“Truth depends on an encounter with something
that forces us to think and to seek the truth.” (14)
 
“if the resonance has both objective and subjective conditions,
what it produces is of an altogether different nature:
the Essence, the spiritual Equivalent….that breaks with the subjective chain.” (154)

— Deleuze, Proust and Signs (1972)

 
M 30-Nov     Foer: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (through p. 173)
                       (Laura Hampson & Tahara Franklin)
 
 
W 02-Dec     Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (pp. 174-259)
                       (Krystal Sardinas & Paige Miller)

Due: Project Proposal Update (revised/finalized; 7pm, on blog)
(counts as blog entry; add Foer to your “poetics inventory”)

→ Notes from class discussion (plus reminders and clarifications)

 
 
F 04-Dec     Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (pp. 267-326)            (Sarah Zimmerman)

plus: (required): “Mystory” excerpts by Ulmer (PDF)

 
M 07-Dec    Due: Final Project — “Resonance Assemblage” (checkpoint / partial)
 
 

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

— Ulmer, Heuretics

“For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear. ”

— Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

 
Final Project: “Resonance Assemblage”

 
Informal Proposal — due Friday 27-Nov
     — (contact me if you need to post on Saturday, as I am replying in queue)

 
suggested reading: “Mystory” excerpts by Ulmer (PDF)
 
Review Experiment, especially CATTt
        (and notes from 09 & 23 Nov classes;
        have you updated your “Analogy” category inventory?)

 
Final Project: “Resonance Assemblage”

 
Context: (parameters)

02 September 1945 – 10 September 2001
American Society
(temporal, geographic, social, political, economic “setting”)

 
“Genre”:

Hybrid — “critical” and “creative.”
Writing with our entire “paradigm,” all three levels of discourse:
personal (autobiographical), cultural (literature, art, popular media), and disciplinary (scholarly, professional); see Ulmer on this combination.

 
 

Project Proposal

 
Informal and brief answers (1-2 sentences), to the extent you’ve developed and researched (both academically and personally) initial topic; including a sentence describing difficulty/uncertainty or posing a question is also useful (both for you and me).
Answer to best extent that you can at this time, with revision and/or supplement later; note that the more developed your ideas, the better feedback and guidance I can provide (I will not respond to proposals missing more than one answer, though).

 
 
1) What specific experience will you undertake the task of, and take responsibility for, expressing? What is the concrete historical context?

Describe the experience first in objective terms, with as many traits/categories as you can:
both A) Historical Situation, Event, Issue (actual, not invented)
and B) Identity
(entire “matrix”: race/ethnicity, sex/gender, sexuality, class, religion, age, etc.)

Note: while we are intuiting the lived experience, we’ll detach the affect from the specific identity (e.g. family member), so as not to make a personal anecdote (or “family history”) — but one slight degree removed. More about this focus later; you can cite a tentative affect (subjective dimension of lived experience), but likely will work on this subsequently.

 
 
2) “Explanation” or “account” of this experience from a conventional view? What is the dominant understanding?
(belief/morality or reason/disciplinary discourse — foreground your point of contrast)
Source of objective account? (list one, even if you’ll research more later.)

 
 
3) Personal resonance for you in the present?
(hint: testing whether this is your feeling/bias, or whether you are “attuned” to past experience of event.) Source and level of your familiarity? (i.e. extent of “expertise” or “curiosity”?)
note: not necessarily “easier” or “better” to undertake something extensively knowledgeable about; might actually be more challenging — what about an area of inquiry or “wondering,” within this same objective topic? see Q. 5)
Advantage and/or difficulty of this personal resonance for the project?

 
 
4) One cultural narrative or image that is prominent in your memory (any media)?
(Or, what is one narrative that comes to mind by association, from any discourse? Use intuitive and associative logic…)

 
 
5) One “forgotten” (or overlooked, neglected) aspect or element? (remember: Lêthê…)
Speculate a “blindspot” of historical discourse: what is conventionally forgotten or excluded about this experience?
(Or, what is “filtered” out by reason, and possibly by reductive binary logic?)
Why is it important to actively “recall” (resonate) and inscribe this into writing and into present/future memory? (”socio-historical significance,” humanities perspective)
 
In what specific way, “impossible” to express? (Literally speaking.)
As for project, what practical obstacles do you foresee at present?

 
 
6) One lesson (abstract) and one technqiue (specific) from one of our relay novels, that you will implement? (”Analogy” in CATTt)
If able, list the key poetics that seem promising for the project, so far.
Reviewing our novels, how many narratives seem to be an adequate/effective number to include in the assemblage? (i.e. estimate minimum and maximum)

 
 
7 ) A potential interface? and A potential figure (expressive)?
(from any level of discourse: personal, cultural, disciplinary — perhaps “discovered” through this week’s “mining” exercise; if not, need more reflexive contemplation…)
 
 

“Spinoza’s ethics has nothing to do with a morality; he conceives it as an ethology, that is, as a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected on this plane of [Nature]” (125).

–”you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of…what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination (125).

–Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

 
 
M 02-Nov          Ceremony     (through p.186 )            (Jessica Brousseau & Phil Cafaro)

 
W 04-Nov          Ceremony     (through end)            (Eric Roe & Jake Jacob)

 
F 06-Nov      No class (away at conference)
                     Due: Blog entry (Friday this week)
 
 

 
 
 
 

Resp 5: Myth and Experiential Narrative in Ceremony
500 words min., 10 points; due W 11-Nov (deadline TBA)
Review assignment criteria here — also remember extra credit opportunity…
 
note: read instructions closely — three main tasks/objectives.
 

“Languages are more or less thick; certain amongst them, the most social, the most mythical, present an unshakeable homogeneity..: woven with habits and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses and keywords, each constitutes an idiolect or more exactly a sociolect.”
 
— “the antidote of myth would be the extreme pole or rather the region—airy, light, spaced, open, uncentred, noble and free—where writing spreads itself against the idiolect, at its limit and fighting it” (168).

Roland Barthes, “Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today” (1971). Image-Music-Text

 
Prompt:
Choose one Laguna “story” (myth) that Silko includes—

e.g. “Thought Woman,” Ceremony (frame); drought/rain; “Spider Woman” and “Gambler”; Fly & Hummingbird; Gallup Ceremonials; “Shush” / Bear; Coyote (Ck’o'yo magician) and Big Fly; Descheeny and captive girl; Witchery; Mountain Lion & T’seh; Sunrise offering.

 
— use this story to understand an historically specific experience in the novel’s diegesis/plot, not in mode of belief but expression (life).     review: Apparatus

 
First, briefly discuss affect that you intuit (third mode) from reading the aesthetic figures and the myth together (novel expression); describe the objective experience/situation in particular and concrete terms, avoiding generalization and abstraction. What is this experience? (focus should be specific, within Tayo’s overall narrative/s)

Tip: review your last Reading Response; likely need to describe experience in affective terms to greater extent (embodied exp., subjective, feeling but not “sentimental” or cliché emotion).

 
 
From this, address key question: how does this relation of myth and experience “negotiate” or “mediate” 1) {the past, culture, tradition} and 2) {historical situation or event, individual’s circumstances and identity}?
In contemporary terms, perhaps helpful to think of myth as “interface” for understanding subject’s (Tayo’s) “situation.”

Tip: review notes on “loss,” beyond single individual; on nature (esp. “the land”) and Nature; on “good/bad” (ethics) over “Good and Evil” (morality); on memory/forgetting, presence/absence, and reconfiguring these binaries.
Also see additional quotes from Barthes, below.

 
 
Finally, consider in relation with other “storytelling”:

either a form of narration within the novels
(e.g. Nick Carraway, metafictional Kurt Vonnegut, anonymous Jazz narrator)

or a story with which you are familiar, in “mode of belief” (from personal experience/knowledge):
e.g. parables/fables, religious/spiritual narratives, Greek mythology

Beyond compare/contrast (which is fine to limited extent), discuss the relation of narrative and experience, from this perspective — particularly what you’ve learned from Silko, in terms of expressing affect through aesthetic figures and “stories” (myths).
Speculate how we might apply your insight(s) in our experiment–not in the mode of belief (avoiding judgment), but concerning experience (Life).

After all, we are not passive receivers inheriting myths (and values) but active producers of culture and knowledge.