Assemblage Expression

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ENG 1131: Writing Through Media
Section 7489: Assemblage Expression

Spring 2010
MWF Per 7 / R E1-E3
CSE E211A / Weil 412

Instructor: Gary Hink, English Dept. T.A.
Office: TUR 4411 (Period 6)

Course website: http://garyhink.net/course/S10

This course proceeds from the fundamental understanding that we are in the midst of an apparatus shift beyond literacy and its modes of thought, toward a new and emerging paradigm of “electracy,” as theorized by professor Gregory L. Ulmer. The effects impact not only communication and identity formation but academic practices as well; this course directly puts into practice the changes and implications for commensurate methods of learning and writing, guided by Ulmer’s Internet Invention textbook.

A second premise is that the “television age” of our parents’ generation involved audiences’ passively receiving the narratives, images, and ideology of the dominant culture—with a logic of consumers, resulting in a collective forgetting of history. In contrast, the “Internet age” situates us in a participatory role regarding information, communication, and media. As active agents and producers, we are not freely inventive but fundamentally responsible for the creation and dissemination of discourse and representations. Thus, ours will be a critical stance toward the paradigm that we have inherited, which narrowly defines American history, culture, identity, and values from the latter half of the twentieth century. This new mode of thought and expression (electracy), within the present media-cultural situation, requires innovative practices within a scholarly context that are both critical and creative; we will test the potential for a new academic writing that cultivates our intuition and responsibility alike.

Course Objectives

The goal of the course is to introduce students to the transition underway between literacy and post-literacy (electracy) in contemporary culture. This shift is approached through its rhetorical implications, with the students as producers and not just “consumers” of new media effects. Students will become familiar with the basic modes of organizing information that underlie and make coherent the apparent diversity of popular media: narrative (enigma), argument (enthymeme), and figures (trope). The desired understanding of the transition from one apparatus or technological paradigm to another is achieved by comparing the way each of these discursive modes manifests in print, film, and multimedia. Additionally, students will become familiar with the basic principles of semiotics, by pairing examples from visual and print culture, toward an understanding of new media. While this course draws upon the analytical skills of literacy for writing, it also asks students to compose narrative, images, and expressive figures in the mode of aesthetic authoring in digital and online forms. We will develop composition skills through web design as well as through blogging and “Photoshopping”—prominent practices of the new cultural logic—using freely-available software online.

Required Texts

Note: all texts available at Orange & Blue Textbooks (Map)
 

• Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention (Longman, 2003)
• Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus (Pantheon, 1996)
• DeLillo, Don. White Noise. (Penguin, 1986)
  — Note: Additional required readings hosted online (see website for links).

 


Assignments and Grade Distribution

• 5 “Exercise” Assignments       (500 words, 10 points each)    30%
• Project 1: Family & Career        (1000 words, 25 points)      15%
• Project 2: Entertainment & Community        (1000 words, 25 points)      15%
• Project 3: Refashioning Culture                       (1500 words, 35 points)      20%
• Attendance and Participation            20%
  – including Blog Entries (10 / weekly) and Group Presentations (two)