Posting assignment #6 (due Sunday 3/27, 11:59 P.M.): Vince forgot his metacommentary!

This week, a little more BARPing (blog action role-playing)...

YOUR CHARACTER CARD

You are Vince Flynn.  You think like Vince Flynn, write like Vince Flynn, have the same personal/contextual history of Vince Flynn, and in every way are Vince Flynn as he is in real life.  Every way, that is, but one:  in this role-play, Vince Flynn is a student in our class, and he wrote the novel Pursuit of Honor as the text for his external writing #2.  (Yes, I know it's a little longer than 1000 words.  What can I say?  He's an overachiever.)  And in your comment, you are still Vince Flynn, "self-"commenting on another part of "your own" work.

YOUR CHALLENGE

Vince, you wrote an excellent text for your external writing #2.  I can see, from reading Pursuit of Honor, that you chose a strong truth (or set of related truths), spent a lot of time thinking about your audience, and made very smart and intentional rhetorical and historiographic choices to make your truth legitimate in the eyes of your readers.  I can also see very clearly the influence of Schmitt in your writing, along with traces of Strauss, Adorno, Weber, and a few others -- and, very clearly, you are writing against the way people like Vidal, Wolf, and Arendt understand history.

There's just one problem:  you forgot to write your metacommentary!

So, Vince, in this blog post you're going to write a metacommentary on Pursuit of Honor -- or at least the first few hundred pages of it.  Just to remind you, your metacommentary should explain:

1) what truth(s) you were trying to legitimate,
2) who your intended audience was,
3) how you tried to make your audience accept your truth(s) as legitimate (i.e., what rhetorical and historiographic strategies you chose), and
4) why you think those strategies were effective in legitimating your truth(s).

Be as specific as you can, as you answer these questions.  Make sure to include some relevant quotes/moments from Pursuit of Honor, as well as relevant material from at least one text from the past week (Schmitt, Strauss, Vidal, Wolf) and at least one other text from earlier in the class, in a way that furthers your arguments. 

(Note:  for a text the size of Pursuit of Honor, of course, there's a lot to write about.  So when you (individual part-of-Vince) write your post, make sure to read all the other posts that have come before yours, and make sure your own post adds something to the discussion, rather than just repeating things that others have said.  Different quotes, different interpretations, different theory, etc.)

Go to it, Mitch.  (Err...I mean, Vince.)