Aesthetics and Politics

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5. Response Paper #4: Finding Common Ground Between Aesthetics and Politics

DUE DATE Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Write a response paper based on an assigned reading and writing prompt. Your response paper must be at least 500 words and in MLA format (see attached link MLA formatting and documentation guidelines: https://daytonastate.edu/cwc/files/Codex-MLA8.pdf). The introduction of your response should contain the name of the work being summarized, the author, and the general situation surrounding the text to help contextualize what will follow. The body of your response should make a claim about an aspect of the text that you find interesting and worthy of discussion. Additionally, the body of your response must include support for your claims in the form quotations. Follow closely the work you are responding to and cite an occasional word, phrase, or passage from the original to give your reader a taste of the original. Your response should begin to draw conclusions, possibly explaining how your understanding of the original is important in a broader context.

Assigned Prompt:

Read “Regarding the Pain of Others” by Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others_Sontag.pdf

In her essay, Sontag claims that photographs are more powerful than words (para. 8). However, Sontag’s own narrative of atrocities follow her first claim but contradicts her second claim. Do you think stories, fictional or nonfictional, can attest just as powerfully to atrocity as photographs can? Why or why not? Provide examples of how photographs and/or words of today’s atrocities have an impact on people’s consciences and behavior. Cite evidence from Sontag to support your claims.

Answer preview

Finding common ground means the activity of reaching an agreement between the two different things. Aesthetics and politics are two different things, but they have a common ground when making political decisions. Aesthetic has been used in photographs to represent various scenes and to provide extra details about the scene. Therefore, political decisions can be easily affected by aesthetics because people tend to be carried by what they see in photographs. The article, Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, explains how photographs have influenced the people by capturing and keeping records of atrocities.(543 words)