Preliminary Class Business

• Enrollment

• Team Presentation Schedule for Next Week

• Team presentations in Class 9 (Feb. 3) and Class 10 (Feb. 5)

  • From Assignments page: "Choose a literary work (or part of a work) that the team will work on.  We will set a schedule by which some teams make their presentations in class 9 while others do so in class 10.  Teams will present their candidate work to the class along with the reasons for its selection. For the presentation, prepare citations, excerpts, and/or summaries of the work as appropriate on your Team Project Page (so that people who don't know the work can get a sense of it and follow your presentation).  In addition, teams must present at least two ideas for a team project based on the chosen literary work.  Be prepared to answer the question "why?"  That is, have at least an initial hypothesis about what a project-idea might accomplish for our understanding, appreciation, of use of the literary work (or of literature in general)."

     

    • Presentation content 

      • The literary work (or part of a work): what it is, context, reason for choice [possibly also an alternate choice of work]

      • At least two ideas for a team project, and be prepared to be asked "why?"

      • Possible tools you might use

         

    • Presentation format

       

    • Team Project Page

       

1. Sampling | Adaptation | Simulation | Game

• Sampling
  • William Trochim and James P. Donnelly, "Sampling," from The Research Methods Knowledge Base (2005)
  • Wikipedia article: "Sampling (Music)"
  • Interactive sampling chart by Jessie Kriss: "The History of Sampling"
  • U.S. Supreme Court Decision, Campbell v. Acuff Rose, 510 U.S. 569 (1994)

• Adaptation
  • Wikipedia article: "Film Adaptation"

• Simulation
  • Shakemovie Caltech's Online Seismic Event Simulation
  • Simulation of Global Warming
  • Nuclear Fusion Simulation
  • NetLogo (downloadable agent-based simulation-building program) [minimum assignment: browse the NetLogo site and learn about the concept] [maximum assignment: download and run the NetLogo program, which comes with many starter simulations]
  • Second Life (e.g., "UCSB Lane," http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kerlingarfjoll/179/245/46)

• Game
  • Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, "The Magic Circle," from Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (2004), pp. 92-99  [in course reader]
  • "Goblin Market" Game (student project from Spring 2007 course)
  • Ivanhoe Game

2. Deformance and Interpretation

• Jerome McGann, "Imagining What You Don't Know: The Theoretical Goals of the Rossetti Archive" (1997)
• Lisa Samuels and Jerome J. McGann, "Deformance and Interpretation," New Literary History 30, No. 1 (Winter, 1999): 25-56 (online access from UCSB campus or use Library Proxy server) [also in course reader]
• Lisa Samuels, Vex Increment

• Precedents
  • example 1
  • example 2
  • example 3
  • example 4
  • example 5
  • example 6
  • example 7
  • example 8

• Excerpts from Samuels and McGann, "Deformance and Interpretation"

   

  • "In an undated fragment on a leaf of stationery, Emily Dickinson wrote what appears to be one of her "letters to the world": "Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have--a Something overtakes the Mind" (Prose Fragment 30)."

     

  • "For Dickinson, a conception like "the poem itself" obscures not only how poetry functions but how language itself is constituted. For her, as all her letters and poetical writings show, language is an interactive medium. Moving backward through a poem, we expose its reciprocal inertias in performative and often startling ways.

    We use Dickinson's proposal for reading poems backward, then, as an emblem for rethinking our resources of interpretation. It is a splendid model for what we would call deformative criticism.... Dickinson's critical model is performative, not intellectual."

     

  • ". . . meaning is more a dynamic exchange than a discoverable content, and that the exchange is best revealed as a play of differences. Indeed, the exchange gets exposed most fully in forms that are as self-alienated and nontransparent as Dante's beseeching sonnet."

     

  • "The foregoing discussion underscores two matters of special importance for our purposes. First, imaginative work has an elective affinity with performance: it is organized as rhetoric and poiesis rather than as exposition and information-transmission. Because this is so, it always lies open to deformative moves."

     

  • "Reading Backward is a highly regulated method for disordering the senses of a text. It turns off the controls that organize the poetic system at some of its most general levels. When we run the deformative program through a particular work we cannot predict the results. As Dickinson elegantly puts it, "A Something overtakes the Mind," and we are brought to a critical position in which we can imagine things about the text that we did not and perhaps could not otherwise know."

     

• Compare:

  • Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing, pp. 26, 39