Daily Prep + Announcements -- Agen(t)cy Unit

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THURSDAY 2/1/18 -- Quiz #1, Discussion of Film, & Concept Review for the "Agency" Unit

Dear Folks: As promised, we will wrap up the unit and review any reading or concepts from the past few weeks on Thursday. Please do come prepared and bring your readings to class. We will place special emphasis on Heilbrun's "Writing a Woman's Life," given that we were unable to discuss her essay last week. We may also revisit Ong's essay and/or the September 11 Digital Archive case study, given that we also ran out of time to complete it last week. Beyond that, I will be very happy to review/revisit/discuss any lingering gray area as you bring some closure to our explorations of agency.

-Prof. Graban

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WEDNESDAY 1/31/18 -- Film Screening (Stranger than Fiction)

 Williams Building (WMS 013, basement "Common Room")
6:30-8:30 p.m.

For those who cannot make the screening due to class or work, you can stream the film via our e-Reserves folder in Canvas.

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THURSDAY 1/25/18 -- Discussion of Campbell and Heilbrun

Dear Folks: Here are some links we may visit during Thursday's discussion of Campbell and Heilbrun:

-Prof. Graban

post-class reflections:

Folks, I think you all did a great job of trying to piece together the connections between:
  • feminist criticism = a text-based critique, or a way of questioning textual practices so as to notice and then disrupt "normative" categories
  • episteme = that network of discursive practices (thoughts, concepts, cultural codes) as well as the rules governing how/whether those practices transform as well as the conditions defining knowledge
  • & author-function.

Here are the reasons you offered for why the "fictive" performance of Sojourner Truth's speech lasted so long -- at least, according to how Campbell asks us to consider it:
  • it created a collective audience
  • it was constructed for an audience that might have been more influenced by it in 1863
  • it fit epistemically with a sense of how the African-American abolitionist woman speaker was portrayed through discourse and literature in the latter half of the 19th century
  • it didn't "originate" only with Truth and wasn't a solitary act of authorship (Truth was essentially co-created)
  • it might have reflected other aspects of Truth's author-function, i.e., there may be other published versions of Truth's discourse reported elsewhere that this was similar to
  • it was delivered through repeat performances, and perhaps got more "interpretable" each time it is performed
  • each version of it was like a negotiation of the event all over again
  • it became the principal historical agent
  • the fictive version might have captured an ethos that was important for abolition in 1863
  • the stereotypes "gave the text a special force" (14)
  • it lasted because we became historical agents (where "we" includes Truth, Gage, Campbell, the newspaper editor, Truth's actual audience in 1851, Gage's intended audience in 1863, and perhaps us today in 2018).

My sense is that we have a slightly shifted way to define "agency": rather than a power that is given or taken away, it may be more reciprocal and active, compromised and negotiated over time. Maybe agency is not only acting on something but also reflecting on how something gets acted on.


-Prof. G

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TUESDAY 1/23/18 -- Discussion of Ong

Dear Folks: In preparation for our discussion of Ong and our in-class case study, there are two principal dimensions of "audience" we might give special attention in his essay:
  • one dimension of "audience" is where writers project audiences for their work by imagining the presumptive audiences of other pieces of writing;
  • another dimension of "audience" is where readers seem willing to be fictionalized in this way—they seem willing to be the audience projected by the writer, so long as that projection is familiar or acceptable to them.

And, as promised, here are some of the cases we may view and discuss:
  • The September 11 Digital Archive -- give yourself at least 30 minutes to browse everything so that you have a very good sense of how it works, why it was created, how it is structured, and how it is used. This is a cool project, but it will take some time to really understand.
  • The following set of media clips (Enchanted and Princess and the Frog; Mary Poppins Original and Remade; Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood Remix) -- give yourself some time to think about these as constructions of audience (i.e., as projections of audience). I'm not necessarily looking for you to compare/contrast them.
  • The following set of advertisements (Nike’s Girl Effect Campaign vidoes “I Dare You” and “Ticking Clock” and “We Have a Situation”) -- again, give yourself some time to think about these as constructions of audience (i.e., as projections of audience) and not only as campaign advertisements to compare/contrast.

Here is one space in which we might work.

-Prof. Graban

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THURSDAY 1/18/18 -- Discussion of Barthes and Foucault

Dear Folks: As we work together to understand Barthes's and Foucault's terms of agency -- i.e., "scriptor" and "author-function" -- we may look to a few of these links to help us consider some applications of these terms:
  • Aspen Magazine's "Minimalism" issue, where Barthes's "Death of the Author" first circulated
  • A finding aid to the collection that houses a copy of issue #5 and #6 [click photos to enlarge and view the whole set of materials in that issue]
  • The Art Institute of Chicago also has record of the journal and this issue in one of their collection's finding aids
  • archived Apple "tribute" pages on past MLK, Jr. Days from 2018, 2017, 2016, and etc.  [you can search their archive by month and year]

-Prof. Graban

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TUESDAY 1/16/18 -- Aristotle Concept Trace

Dear Folks: We will work in this space on Tuesday, using your respective traces to guide us in answering the overarching questions.

-Prof. Graban

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 OUR SCHEMAS FROM FIRST WEEK OF CLASS (RANDOM PICS)







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