IHUM Fall 2003: Bodies in Place

FINAL PROJECTS

Links to online projects(coming soon)

Video (coming soon)

Final Product Due: Monday, December 8, 3:30-6:30. Please note that this is the time normally scheduled for our final exam. You will present or hand in your project at a multi-media course-wide event. Attendance is mandatory for all students whether you write a paper or not with no exceptions. Please make your travel plans accordingly.

Please note the following additional due dates:

Proposal, including a description of the form and topic of your presentation and a detailed description of the content each student involved in group presentations will develop. Every student must contribute to both the content and form. Due: November 8 via email

Revised Proposal, revisions based on instructor response and your group’s continued work, including a refined analytical thesis or a sophisticated, subtle idea that you will explore in your presentation. Be sure to include a list of all technical requirements and whether or not you will bring the necessary equipment with you. For example, will you bring a laptop or do we need to provide you with one? Due: November 25 via email

Final Product, a performative artifact plus a three-page paper that you will present to your classmates and other guests at a course-wide event on December 8th. Again, attendance for all students is mandatory with no exceptions.

Requirements for Creative Option

Requirements for Standard Analytical Essay:

You may choose to write a longer essay of 8-9 pages in lieu of the art work and essay. Like the shorter analytic essay would accompany an art work, this longer essay's argument must be anchored in the text, including the use of evidence of close reading when relevant. Evidence from close reading includes consideration of details - word choice, sentence structure, repetition, tone, setting, characterization, imagery, symbolic meaning - as well as more generalized characteristics of the writing - structure of the plot or parts of it, repetitive image patterns, theme. The more detailed your use of the text, the stronger your argument will be. Use your observations to unpack and develop the distinction you present in your essay.

Topics for the Long Analytical Essay:

1) The Located Body. Develop a "located body" that can be found in three texts (Crito, Pillow Book, Richard II, Tristes Tropiques, Sims, Madness of King George.) What forces in each text create a critical need for your proposed "located body"? You should think of your essay as a discussion in which you develop various nuances of your proposed "located body" supported by the specific evidence and environments in each text. Draw larger conclusions about the significance of your theory of the located body. How does it synthesize and expand upon larger ideas that have been brewing in this course?

2) Anthropological Analysis. Choose one of the located bodies discussed in lecture and use it as a tool to analyze the culture of the body that you live in. This essay requires you to engage in an anthropological analysis of your own experience or the experience of those around you. Students should compare and contrast their experience of the body to that presented in three texts.

3) Simulation and the Located Body. How does the technique of simulation open a window onto the body? Develop a theory of simulation and the body, then advance a discussion in which you advance various nuances of your proposed theory in four texts studied in this course. Support your arguments with the specific evidence drawn from each text. Draw larger conclusions about the significance of your theory of simulation and the body. How does it expand upon and synthesize larger ideas that have been brewing in this course?

4) Mental Geography. Consider the mental geography or the function of a landscape in three texts. Identify the factors which produce the placement of items on your map or determine the framing and meaning of landscapes. Indicate how your mapping produces new interpretations of the texts.

5) A Topic of Your Choice. If you select this option, you must hand in a proposal to your TF via email by November 25. In 250 words, describe your topic, its relationship to the course, the texts you will use and a hypothesis concerning what you think you might find. Try to be as detailed as possible so that your TF can help to ensure the success of your analysis.

Requirements for Creative Option:

This final project is intended to provide an opportunity for you to respond to your work in Bodies in Place in a way that differs from earlier writing assignments. You may wish to engage in some creative writing or produce a performance, artifact, or different kind of analysis. By doing so you will not only develop an interesting alternative but consider your project as a way of transcending the influence of traditional analysis and analytical writing. What can your medium convey that cannot be conveyed by traditional written means? You may work singly or in a small group. Whatever form you choose, your grade will depend on the level of engagement with the texts, subtlety and creativity of their use, and excellence of your analysis. Please consider carefully the decision to undertake a creative project since they are more difficult to make or perform with the necessary degree of sophistication.

Art elicits complex questions and responses. As in your papers, projects should convey analytical insights which should be presented in an argumentative product focused on a specific, subtle thesis, although it may not be expressed in an argumentative essay. You will have to decide how to express this thesis in the medium you choose. It should raise implicit questions that are not obvious, bringing your audience to think about the assumptions of the course.

Produce some artifact or performance to be presented to your classmates or displayed. Be sure you include the following elements in your project:

1. Each student must produce a short, 3-page analysis that follows the usual rules of analytic essays in which you either analyze the engagement of your artifact with the three chosen texts or compare it with three chosen texts. Please include a 1-2 paragraph-long epilogue or a copy of a weblog that discusses the evolution of your specific contribution to both the form and context of your project.

2. If the project is a group project, determine concrete content areas for each student to develop early on. This prevents the artist-technologist-writer split often seen in this sort of project. Each student must contribute to both form and content and each student will receive an individual grade.

3. Think about form as well as content. The heart of the multimedia project is the relationship of formal choices to the content represented. Ask “How does the media choice enhance the understanding of a concept, idea or argument about the subject matter?” Please see attached rubric for more details.

Creative Project Forms:

Try to select a form that is truly appropriate to the topic you address and your particular strengths.

1) Literary. Produce a literary work that engages or displays the themes of the course and engages with three texts, including Sims. Here are some examples of how the requirements of this option might be satisfied:

a) Write the Pillow Book of an imaginary "Bodies in Place" professor. You must create a professor who would develop concerns differently from our own professors. How might this third professor take notes while listening and responding intellectually to Lenoir’s, Saussy's and Shank's lectures on Sims and one other text? How would these notes lead to ideas that would frame out his/her own lectures? (All written or audio transcript of this professor's lectures have been lost, but if you are really adventurous you might have found the powerpoint presentations that somehow got saved through digital archiving.) Additionally, how would this professor write up miniature descriptions of faculty meetings, visits, etc? Include a 3-4 page analytical essay as introduction in which you explain the disciplinary bias of the professor and argue for his/her specific contribution to enriching the intellectual discussion of "Bodies in Place." Support your arguments with evidence from the text (that is, from the Pillow Book you have written!)

b) Write a pastiche. A pastiche mimics the ideas and style of an author. Produce an analysis of some pre-approved aspect of contemporary life in imitation of Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Your pastiche must include discussion of two other class texts. Your success will depend on the accuracy and subtlety of your analysis and the mimicry of his style and worldview. Include a 2-3 page discussion of your topic, its relationship to the course, and a list of all the stylistic and thematic characteristics of Tristes Tropiques that you seek to imitate.2) Plastic Arts.

2a) Create and present a plastic artifact (painting, sculpture, photograph, etc.) that engages or displays the themes of the course and engages with three texts, including Sims. on December 8 during our scheduled exam period (3:30-6:30). Here is an example of how the requirements of this option might be satisfied:

a) BMOC: Bodies Manufactured on Campus A series of five photographic prints of people on Stanford grounds on which the artist has colored meaningful graffiti (images and words) and/or glued very small images from the latest Victoria’s Secret catalogue. One photograph is really a color print of a Sims “photograph.” Each photo is accompanied by a quote from Richard II. The analytic essay ties the collection together with an argument about the relationship between the contemporary body the photos express those expressed by Richard II, The Pillow Book, and The Sims.

2b) The storyboard is a way of engaging with the text and presenting ideas without the traditional constraints of a narrative. Create and present a storyboard that addresses or displays the themes of the course and engages with three texts, including Sims, on December 8 during our scheduled exam period (3:30-6:30). Please see the following storyboards for examples:

a) The storyboard for the documentary film The Thin Blue Line directed by Errol Morris:
http://www.errolmorris.com/films.php?film_id=4&info_id=22

b) A sampling of different genre:
http://www.storyboards-east.com/storybrd.htm

2c) Produce the objects or artifacts of an imaginary culture. Your artifacts must engage or display the themes of the course and engage with three texts, including Sims. on December 8 during our scheduled exam period (3:30-6:30). Your artifacts should reflect your analysis of the relationship between artifacts and the culture that produced them.

a) Lost Worlds of An Alternating Reality. A weblog that represents the simultaneous presence and absence of respect for material reality, including different entries focuses on time, haptics, references to objects, etc. Sei Shonagon and Richard II offer different poles of experience concerning the haptics of court life. A slideshow of images stands in place of a picture of the editor so that it is impossible to know which represents the editor. The simultaneous striving to represent but to do so in this form suggests irresolvable tensions in the culture, as in Tristes Tropiques.

3) Performance. Create and present a performative artifact that engages or displays the themes of the course and engages with three texts, including Sims, on December 8 during our scheduled exam period (3:30-6:30). If you need to consider the experience of the live performance in your analysis you may turn in your analysis into your fellow’s box by 3:30 December 9. Here are some examples of how the requirements of this option might be satisfied:

a) A guitar recital of an original composition that lyrically represents Crito’s lament or threnody for Socrates using one of the poetic forms used in the Pillow Book. The analysis compares this performative act with the texts from which it drew and with an attempted simulation of that wait in the Sims in order to articulate the artist/author’s theory of simulation and the body.

b) A performance of the marginalized body through an original spoken word and dance piece incorporating clips from Madness (likely a repeating loop of George defecating in exile), a slide show of “photographs” of Sims of various body types (perhaps all asleep on the lawn of their homeless lot?), and passages from Tristes Tropiques. The analysis develops the definition of the marginalized body as it expressed itself in the three texts used in the performance and in one more text. The essay also distinguishes the marginalized body from and relates it to neighboring bodies like the disciplined and primitive bodies.

4) Electronic Arts. Create and present an electronic artifact that engages or displays the themes of the course and engages with three texts, including Sims, on December 8th during our scheduled exam period (3:30-6:30). Here is an example of a project that would meet the requirements of this option:

a) In class we have talked about the ways in which the Sims presume a social order based on bourgeois domesticity and the quotidian aspects of life. In our Panfora assignment asking you to recreate courtly life in the manner of The Pillow Book in Sims terms, we asked you to try to fit a very different kind of social order into the pre-existing Sims mold. Now we’d like you to take several steps further and imagine that you are a programmer trying to redo the Sims (or put in an “Expansion Pack”) so that it fit with the values and perspectives of each of the works we have read. How might you re-structure the elements of the game to fit with each of these “temporal topographies”? How might character traits be defined? How might the motive bars be edited and managed differently? What kinds of “bodies” do the characters you manage inhabit? Feel free to illustrate your vision with diagrams, images, edited sim-scenarios, web pages, etc. In order to do this assignment well, note that you will need to begin with a structural analysis of the game as it exists now, perhaps drawing some critical tools from Levi-Strauss to aid in your discussion. Focus on at least 3 texts (2 can be Sims and Levi-Strauss) in order to do your analysis.

Visit the project pages from last year.