Advanced Rhetoric and Research
400.001 - Fans, Games, and Bots: Whose Story IS It, Anyway?
TLDR: Fall down a rabbit hole of weird and wonderful stories that can only thrive in a digital world. Poke your head back up–or not–and tell your own!
The digital world is transforming the way we make and enjoy stories. Stories that "count"– whether as canon, lore, truth, or art–proliferate online, along with the communities who spawn them. Video and augmented reality games invite players to become characters and authors, and sophisticated A.I. tools like ChatGPT and DallE-2 perform astonishing and uncanny masquerades of human creativity and invention. What do any of these profound narrative disruptions and opportunities mean for how we understand, make, and enjoy stories?
In this course, we will explore this question by reading, playing and writing. During the first half of this course, students will investigate what literary and game theorists, critics and scholars of popular and digital culture, computer scientists, writers, artists, and makers of all sorts have to say about the way online life is transforming narrative (i.e., weekly readings of about 20-30 pages). Throughout the course, students will build on course readings and their own research (2000 word narrative-style literature review and 1000 word explication of an online narrative) to develop their own creative project that disrupts or transforms a narrative that lives online (lengths/formats will vary) and a reflective analysis/maker's statement (1500-2000 words) offering informed insight about the creative project.
400.002 - Deep Dives
A good general education will teach you a little bit about a lot of things, but there’s no replacement for knowing a lot about a single thing. Writing 400: Deep Dives gives you an opportunity to immerse yourself in a process of inquiry with a singular focus and produce one lengthy, sustained multimodal project that unifies and presents the results of that inquiry. Topics will be determined via a process of proposal and negotiation with the instructor, and once a topic has been agreed upon the instructor will help you develop a research plan with special attention to form, tone, audience, and how to incorporate multiple disciplines in a coherent (or at least complementary) way.
Each student will collaborate with peers on equivalent journeys of discovery and design, and work will be evaluated on the basis of adherence to production schedules and the thoroughness and quality of the final product. Work will unfold via small groups collaborations, individual appointments and consultations with the instructor, and shared seminar discussions about the process of disciplinary open research and its enactment in various models and inspirations. This class is for writers and designers who want to draw from as many different wells as possible in pursuit of a single project, and if you have an obsession you want to substantiate or a question you’re willing to spend an entire semester answering, dive in!
