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.
Additional course requirements include active class participation and regular attendance, weekly in-class writing by hand, engaged peer review (written and verbal feedback on early drafts of peers' projects), and one-on-one meetings with the instructor to help brainstorm and develop projects.
Intended Audience: Upper-level undergraduate students with a keen interest in stories, digital/internet culture and technology, the craft of writing, and the nature of human creativity–especially those who feel excited and energized by the prospect of developing and pursuing their own genuine research questions and creative projects.
400.002 - An Assemblage of Voices: Exploring Community through Zines, Street Photography & Podcasting
Do you like making things? Are you curious about the whys and the whats of the stories unfolding around you when you walk around in the world? Do you want to explore your own vision and perspective while creating vehicles for the stories and the voices of others?
You may be ready to make some zines, snap some photos and try some audio experiments.
This making-centered course will be a chance for you to experiment and to strengthen your voice. You will make your own zines: learn about documenting the world around you with street photography: and record audio out in the field and conduct short interviews. We will look at foundational texts to connect into the history and community of zines, to explore how street photography can work as documentary and as witness, and to listen to interview-based podcasts that can illuminate or challenge current conversations and narratives. Our class will focus on process and experimenting, with lots of feedback and collaboration, as we self-publish our own zines, photobooks, and short-form podcasts.
This course is a making-centered class with class discussion at the core of how we will approach the arts of zines, street photography, podcasting, and assemblage. Asking questions and engaged listening is the heart of our course. Additional course requirements include regular attendance; weekly in-class writing by hand in a notebook; engaged peer review (written and verbal feedback on early drafts of peers' projects); one-on-one meetings with the instructor to help brainstorm and develop projects; and whole class workshops. For the course you will make a zine, a photobook, a short form podcast, and a final reflective analysis/maker’s statement of your own design.
Intended Audience: Upper-level undergraduate students with an openness to share ideas and their own stories as well as a strong curiosity and interest in the stories of others–especially those who feel energized by the prospect of developing and pursuing their own genuine research questions and creative projects; those students who value the craft of writing and composing multimodally, and experimenting across print, visual and audio media; those who want to work with hands-on making as well as digitally.
