There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes. Every individual sees a different world. The connection between people and society also has a different view in different eyes. As a writer, he/she will express his or her idea to society, describing how society displays in their eyes. The mission for their audiences is to acknowledge the writer's idea criticize the writer’s idea and apply the writer’s idea in their own life. In “Is This Kansas”, author Eula Biss describes the connection between herself and Iowa City. She found lots of negative parts of Iowa City society, especially the college boy of Iowa City. The central theme of this article is how society holds a different group of people to different standards. It is considerable to discuss the connection between the writers themselves and society and it’s also valuable to discuss how the audiences will reflect when they see these passages.
Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who lived in New York City. The main group of people she discussed in the article is the college student group. She depicts the University of Iowa as a picture in her article. 'The car crashes, the falls from balconies, the alcohol poisonings. The football game days, on which cars crept toward the stadium in long, slow lines and everyone wore black and gold. The empty plastic cups under bushes, the idle boys on decaying porches, the midnight pint-pong tournaments, the windows illuminated by neon beer signs” Eula Biss uses quick and short language to paint a scene of a normal party college night with a drink, chaos, and color of black and gold. From this opening, there is no difference between the University of Iowa and other universities.
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In “Is This Kansas” Eula Biss introduced her as a teacher who taught creative writing in New York City to elementary school and high school. She loves her job and she cares about how the students think about her teaching ability. From the readings, she said, 'I told them this as evidence that I had some teaching experience, to compensate for what I understood to be my grave under qualifications for my job as their instructor.” (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) After the friendly introduction, she seems annoyed by why her students care about her background and experience in New York rather than about her teaching skills. From the passage, her students asked her amount of impolite questions. 'They wanted to know where I had lived there, where I had worked, and if I had been scared. They wanted to know if men had harassed me.' (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) She feels like don't like students to ask questions like this. She also points out that her students in New York City had never asked questions like this. From this detail, she seems not involved in the teaching environment of Iowa city university. After that, she told to her students that men in New York City had harassed her, but the Iowa City frat boy harassed her more times than the men in New York City. She also said a street named Lucas Street is scarier than anywhere she had been in New York City because of the existence of the frat boys. She shared a personal experience about the Iowa City frat boy. “And this was before a drunk frat boy broke into my apartment two weekends in a row, the first-time wearing Mardi Gras beads and passing out just inside the front door, the second time becoming belligerent and refusing to leave until the police arrived.” (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) She talked about how the frat boy harassed her neighbor like dragged a couch and using it to barricade her neighbor's door. She can't understand the crazy behaviors that the frat boy did in Iowa City can be treated as normal behavior. That is one of the reasons that she feels a disconnect with the local society.
Another part for Eula Biss to describe society is from the last three passages of this reading. After a tornado goes through Iowa City, a wall of a Liquor store has been ripped off. Eula Biss describes the student’s reactions to the tornado as “And in the dark silence after the storm the streets filled with students carrying plastic cups of beer and digital cameras, wandering past the live wires and the gas leaks, and lighting cigarettes. Some students dragged a couch into the street and sat on it, while some others gathered around cases of beer in a parking lot.” (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) These details Eula described make the audiences feel emotion towards the students' actions as well as picture the iconic image of the students sitting back on the couch in part lot watching the destruction of the streets. On page 138, author Eula Biss describes another Hurricane Katrina touched in Louisiana. She said in her passage about how the Iowa City college student judged the looting of Louisiana after the Hurricane. 'Perhaps that is why I was shocked when I returned to find so many people on campus preoccupied not with the flooding of New Orleans but with the looting of New Orleans. My students, in particular, kept saying of the looting, ‘Well, that’s where I draw the line.’ What line that was, I did not ask. But I supposed it was the line between victim and villain.” (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) compare to the tornado in Iowa City, the picture of students drinking alcohol in the parking lot is more ironic and realistic. Students are hypocritical, they pointed out the wrongdoings New Orleans citizens did after Hurricane Katrina like looting, robberies, and other incidents, while they were doing the same thing themselves after the tornado. However, the newspaper in Iowa City did not treat this thing too seriously or try to protect the students on purpose. “The local newspapers reported the looting very cautiously. The Press-Citizen described it only as ‘small-scale looting’. The Gazette mentioned only that ‘some scattered reports, most unconfirmed, of looting were made.’” (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) This kind of unfairness leads the audiences to inquire the same question, why are college students pardoned for illegal activities, while racial minorities are persecuted for identical actions?
On page 138, Eula Biss mentioned the racism, sexism, and stereotypes in Iowa City College students. 'Because white Americans have tended, for hundreds of years now, to think of black Americans as either victims or villains- children or savages.' (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) “We were not talking about looting, we were talking about everything white Americans feared would be taken from us by black Americans. The metaphor did not end with looting, of course, because fear moves like floodwaters.” (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) She also mentioned on page 137, “Racism, I would discover during my first-semester teaching at Iowa, does not exist. At least not in Iowa. Not in the minds of the twenty-three tall, healthy, blond students to whim I was supposed to teach rhetoric.” (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) Eula Biss points out that she believes that her students criticize the wrong behavior of the citizens of New Orleans not just because the students believe these actions were morally wrong but because the citizens of New Orleans were mostly black. As she said on page 137, there is no racism in the college in Iowa City, but it's not because the students are all noble. It's because all of the students, the twenty-three students she teaches in class are all white. It is not the fault of the University of Iowa, because Iowa state is not the normal diverse state. Eula Biss states that the University of Iowa has a potential race problem. Most of the classes are made up of all-white students. they are coming from Iowa or Illinois, and most of them don't know or ignore the things such as the education gap or stereotypes, or sexism. They also don't touch racism because of the population composition of the university. This kind of ignorant and stereotype leads to unintentional, potential racism and sexism. For example, from page 137, “In the course of one of our discussions about the rhetoric of the gay-marriage controversy, several students agreed that it would be a good idea to send all of the gay people in America to one state, one largely unpopulated state, like North Dakota, where they could live together and send their children to schools that would be ‘separate but equal’.” (Eula Biss, Is This Kansas) This kind of potential racism and sexism don't lead the students to show their “Midwestern compassion” but they criticize the looting. They don’t care about sexism but love to use the separation to treat different gay people. The purely ignorant make college students full of bias and stereotypes.
In conclusion, 'Is this Kansas' gave audiences a good vision to consider the relationship between society and stereotypes, racism, and sexism. As a professor, Eula Biss is a better observer than college students themselves. She gave a critique to the middle American university, qualify the students, and consider the society with this stereotype which shows the audiences the connection between society and college students.
Works Cited
- Biss, Eula. 'Is This Kansas.' Notes from No Man's Land. N.p.: Graywolf, n.d.
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