizes in the latter half of the play, when the play’s truly tragic moments occur. In particular, Lord Capulet’s reaction to Juliet’s ‘death’ is stiff and forced: he says “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field,”1 and a few lines down, continues “Flower as she was, deflowerèd by him. / Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir.”2 Here, the consecutive accumulation of conventional floral imagery and filial metaphors makes Capulet’s expression of grief appear contrived. In fact, imagery associating dead brides with flowers can even be found within numerous epitaphs in the Greek Anthology, a Renaissance record of Hellenic poetry.3 Capulet’s mourning, modeled on the Classics, is therefore derivative. When read in the context of the rest of the scene, the detachment and automaticity of Capulet’s dialogue becomes even more apparent. Just before Capulet delivers his lines, the Nurse exclaims “She’s dead, deceased, she’s dead, alack the day!”4 which is mirrored by Lady Capulet’s exclamation, “Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!”5 Unlike Capulet, the reactions of the Nurse and Lady Capulet more authentically convey the grief of losing a child. While Capulet uses descriptive imagery, neither the Nurse nor Lady Capulet do so: for them, their sorrow and shock are unable to be adequately captured but for repeating the words “she’s dead”, an utterance that seems out of place in a play filled with poetic language, but an utterance that nonetheless feels like a natural expression of grief for the audience. In this context, Capulet’s turn to literary convention appears detached from the actual emotional consequences of the tragedy.
Accordingly, an authentic rhetoric, which is divested of convention, is better able to understand a world that is itself unconventional; authenticity indeed heightens the audience’s ability to feel the tragic emotions of fear and pity because it enables the process of defamiliarization. In his essay ‘Art as Device,’ Russian Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky defines defamiliarization as the act of describing objects and experiences in novel, unfamiliar ways so that the audience can view these objects and experiences in a different light. Shklovsky refers to the Aristotelian notion that poetic language must have “something foreign, something outlandish about it.”6 To put it simply, conventional rhetoric produces an automatic effect on the audience; that is, when the audience hears a sonnet, they know the characters are deeply in love. When rhetoric is then authentic—meaning it lacks familiar literary conventions—the audience is confronted with tragedy in ways they have not experienced before in previous literature, and thus fear and pity are produced in new ways.
The defamiliarizing power of authentic rhetoric is epitomized by Juliet’s Act IV Scene 3 soliloquy. Juliet’s soliloquy can be read in contrast to Aristotle’s concept of dianoia (‘tragic language’), which Aristotle believed should include references and allusions, typically to Classical mythology.7 Devoid of these conventions, Juliet’s soliloquy instead uses defamiliarizing vivid imagery to express her troubled interiority. Unlike her father who uses borrowed Classical imagery in his mourning, Juliet portrays death brutally and viscerally. She fears being “stifled”8 in a place “where the bones / Of all my buried ancestors are packed,”9 presenting death as suffocating and asphyxiating. She then imagines waking up to “madly play with my forefathers’ joints, / And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud, / And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone / As with a club dash out my desp’rate brains?”,10 a series of grotesque images strung together by verbs so tactile that the audience can almost physically feel the violence. This soliloquy, moreover, is formally defamiliarizing, as Juliet frequently breaks the usually stable flow of iambic pentameter. For example, the three-syllable long line “Come, vial,”11 beginning with the forceful imperative, reflects Juliet’s unwavering and resolute mindset. More importantly, it is the lack of the other seven syllables that makes this line effective: by giving the audience time to pause, Shakespeare heightens the tragic solemnity of this scene. Breaks in form continue throughout the soliloquy to reflect Juliet’s conflicted line of thought, such as the line “No, no! This shall forbid it. Lie thou there.”12 Here, the caesuras disrupt the rhythm of the soliloquy, underscoring Juliet’s inner turmoil as she alternates between her fear of death and commitment to the Friar’s plan. The soliloquy concludes with the line “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here’s drink. I drink to thee,”13 in which the rapid stream of syllables in this fifteen-syllable line amplifies the intensity of the tragic moment.
Footnotes
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. Peter Holland (Penguin Books, 2016), 4.5.28-29. ↩︎
Gayle Whittier, “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752. ↩︎
Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1—14. In this essay, Shklovsky coins the idea of “defamiliarization,” the idea that poetry should describe familiar things in unfamiliar ways such that the reader can gain a newfound appreciation or perspective. This will be expanded on further in the essay. ↩︎
Aristotle, “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE),” in Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, ed. Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard (Methuen Drama, 2019), 23. Aristotle argues that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse “pity and fear” in the audience through the process of imitation. ↩︎
Aristotle. “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE).” In Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, edited by Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard. Methuen Drama, 2019.
Brown, Carolyn E. “Juliet’s Taming of Romeo.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 2 (1996): 333—55. https://doi.org/10.2307/450952.
Petrarch, Francesco. Sonnets and Shorter Poems. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Peter Holland. Penguin Books, 2016.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1—14. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
Whittier, Gayle. “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752.
Author Commentary / Nikki Han
Attempting to write a paper about a play that has centuries worth of scholarly discourse was an incredibly daunting task. I had no idea where to begin, so I began by going back through the notes I had typed in class. There were two key ideas that stuck out to me in my notes: the first was a brief mention of Petrarch’s influence on Romeo’s language; the second was an observation that Juliet’s soliloquy was devoid of references and allusions. These two ideas, I realized, seemed to be in tension with each other. Consequently, I went back through the play and realized I could use a framework of “convention” and “authenticity” (though I had not yet come up with these specific words to frame my thoughts) to understand the language of the entire play. Arriving at the thesis, however, was still a difficult process. I brainstormed and mind-mapped, drafted and redrafted thesis statements, until I finally arrived at a thesis that actually convinced me. Along the way, I decided to use Victor Schlovsky’s theory of “defamiliarization,” which I had encountered back in high school, as I found that “defamiliarization” could help explain the effect of “authentic” rhetoric: convention is familiar, and authenticity is (sometimes) unfamiliar.
My thesis hinges on careful textual analysis, so doing an effective close reading of Shakespeare’s language was integral to my piece. In order to argue my thesis, I had to prove multiple things: firstly, that the play’s language does actually fluctuate between conventional and authentic; secondly, that Shakespeare’s contrasting use of conventional and authentic rhetoric reflects his specific, tragic vision of the world; and thirdly, that moments of authenticity heighten the play’s tragic gravitas. To do so, I moved between analyzing individual words, assessing meter, and examining the very structure of the tragedy. I also completed additional research to help me understand when Shakespeare invoked other literary traditions and authors. Doing this close reading helped uncover an entire world of meaning that lay beneath the highly wrought text. Juliet famously says “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet”—an adage that illuminates the gap between language and lived experiences—but when analyzing literature, a “rose” is always called a “rose” for a reason.
Editor Commentary / Annie Kim
College-level writing can seem daunting, especially when your chosen topic is a text that has been studied and commented upon for hundreds of years. Nikki’s impressive paper, which is even more so because it was written for an FRS course, trusts in her own reading of a text instead of excessively historicizing Early Modern English. She critically examines the use of classical allusions and literary tropes in the expression of love and grief and incorporates a concept from high school to form her motive, just like the Gaipa moves we often discuss in Writing Seminar. With her paper, Nikki proves that college-level writing is not an unreachable goal but simply a small step up from what we can all achieve with practice.
We worked on maintaining the close focus of her argument by avoiding defaulting to the general argument that hyperbole creates a sense of contrivance. This excerpt, taken from the end of Nikki’s paper, demonstrates her eloquent and concise orienting which is done throughout her paper, as when she introduces “defamiliarization” and “dianoia,” which she uses to support her analysis of textual evidence. Nikki’s thesis is clearly stated at various appropriate points — “…an authentic form of rhetoric, defined by its lack of literary influences and occasional breaking of meter, is more effectively able to represent the complex tragedies of reality…” and “through the process of defamiliarization, a rhetoric of authenticity is able to generate the greatest tragic effect…” — shows the amount of thought she put into its formulation.
This paper systematizes and applies Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to the Nicaraguan Revolution, exploring how hegemonic systems suppress dissent and how movements transition into violent resistance. In this excerpt, I examine the nuances of Gramsci’s framework of hegemony and revolutionary strategy, focusing on the dynamics of consent, coercion, and the wars of position and maneuver. Furthermore, I explore the concept of organic crisis, where structural failures expose contradictions in ruling ideology, providing the grounds for revolution to occur.
Excerpt
Hegemony functions through the dual process of 1) generating a normative cultural order that secures consent for the system’s rule, alongside the 2) traditional mechanisms of coercion that manifest through an array of repressive repertoires.1 This consent is rooted in the establishment and maintenance of institutional power, through means of education, media, religion, and other networks. Through these institutions, the prevailing hegemonic power establishes the perception that its rule is at least the only choice or, at best, the moral imperative. This duality is well paralleled by the relative nature of repression and concession.2 Regimes employ repressive tactics to engage in coercion, in addition to, while less directly related, concessions to strengthen mass consent to their rule. It is important to note that repression manifests as direct, often violent actions aimed at the suppression of oppositional ideology, while coercion is a broader concept that can include further subtle mechanisms, like legal and economic tactics, that strengthen dominance. The hegemonic power combines these tactics to limit accessible political opportunities and close potential institutional gateways that movements depend on for success.3
The Gramscian response to this system is a subsequent counter-hegemonic framework. As hegemony is described as dependent on a constructed culture that affirms the rule of the elite, counter-hegemony proceeds by the development of a competing worldview that challenges their legitimacy.4 This process of building an alternative ideology intends on exposing the inherent contradictions of the ruling classes dominance that is preserved through manufactured consent. Thus, through the mobilization of existing like-minded movements, counter-hegemonic tactics engage with cultural institutions in an attempt to reshape the narrative of society, primarily through means of grassroots efforts. It is important to recognize the relevance of the framing of these efforts in a way that strategically appeals to the subjective perceptions of the masses, with the goal of ideologically converting as many people as possible through emotional appeals.56
This struggle is well articulated by Gramsci’s relative frameworks for revolutionary strategy—the wars of position and maneuver.7 The war of position is characterized by a long-term struggle against the oppressing class, methodologically challenging its cultural and ideological dominance. In this case, like-minded groups network in a way that focuses on the genesis and cultivation of counter-hegemonic institutions within civil society, using diverse repertoires from protest to education and media in order to slowly erode the prevailing ideologies legitimacy.89 The war of maneuver, however, takes on a more conflict-oriented approach directly confronting the hegemonic system — often through physical struggle.
To further delineate the two revolutionary tactics, it is important to clarify: the war of position involves a struggle “within and against” the ruling system,10 while the war of maneuver is that of explicit conflict with the government. Depending on how we interpret this, movements with revolutionary aims theoretically need not engage in a war of maneuver if the war of position is successful enough in the erosion of this established hegemonic consent and mobilizes the population effectively. For example, Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle against British colonial rule highlights how, under the right conditions, the war of position can be effective at producing the intended changes of a movement.11 In this case, the British Empire’s post-World War II decline and its inability to readily engage in coercive action allowed Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance to prevail with the absence of a war of maneuver. However, this process can easily collapse into violence through excessive and increasingly indiscriminate violence perpetrated by the prevailing regime.12 In cases such as the Nicaraguan Revolution, where the Somoza regime’s manufactured consent had not been extensively enough eroded and coercive control was still well maintained, a war of maneuver was an inevitable necessity for systemic change. The transition between these two phases of conflict, the wars of position and maneuver, can be well conceptualized in what Gramsci refers to as an organic crisis.13 This generalized term characterizes the point in which something “organically,” or naturally occurs that exposes the underlying contradictions within the ruling ideology. This crisis arises through a combination of economic, political, and social factors that strain the present system, like widespread poverty in the case of the Nicaraguan Revolution, or through other more external factors such as foreign affairs or natural disaster. Gramsci’s emphasis on the organic nature of these events both breaks from and synergizes with the structuralist theories of revolution,14 which assert that revolutions are not deliberately generated but rather solely the byproduct of structural conditions over time. By framing crises as contingent, he acknowledges the pivotal role of revolutionary agency in the outcomes of movements, while still accepting certain structural culminations in the genesis of political opportunity. This emphasis on the organic nature of events involving movements allows us to critically conceptualize the forces at play in the pivotal points that shape the evolution of revolutionary struggles.
Footnotes
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 207, 242. ↩︎
Karen Rassler, “Concessions, Repression, and Political Protest in the Iranian Revolution,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 1 (1996): 132—136, 144—146. ↩︎
Herbert Kitschelt, “Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Activism in Four Democracies,” British Journal of Political Science 16, no. 1 (1986): 57—60, 62—64. ↩︎
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 210-211. ↩︎
Charles Kurzman, “Structural Opportunity and Perceived Opportunity in Social-Movement Theory: The Iranian Revolution of 1979,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 1 (1996): 153—156. ↩︎
James M. Jasper, “Recruiting Intimates, Recruiting Strangers: Building the Contemporary Animal Rights Movement,” in Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties, ed. Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 66—70. ↩︎
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 238-239. ↩︎
Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758—1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 40—45. ↩︎
Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (New York: The New Press, 2012), 1—6, 54—56. ↩︎
Karatani, “War of Maneuver vs. War of Position.” ↩︎
Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 146—150, 172—174. ↩︎
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 210-211. ↩︎
Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 100—102, 110—112. ↩︎
Works Cited
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Jasper, James M. 1999. “Recruiting Intimates, Recruiting Strangers: Building the Contemporary Animal Rights Movement.” In Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties, edited by Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson, 65—82. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Karatani, Kojin. n.d. “War of Maneuver vs. War of Position.” P2P Foundation. https://p2pfoundation.net/war-of-maneuver-vs-war-of-position.
Kitschelt, Herbert. 1986. “Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Activism in Four Democracies.” British Journal of Political Science 16 (1): 57—85.
Kurzman, Charles. 1996. “Structural Opportunity and Perceived Opportunity in Social- Movement Theory: The Iranian Revolution of 1979.” American Sociological Review 61(1): 153—70.
Rassler, Karen. 1996. “Concessions, Repression, and Political Protest in the Iranian Revolution.” American Sociological Review 61 (1): 132—52.
Sharp, Gene. 1994. From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. Cambridge: The Albert Einstein Institution.
Skocpol, Theda. 1994. Social Revolutions in the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles. 1995. Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758—1834. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Author Commentary / Aeden Fraley
The course that I wrote this paper for, Social Movements and Revolutions, briefly mentioned Gramscian analysis as one of the less commonly used theories for conceiving of the role of culture in mobilization. However, Gramsci’s conceptualization of the synthesization of a false consciousness in deeply entrenched hegemonic systems piqued my interest, so I decided to inquire further with my term paper. Thus, writing the paper became a balance of carefully articulating the theoretical framework while also applying it to a specific historical event—the two major sections mirror each other in structure, first outlining the theory and then in the same order working through the case itself.
The research portion of the paper was somewhat multifaceted, with the course itself having already distilled most of the academic literature on social movement theory. However, when it came to Gramsci’s thought, it was much more difficult to parse through his noticeably more difficult Prison Notebooks. To achieve the intended structure of the paper, I chose to first outline a framework for Gramsci’s key concepts, while then logically mapping them onto the historical events of the Nicaraguan Revolution, outlining a progression from nonviolent resistance into armed conflict. The construction of this framework itself was very rewarding, alongside its connection to the case itself. It was interesting to see exactly how the individual concepts within Gramscian hegemonic theory functioned, from the dual use of consent and coercion to the wars of maneuver and position divided by organic crisis, specifically in the context of the Somoza regime’s chronic repression of the struggling Nicaraguan populous.
This excerpt from the essay represents arguably the most important movement within the overall argument, as it outlines the vital theoretical framework and provides the grounds for mapping itself onto the historical event. The writing itself required careful attention to and revision of rigorous definitions of the theoretical concepts. As I outlined them in order, the following analysis in which they were applied manifested through a similar logic (e.g. the war of position is first established while then building into the war of maneuver).
While the essay was a great experience in developing my writing skills, I found it very difficult at times to maintain the scope of the argument, as well as the balance between explanation and analysis. I had to amend the topic a few times to limit the scope for a paper of this length, which helped me learn to take executive steps to ensure the final product was not convoluted or incapable of fully grasping the topics I introduced. For example, there were other concepts both in the current excerpt (Gramsci’s organic intellectuals), and in the analysis (the role of foreign influence) that I had to exclude, as well as the overall focus on the logic of transitioning into violence from nonviolence. These choices helped me improve the analysis of my paper, as well as provided insight into proper writing technique.
Editor Commentary / Mya Koffie
One of the most prevalent characteristics of strong academic writing produced in a collegiate setting is the ability to synthesize theories that are not one’s own, apply those theories to a relevant or sensible situation previously not considered by the original theorists, and use information from the selected situation to extend or enrich the selected theory. Aedan’s use of this “inventive intervention” process in his piece on the Nicaraguan Revolution exemplifies deft scholarship. Theories rooted in political science, such as Gramsci’s theory on hegemony that is explored then expanded in Aedan’s except, are often extremely complicated and require careful orienting. Aedan’s orderly illumination of dual processes—consent as it exists with coercion, position as it diverges from maneuver—breaks complex political ideas into understandable classifications and applies those classifications to real-world events with clear impacts.
It proves critical to insert ourselves into a field or attempt to contribute meaningfully within it only once we ourselves have a firm grasp on the operating frameworks that underpin foundational field theories. Yet, the writer’s role is seldom finished at the point at which they conceptualize existing frameworks correctly for themselves. The act of parsing out details and information in a way that makes sense of niche field understandings and theories for the benefit of a more general audience is paramount when making creative interventions as an academic writer.
In this excerpt, the context, history, and theoretical underpinnings of social movements and political science cannot be left unaddressed even as Aedan intends to contend primarily with the specific situation of the Nicaraguan Revolution. One of the most important practices for writers is to resist in certain ways as they delineate a circumstance or historical instance about which they are passionate. Here, in order to make a creative scholarly contribution, Aedan successfully resists the urge to unpack the Nicaraguan Revolution and launch into his main argumentative ‘cogs’ until after the metaphorical machine’s wiring is all set up. How is hegemony understood within the field? What types of wars might be classified as wars of position versus wars of maneuver? These are issues of categorization that Aedan effectively addresses before he asserts his own ideas, having given himself a strong, clear conceptual basis on which to stand.
In this excerpt, I set up the scholarly conversation about physicians’ adoption of obstetric anesthesia in the late 19th century. I aim to highlight different historical camps and to reveal a question overlooked by historians. I am curious not only about how obstetric anesthesia came to be accepted by doctors, but also about how and why obstetric anesthesia was framed as a racially-specific intervention. In this manner, I aim to demonstrate my motive for closer analysis of primary sources, specifically Dr. James Young Simpson’s writings about obstetric anesthesia.
Excerpt
In 1847, Scottish obstetrician Dr. James Young Simpson began advocating among his colleagues for the use of chloroform to treat parturient pain.1 At first, the overwhelmingly white and male American and European physician class was divided over whether to adopt this novel intervention.2 Scholars have noted that the normative debate among physicians about the use of obstetric anesthesia hinged on defining whether parturient pain was pathological or physiological.3 Historians have offered various theories about how obstetric anesthesia became widely accepted by the medical community in the late nineteenth century. According to historian Judith Walzer Leavitt, some physicians believed that labor pain was natural, and they worried about the side effects of anesthesia on the mother’s health.4 Walzer Leavitt argued that the pro-anesthesia faction prevailed largely due to parturient women’s grassroots advocacy for pain relief during labor.5 Historian Jacqueline Wolfe endorsed Walzer Leavitt’s stance with an important caveat: altruism was not physicians’ only motivation for giving women the anesthetics they desired. Rather, physicians from America and Great Britain shared their nations’ worries about the declining birth rate among white women.6 According to Wolfe, nineteenth-century physicians set aside their concerns about the safety and efficacy of obstetric anesthesia in favor of addressing this social problem; by making birth less painful for white women, they could persuade these women to have more children.7 However, Wolfe did not detail exactly how physicians managed to label obstetric anesthesia as an intervention suitable for white women only, leaving this an open question in the scholarship. Examining the writings of Dr. James Simpson, the first obstetrician to promote chloroform as obstetric anesthesia, reveals that he justified its use by relying on medical myths that Black women were primitive and insensitive to pain in order to label parturient pain as a disease unique to white, civilized women. Employing this racialized logic allowed physicians to respond to concerns about white population decline while reinforcing their professional authority and upholding social norms regarding gender and race.While Walzer Leavitt and Wolfe highlighted the legitimate dispute about the safety of obstetric anesthesia alongside social pressures which spurred physicians’ acceptance of this intervention, they overlooked the implications of the obstetric anesthesia debate for the professional status of physician-obstetricians themselves. At the turn of the 19th century in Europe and America, male obstetricians were still struggling to usurp female midwives as the dominant professional authority on childbirth.8 If obstetricians established labor pain as a prevalent disease that could only be treated using anesthetics—inaccessible to midwives—then these physicians could better contest the inclusion of midwives in the birthing process due to their lack of specialized knowledge about pathology and their dearth of necessary medical supplies. However, pathologizing labor pain also risked undermining male physicians’ professional authority as it potentially posed a radical challenge to nineteenth-century gender roles in Europe and America. In her analysis of 19th century folklore about labor pain, Miriam Rich specified that the pains of childbirth helped justify mothers’ assignments as stewards of domesticity; labor pain was thought to render mothers too fragile to function outside the home.9 Thus, many physicians and common people reasoned that the experience of labor pain naturally predisposed women to serve as ideal family caretakers.10 Accepting parturient pain as a ubiquitous disease of childbirth could have weakened this convenient justification for women’s relegation to the domestic sphere. Because the physician class was nearly exclusively male, they benefited from the myth that women’s reproductive capabilities made them naturally suited for work inside the home and, implicitly, unsuitable to compete in the medical marketplace as a physician. Thus, male physicians were tasked with negotiating a professional tradeoff: rejecting labor pain as a disease could provide midwives an opening to regain control over the birthing chamber, but accepting this pathological classification risked destabilizing patriarchal values. Simpson cleverly resolved this dilemma by framing labor pain as a disease of civilization to which white women were uniquely susceptible. Under this definition, although the effects of labor pain were harmful to a white woman’s health, the existence of this pain signaled their pre-existing refinement, fragility, and sensitivity as byproducts of civilization, qualities that made a mother well-suited for the delicate work of nurturing children. By framing labor pain as a race-specific disease and consequence of civilization, physicians justified the intervention of obstetric anesthesia for their target audience of white, upper-class women while maintaining the overall cultural association between labor pain and domesticity alongside whiteness and advanced civilization.
Footnotes
Jacqueline Wolfe, Deliver Me From Pain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 24. ↩︎
Wolfe, Deliver Me From Pain, 28; Miriam Rich, “The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race, Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine,” Gender & History 28, no. 1 (2016): 68. https://doi-org.ezproxy.princeton.edu/10.1111/1468-0424.12177. ↩︎
Judith Wazler Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 117. ↩︎
Walzer Leavitt, Judith. Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Wolfe, Jacqueline. Deliver Me From Pain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Author Commentary / Sonia Cherian
I wrote this essay as my final paper for HIS 390: Formations of Knowledge: Historical Approaches to Science, Technology, and Medicine. I enjoyed learning about the philosophy of science as a tool to analyze values and epistemic virtues embedded in different practices of science. This class showed me that even though science is seen as an “objective” endeavor, scientific practice and findings can be shaped by a host of social and cultural factors which impact definitions of health and sickness. This notion that disease categories are historically and culturally contingent was central to my exploration of the development of obstetric anesthesia. When I began researching the history of obstetric anesthesia, I expected to uncover a story of empowerment: how could offering women the option to reduce childbirth pain be anything but a triumph for obstetricians and their patients? However, assessing the scholarly conversation and analyzing physicians’ primary source writings about obstetric anesthesia led me to a different conclusion. I realized that physicians relied on, and even reinforced, racist notions about which women experience pain in order to label obstetric anesthesia as a racially-specific intervention. Through my historical analysis, I discovered that this racialized definition may have appealed to the white, male 19th-century physician class as they sought to elevate their professional status while upholding gender norms. During my writing process, I first combed secondary sources about the development of obstetric anesthesia: this helped me identify my key primary sources, writings by James Young Simpson. However, only during my own close reading of the source did I uncover his racialized descriptions of parturient pain that had gone unmentioned in the secondary sources. I spent lots of time going back and forth between the secondary and primary sources to make sure that I had truly identified a “gap” in the scholarship, and to equip myself with historical context to better evaluate Simpson’s motives. Writing my introduction with the goal of laying out my motive helped me solidify my scholarly conversation and thesis.
Editor Commentary / Katja Kochvar
Sonia and I are both students in the sciences, most familiar with concise and precise scientific writing. While the course Sonia wrote this essay for may have “science” in the name, the focus was placed squarely on historical analysis. Historical analysis is necessarily a process of imagination. It forces us to reconcile the facts, statistics, and accounts from primary sources with perspectives, ideas and interpretations from secondary sources. In analyzing history, we must not only decipher what happened, but question who tells the story of what happened and what their motivations might be.
Sonia embraces this challenge by evaluating historical analyses from multiple secondary sources. She first lays out a historian’s interpretation of why parturient anesthesia was widely adopted by the medical community, namely that “grassroots advocacy for pain relief during labor” was the main driver. She juxtaposes this claim with an account from another historian, who instead proposes that “the declining birth rate among white women” was a broader concern and motivation for adopting anesthetics. Based on this interpretation, Sonia cleverly identifies a gap in the literature: how did concerns about white birth rates justify an intervention many physicians deemed unsafe and risky?
In answering this question, Sonia inserts herself in the past, fully immersing herself in the mind of a key physician, Dr. James Simpson, and the broader context of the era. This task requires immense creativity—it is no easy task to imagine the inner workings of a white male physician’s brain in the 1800s! Yet Sonia does not shy away from succinctly detailing the anxieties physicians felt about their precarious role as authorities on childbirth and defenders of patriarchal values. Her deep understanding of these concerns, paired with careful analysis of the primary source writings of Dr. James Simpson, allowed Sonia to follow the logic of physicians’ ultimate decision to adopt parturient anesthesia. What she finds is a story rooted in racist and sexist notions about who experiences pain and what treatment they are entitled to in a white supremacist society.
It is worth noting that the prompt for this paper was entirely open-ended; Sonia had the power, and burden, of choosing a topic of her own. While this task can be daunting for many students, Sonia allowed her own interests in medicine and careful reading of secondary sources to guide her to an unsolved scholarly puzzle. This essay can hopefully encourage other students facing big, broad prompts to follow your feelings—of curiosity, interest, indignation—to an interesting thesis. It is this process of finding your unique voice that often leads to the most creative writing solutions.
This is an excerpt from my final paper for EEB329: Sensory Ecology. Students were prompted to design a “dream research project” related to sensory ecology and write a mock scientific research paper complete with abstract, body text, and figures. Inspired by a sighting from my freshman year, I decided to invent a study on green lacewing larvae, juvenile insects that carry miscellaneous debris on their backs.
Excerpt
Decorating is a widespread behavioral strategy in which organisms accumulate and retain exogenous materials such as shells, rock, algae, and carcasses on their exterior (Ruxton & Stevens, 2015; Tauber et al., 2014). The behavior appears among both aquatic and terrestrial taxa, prompting a plethora of hypotheses regarding its adaptive purpose (Ruxton & Stevens, 2015). In some cases, these decorations may serve as a form of masquerade, a camouflage tactic in which organisms resemble innocuous objects to prevent recognition by a potential predator or prey (Ruxton & Stevens, 2015; Skelhorn et al., 2010). Alternatively, organisms may use decoration to blend into the environment and avoid detection, a tactic called background matching (Ruxton & Stevens, 2015). Still other studies have found that chemical rather than visual manipulation affects the efficacy of the decorative shield (Ruxton & Stevens, 2015). Better understanding the evolutionary origins and adaptive value of this behavior would provide insight into the sensory tactics organisms use to fool predators and prey.
Caption: Fig 1. Trash-carrying chrysopid larvae walking on tree bark, side view. Material of trash packet identified by the Seek app as lichen. Photo by Jessica Wang, Princeton, NJ, December 2022.
While decorating has been well-studied in charismatic species such as the decorator crab, its application to insect larvae attracts less attention in modern ecology research (Ruxton & Stevens, 2015; Tauber et al., 2014). In this study, we examined decorating behavior in the insect family Chrysopidae, commonly known as green lacewings. More than half of the species in this family adopt the practice of decoration to conceal themselves from predators, cannibalistic conspecifics, and unsuspecting prey (Anderson et al., 2003; Mochizuki et al., 2006; Tauber et al., 2014).
Within the family, larvae adopt a variety of decoration tactics. Some are specialists, such as Chrysopa slossonae, which preys on the woolly alder aphid and disguises itself by covering itself with the waxy “wool” secreted by the aphids (Eisner et al., 1978). Some species exhibit phenotypic plasticity; Chrysopa quadripunctata, while typically naked, can adopt the wax disguise of the wooly alder aphid just as well as C. slossonae (Milbrath et al., 1993, 1994). Other more generalist larvae simply cover themselves with an assortment of decorations, including plant particles, spider’s webs, lichen, insect parts, fungal spores, and even live snails (Fig. 1; Appendix Fig. A) (Melo et al., 2024; Smith, 1922; Tauber et al., 2014). The diversity of environmental debris used to construct this decorative “trash packet” has prompted the term “trash-carrying” to refer to Chrysopid larvae decorating behavior (Ruxton & Stevens, 2015).
By conducting predation trials of trash-carrying and artificially denuded larvae, past studies have shown that trash-carrying decreases predation (Anderson et al., 2003; Eisner et al., 1978; Ruxton & Stevens, 2015). However, no studies to date have addressed the gradations in trash packet size beyond the binary categories of “trash-carrying” and “denuded.” Moreover, the particular mechanisms of this anti-predator defense are not well understood. Researchers have hypothesized that trash packets might provide background matching or visual masquerade; physical protection by preventing predator mouthparts from reaching larvae; or chemical protection by signaling unpalatability (Anderson et al., 2003; Melo et al., 2024; Pérez-de La Fuente et al., 2012; Ruxton & Stevens, 2015).
This study investigated the components of visual and physical protection in the trash-carrying larvae of a specialist Chrysopid, Cereaochrysa lineaticornis. Larvae of this species construct their trash packets exclusively from trichomes on the undersides of sycamore tree leaves, taking on the appearance of “tiny ambulatory cotton wads” (Appendix Fig. B, Appendix Fig. C) (Eisner et al., 2002). Unlike other trash packets, the fluffy white trichome disguise of C. lineaticornis provides minimal background matching to sycamore trees; multiple researchers have called it “conspicuous” against the green leaves (Eisner et al., 2002; Smith, 1922; Tauber et al., 2014). The trichome arrangement also does not masquerade as a naturally-occurring object in the environment. This suggests that, contrary to expectation, the decorative trash packet of C. lineaticornis might have an adaptive function beyond visual masquerade and background matching. Past studies have recorded but not quantified instances of attempted attack on trash-carrying C. lineaticornis larvae by reduviid bugs, which were blocked by the trichome trash packet (Eisner et al., 2002). This observation points to physical protection, dependent on trash packet size, as the primary anti-predator mechanism of the C. lineaticornis trash-carrying behavior.
To investigate this, we first tested the ideal trash packet size preferred by larvae by presenting groups of denuded C. lineaticornis larvae with increasing quantities of trichomes. After a reloading period, we then measured the mass of the trash packets the larvae constructed. To assess the effectiveness of these trash packets as physical protection, the larvae were then exposed to predation by reduviid bug nymphs (Pselliopus latispina). From this, we evaluated predation probabilities across larvae with differing trash packet sizes.
In a second experiment to isolate and evaluate the visual effects of the trash packet, we provided groups of denuded larvae with trichomes stained different colors. We then repeated predation trials with these colorfully-adorned larvae to determine if the cryptic appearance of the trash packets was significant to anti-predator defense.
We hypothesized that physical protection would be the most significant component of the anti-predator defense mechanism. Based on this, we expected that increasing trash packet size, measured by mass, would correspond with the lowest predation rates and that color of trichomes in the trash packet would have no significant effect on anti-predator defense.
Bibliography
Anderson, K. L., Seymour, J. E., & Rowe, R. (2003). Influence of a dorsal trash‐package on interactions between larvae of Mallada signata (Schneider) (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae). Australian Journal of Entomology, 42(4), 363—366. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-6055.2003.00373.x
Eisner, T., Carrel, J. E., Tassel, E. V., Hoebeke, E. R., & Eisner, M. (2002). Construction of a defensive trash packet from sycamore leaf trichomes by a Chrysopid larvae (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae). Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington, 102(2), 437—446.
Eisner, T., Hicks, K., Eisner, M., & Robson, D. S. (1978). “Wolf-in-Sheep’s-Clothing” Strategy of a Predaceous Insect Larva. Science, 199(4330), 790—794. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.199.4330.790
Melo, T. F. D. O. R., Dos Reis, J. B. A., Pujol-Luz, J. R., De Souza Queiroz Júnior, C., Pinho, D. B., & Schirmer, S. C. (2024). Revealing a new possible camouflage strategy: Use of fungal spores in the “trash package” of Chrysopidae larvae. Symbiosis, 94(1), 65—70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13199-024-01014-1
Milbrath, L. R., Tauber, M. J., & Tauber, C. A. (1993). Prey Specificity in Chrysopa: An Interspecific Comparison of Larval Feeding and Defensive Behavior. Ecology, 74(5), 1384—1393. https://doi.org/10.2307/1940068
Milbrath, L. R., Tauber, M. J., & Tauber, C. A. (1994). Larval behavior of predacious sister-species: Orientation, molting site, and survival in Chrysopa. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 35, 85—90.
Mochizuki, A., Naka, H., Hamasaki, K., & Mitsunaga, T. (2006). Larval Cannibalism and Intraguild Predation Between the Introduced Green Lacewing, Chrysoperla carnea, and the Indigenous Trash- Carrying Green Lacewing, Mallada desjardinsi (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae), as a Case Study of Potential Nontarget Effect Assessment. Environmental Entomology, 35(5), 1298—1303.
Pérez-de La Fuente, R., Delclòs, X., Peñalver, E., Speranza, M., Wierzchos, J., Ascaso, C., & Engel, M. S. (2012). Early evolution and ecology of camouflage in insects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(52), 21414—21419. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1213775110
Ruxton, G. D., & Stevens, M. (2015). The evolutionary ecology of decorating behaviour. Biology Letters, 11(6), 20150325. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0325
Author Commentary / Jessica Wang
I initially chose to research Chrysopid larvae because I thought they were amusing. These little insects walk around looking like clumps of lichen, dirt, and fluff for protection, and I wanted to learn more. Beyond my personal motive, however, I found that there was a real mystery in existing research about the way these larvae collected and used their so-called trash packets.
The Writing Center lexicon helped me refine this into my scholarly motive: in my case, a scientific puzzle or mystery with conflicting published hypotheses. Why do the larvae carry trash packets? What function do they serve? How exactly do they prevent predation? In the words of the Motivating Moves handout, “We can learn about a larger phenomenon by studying this smaller one.”
We’re often taught to recognize and apply concepts like orienting, literature review, and motive in the context of humanities literature, but I’ve found that I can identify the same components in scientific research papers if I look closely enough. They’re often embedded in the Abstract or Introduction, with signposting phrases like “poorly understood,” “remains uncertain,” or “little is known about….” With these words, researchers set up an open or unanswered question—the gap in past research that justifies their study.
It is this phrasing and style that I tried to mimic in the introduction of my paper. While I begin by orienting the reader to decorating behavior and the Chrysopidae family, I also frame the limitations and gaps in existing research. I hope that this example helps students identify and develop scholarly motive in their own and others’ scientific research papers.
Editor Commentary / Cindy Lei
What is the relationship between research and writing?
Everyone at Princeton is required to complete some form of ”research” or “original work” as a part of the curriculum. For some fields, particularly in STEM, it can be easy to believe that the “research” is separate from reading literature or writing the actual paper. As a counterexample, I put forward this excellent introduction from Jessica’s imagined study on Chrysopidae larvae. Shockingly, this was purely a writing exercise, with no actual experiment run. Jessica shows us in a tangible way how principles of writing can be applied to design a research project, and then to communicate its scientific significance.
A good place to start is always motive. Jessica masterfully layers motives, taking us from the broad to the narrow, and back again. We first start with the key term decorating, “a widespread behavioral strategy” used by many organisms, and are quickly shown how much, and then how little, we know about it. Jessica invokes two major gaps in the scientific literature: most decorating strategies are assumed to function visually, and less charismatic species such as insects are understudied. Essentially, Jessica is saying that there is a lot that we don’t know about deceptive/defensive sensory tactics used in nature.
Alright, we have a potential scientific impact in the form of a scholarly motive. But how do we accomplish this? Jessica then introduces us to her textual motive—the existence of this little bug that paradoxically wears a coat of white fluff while living on a green leaf. This textual motive put together with the scholarly motive forms a research aim/goal, but it also motivates the methodologies (how to collect evidence and how to analyze it) and primary sources (what data to collect) to be employed. If we are curious about the mismatch in the color, it makes sense to do an experiment where we change the color of the bug’s fluff. And if we wonder what the point of the fluff is, it makes sense to measure something like larvae survival rate.
In a way, the introduction for a scientific study is often a miniature essay: it is an argument for the hypothesis. An invitation to make a wager on something small (whether the larvae will be eaten) that has much larger implications for the field (perhaps we ought to re-examine other instances of decorating and investigate how exactly it helps the organism). This is a paper that would bring value to more than just the bug specialists. Even better, thoughtful orienting is interspersed throughout that allows non-specialists to follow along, supporting the other elements of the paper.
If we see writing as more than just the act of putting pen to paper, but also an active process of organizing thought and communicating, then research must begin and end with writing. Writing is how we formulate the questions we seek to answer in our research, as well as how we interpret the answers we find.
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