Figure Poetics

Lecture Notes — toward composing final project (see below)

Read / review: Apparatus shift: table/summary (Ulmer).
       —Note: I refer to concepts from this table throughout lecture and these notes.

Read: Ulmer’s blog, “Heuretics”
    —“browse around,” navigating the pages, tags, and/or categories; or in reverse-chrono.
    –Also see (models for layout/organization and navigation):
Ulmer’s current grad students’ projects, analysis of “blogging the disaster”.

Read (for Friday): MyStory project page (tentative; will finalize on Friday)

M 20-Apr     “Para-doxa studio” day. (praxis, poetics, troubleshooting)
    Due: Stage 1 of Project (see below)

W 22-Apr    Due: Final Project (complete) Due by: 9pm

Invention: Para-doxa

“The project is to learn to write with patterns that function more like music than like concepts.” (91)

“…bring directly into the invention process the metaphor for research that has been the unacknowledged support of a certain feeling of thought. What is this feeling–the one guiding the judgments upon which invention depends?” (169)

— Gregory L. Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention

M 13-Apr
Read / review: Apparatus shift: table/summary (Ulmer).

Read / review: excerpts from Ulmer about Mystory (PDF on e-learning).

Due: extra credit work for Response 6
        (e.g. response to classmate’s entry; analytic response to Slaughterhouse Five)

W 15-Apr      Vollman: “Red Hands” (3233-9)

Read: Ulmer’s blog, “Heuretics”
    —“browse around,” navigating the pages, tags, and/or categories; or in reverse-chrono.

Relevant / related (potential contrast/lesson?):

“Facebook fans do worse in exams.” (Leake and Warren) The Times 12-Apr 2009.

// “Does Facebook Lower Academic Performance? It’s Still Too Soon to Say.”
(Jefferey R. Young) Chronicle: Wired Campus. 13-Apr 2009

F 17-Apr     Spiegelman: excerpt from Maus (3091-3108
        & Optional — Carver: “Cathedral” (2828-38)
        Due: any remaining extra credit work (e.g. analysis of “blogging the disaster” project)

M 20-Apr     Due: Mystory Project

So It Goes

Note: CATTt page updated (04-Apr)

(Have you been keeping “inventory” from respective readings?
Likely need to update your CATTt-egories and poetics, from past two weeks.)

M 6-Apr Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five (through Chapter 5)    (George Carter)   W 8-Apr Slaughterhouse Five (Chapters 6-7)     (David Lewis)   F 10-Apr Slaughterhouse Five (Chapters 8-10)    (Carter Louv)     Due: Response 6 (updated)

Mystory Proposal

Project Proposal: Mystory

Post on your blog; flexible deadline — tentatively due Friday. However, contact me if you need to post yours later; I will reply in order received.

Reminder: blog entry for this week (due class-time Fri) should address one of the CATTt-egories (for “recipe”) from Anzaldua, Cisneros, Kingston, Silko, or Momaday. Be sure to discuss specific lesson derived from their poetics, whether formal (stylistic/composition) or conceptual (content).

Proposal Guidelines and Qs — see below.

Fallschirmjäger

15 January 2009
Method: Para-doxa

“para-doxa” // “paradox”

“para-” :
1) beyond; beside
2) guard against²

“paradox” (see multiple)

para-² 
“a combining form meaning “guard against,” occurring in loanwords from French, or, via French, from Italian: parachute; parasol
Origin: < F < It para, 3d sing. pres. of parare to prepare against, ward off”

 
 
     Q. potential figure: the Fallschirmjäger?

Even more specifically: these para-troopers were literally “beside” the Wehrmacht, some comprising the Fallschirm-Panzer-Division 1 Hermann Göring — Göring’s distinct (“private”) army.

Q. Obvious task, historical parallel: “guard against” the Luftwaffe (against the blitz; premises: London 1940-41) — but how to go beyond? How to re-deploy history toward unconventional expression of unique{affect, experience, identity}?
 
 

Never Before

“History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man — that’ll be history too someday.” (180)

“I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible.” (233)

M 16-Mar Roth: The Plot Against America Postscript; Chapters 1-5 (Saudia Ally & David Korman)       W 18-Mar Plot Against America Chapters 6-7 (Amanda Stipe)       F 20-Mar Plot Against America Chapters 8-9 (Kristin Zemina)     Response 5: Due M 23-Mar (updated)

 
 
 

Breaking (from? toward?)

 
 
During Spring Break…

Weekly blog entries not required (optional / extra credit toward participation).

More significant extra credit opportunity of an additional response
(see details below).

 
 

Blogging

By Monday 19-Jan, please create a blog and write first entry.

Create Blog

Support site

(Fri 23-Jan) Coincidence?
Nay, “Instructions” — we are attentive to noticing associations, towards insights within our on-going project.

See practical blogging instructions and content/method notes below.