Word: essays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Essay...
Perhaps it was natural that Japanese artists should return the compliment; anyhow it was inevitable, once the traditional isolation of Japan was broken by the Emperor Meiji's decree, in 1868, that "knowledge shall be sought throughout the world." As J. Thomas Rimer points out in a fascinating catalog essay to this show, the teaching of Western art in Meiji Tokyo began in 1876 mainly as a "scientific" discipline. But before long the bizarre techniques of the mysterious Occident developed their own momentum for Japanese artists, and particularly the Western way of depicting forms by smearing a kind of sticky...
...discussion of the various methods whereby the crafty student attempts to show the grader that he knows a lot more than he actually does, the vague generality is the key device. A generality is a vague statement that means nothing by itself, but when placed in an essay on a specific subject might very well mean something to a grader. The true master of a generality is the man who can write a 10-page essay, which means nothing at all to him, and have it mean a great deal to anyone who reads it. The generality writer banks...
...check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take the typical example, "Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme." The question is asked, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived?" Our hero replies by opening his essay with "David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If this be the spirit of the age in which he lived then he was representative of it." This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea of what Hume really...
Just exactly what our equivocator's answer has to do with the original question is hard to say. The equivocator writes an essay about the point, but never on it. Consequently, the grader often mentally assumes that the right answer is known by the equivocator and marks the essay as an extension of the point rather than a complete irrelevance. The artful equivocation must imply the writer knows the right answer, but it must never get definite enough to eliminate any possibilities...