COURSE INFO:
Dana Och
Seminar in Composition: Film
Undergraduate
Fall 2012
ASSIGNMENT:
For this assignment, you need to pick a quote from the assigned reading (you can choose from Lethem or the article on [nostalgia] – or even mix the two to create a new passage) and close read the passage by linking to images, videos, ads, voice clips, etc, that enact the process being discussed — and more importantly your application of the argument. The act of reading, as Lethem argues, is not passive; we make our mark on the text, albeit through dog-eared pages, pencil marks, or the examples that we conjure in our brains to suss out the meaning of the author’s words. In many ways, Lethem’s article is about the act of creation by artists, whether writers, remix artists, painters, sculptors academics, graffiti artists, etc. Here, think about yourself — with your act of reading — as an artist. Or, if you prefer, think of yourself as a curator, and your hyper-linked choices are your exhibits Regardless of which way you approach it, treat this assignment as a way of revealing your marks on the text, revealing how you processed and made your own the writer’s ideas. Furthermore, this is a close-reading of a passage (a skill that you will be constantly expected to perform), just through curated materials. Once you have created your hyperlinked text, please write the three page paper (that was pushed back) that works with and interacts with the ideas in the articles (you can expand your discussion of materials beyond just those that you linked). Please be sure also take this space to explain the choices that you made and how this makes a specific mark on the text.
Ex. : Animating Submission and Resistance in De Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life
“Although they use as their materials the vocabularies of established languages (those of television, newspapers, the supermarket or city planning), although they remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes (the temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic organizations of places, etc) these traverses remain heterogeneous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires“ (34).
So, how do you do this? First, you need to think though what types of images/clips you want to link. What will your argument be? What types of materials do you hope to find? How will they shift thoughout the passage to make your argument? Then start searching your images. Do this with care. Don’t just grab the first image that comes up for a search. Look and find the image that best captures what you are aiming to show at that moment. Type out your chosen passage (see below for some suggestions of sentences from Lethem; you need to make sure that you pick a difficult and complex sentence/s to work with), highlight a word, then go to the little globe on the second line (line starts “Abc” and the hyperlink button is the 8th icon in), and paste in the address of the item you are linking. Note: for a youtube clip, you can pick the exact moment to start. Click “Share” and a new window will open below that has a box you can click “start at ..” Also, from a Google Image search, you can right click and choose “open image in new tab,” do this and then grab just the image (or gif etc).
In so doing (“making strange”), in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights. (63)
Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own–artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control the second used of its artifacts. (63)
Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, exhoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, adn yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. (68)
For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the famerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. (68)