Our Home-Grown Onion

Periodically Daisy puts out an issue of our home newspaper called the Animal Times. Today Clara, in a masterful stroke of procrastination, instituted a home-grown version of the satirical Onion. 

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"Student Turns in Handmade Pants in Lieu of Final Paper"

Student Clara P. shook the academic community this week when she turned in a pair of pants that she had made, instead of the final paper, in Dr. Janet Willoughby-Esperanza's "Introduction to Graduate Study," a seminar-style English class focusing on the films of 1964, primarily from the perspective of gender studies and psychoanalytic film theory. Willoughby-Esperanza described the wide-leg velveteen pants as "a brilliant, radical commentary on the interplay of masculinity and femininity in the oeuvres of these filmmakers."

Clara P. was distressed by Willoughby-Esperanza's interpretation of her pants, stating in an interview with the Pleasant View Pigeon that she had not intended to make any such statement by submitting the pants: "I just didn't want to write the essay. I kept putting it off until there wasn't time to finish the pants and the paper, so I decided to just hem the pants and turn them in instead of the paper." In an email addressing Clara P's objection, Willoughby-Esperanza explained that much of current literary critical theory rejects the idea that the meaning of a work is determined by the author or creator's intention, and stood by her original analysis of the pants' implications.