A Projection on Paper… Essay?

I wrote a rather alternative paper for my Argumentation and Advocacy class. It would seem the teacher liked it because I managed an “A” for the course. I’d like to post it here. For the funny/creative stuff, see the intro, conclusion and the text and analysis. If you’d like some somewhat reliable information on spheres of argumentation, read the spheres section. I put the spheres section at the end even though it came first in the paper, because it’s far less interesting of a post (and looks worse therefore when I have to use a “more” tag).

Introduction

            Imagine a world where we are forced to consume footwear against our will. That footwear, completely representational of culture and conquest, stuffed down our throat and forced into our gullets until we begin to walk and talk like those whose shoes we have eaten. That is what happened to a fictional old Peruvian man when the Spanish Government took over his Personal Sphere.

The Text

            “There was an old man from Peru,
Who dreamed he was eating his shoe.
He woke in the night with a terrible fright,
And found it was perfectly true.”

This poem is a symbolic representation of the struggle between the political sphere and the personal sphere, as well as being symbolic of the conquest and revolutions that humans embrace in order to maintain their control over the personal sphere. The shoe is representative of walking, which is how the human race has historically spread from one region of the world to the next and sought conquest, and of culture, because the shoes of a culture vary from one to the next so distinctly. Consuming a shoe is to become like the ones it belonged to. By mentioning Peru, the poem references the revolutions in Peru as well as control from other countries during their revolution-heavy timeline. This is further supported by mention of consuming shoes, as Spanish cloth shoes and Japanese sandals would be significantly easier to consume than the American sneaker, and these cultures have controlled Peru in both the recent and distant past. In finding it true that he was eating his shoe, the old man from Peru has essentially consumed the culture of Spain Continue reading →