By: J. Spruill
As facilitator of our blog, my hope is that this blog will develop a readership. I am hoping that parents, friends of students and the university, other English classes and so on will read and enjoy our blog and even learn from it. Because I fully expect people to come to it, I think, perhaps, people will want an explanation of our naughty looking title.
For the sake of honesty, yes, the similarity between our blog's title to a certain "bad" word is purposeful. Here is the history of that choice. In preparing to start our blog, we watched an interview with Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt, author of a philosophical and uber-academic book called On Bullshit. In his book, he looks at the ways in which pure bologna functions in our society. Dr. Frankfurt believes that its danger lies in its ambivalence toward the truth. The bologna artist doesn't care whether he lies or tells the truth. He cares only about what one feels about him - whether or not we will buy what he is selling.
As a class focused on analysis and rhetoric, we are interested in exposing the way people try to "sell" us things, concepts, ideas, and people. So, in short, we are interested in being bull#$@!% detectors.
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