ASSIGNMENTS

essay 1 - midterm - essay 2

Writing:

"When I write, I teach myself."

There is a lot of writing in this course, and it falls into different categories. There will be in-class writing exercises, short written assignments (typed and proofread), essays (first and final drafts), and a seeing/reading journal. This will be a special journal you will keep in a notebook that does not have lined pages. You will make at least two entries in this journal a week; each entry should have both writing and images and should address ideas that are raised in class or in the readings. It isn't a diary, but an intellectual and creative project that complements and extends the work we do in class. You can draw your own images or paste them in with a glue stick. Journals will be collected at intervals during the semester.

Readings:

Books:

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Ways)

McQuade & McQuade, Seeing and Writing (S&W)

*Handouts:

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Handouts on the gaze:

bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators"

Francesco Casetti, from Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator

Lori Landay, from Madcaps, Screwballs, & Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture

Websites:

GCOR111 website: http://classes.berklee.edu/llanday/fall01/ways

Seeing & Writing website: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/seeingwriting/online/

Edward Weston & Modernism exhibition site: http://www.boston.com/mfa/weston/

Museum of Fine Arts: http://www.mfa.org
 

Essay 1

First draft DUE: WEDNESDAY OCT 3 (bring 2 copies to class to workshop)

Completed essay DUE: WEDNESDAY OCT 10

Write a 2-3 page (typed, double-spaced, 1-inch margins all around, fastened with a staple) critical essay that explores the concepts of the gaze and the spectator/viewer that we have been working with in class, in our reading and screenings, and at the museum. Choose two texts that we have seen and use them to illustrate two different ways of seeing and looking. Build on the questions we answered at the museum about the relations of looking within the image, between you as spectator and the image, and the artist's point of view. What new ways of seeing do the texts require? What new ways of looking do they portray? How does your pairing illustrate one of the points Berger makes in the reading?

Here are some suggested pairings, but feel free to develop your own:

1) David Holzman's Diary and one of Chuck Close's photorealist paintings

2) One of Nan Freeman's drawings and Gretchen Rogers' Woman in a Fur Hat

3) The Venus of Urbino by Titian (in book) and one of the modern nudes from the MFA such as Kokoschka's Two Nudes

Your essay should be well-focused, nicely organized, and carefully written. What comes off the top of your head might be fine for a rough draft, but then revise it, paying deliberate attention to the STRUCTURE of your argument:

    • informative (even clever!) title
    • thesis: concise articulation of your argument
    • paragraphs with:
      • topic sentences (which are like mini-thesis statements for each paragraph)
      • evidence to support the ideas you raise in your topic sentences (examples, quotes)
      • explanation, analysis, and interpretation of the evidence that shows how the evidence supports your topic sentence and ultimately your thesis
      • transitions between paragraphs
      • a conclusion that provides a synthesis of your entire argument


        •

        Before you finish your final draft, make sure you can locate the thesis statement & topic sentences. Are they well-focused? Carefully supported? Do ideas flow from one point to the next in a way that makes sense to your reader
 

TAKE-HOME MIDTERMEXAM due WED OCT 31
PART 1: Words about Images (answer each question in a 1-2 page answer):

A) In "Show and Tell," Scott McCloud charts the history of words and images as moving between the poles of resemblance and meaning. In a clear, 1-2 page answer, explain McCloud's argument with at least 4 examples from the following collections we visited when we had class at the museum: Egyptian, traditional oil painting (15th-19th centuries), impressionist, and modernist.

B) We have read the ideas of several thinkers this semester: Susan Sontag, Annie Dillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, and W.E.B. DuBois; each thinker is primarily concerned with a different aspect of how seeing can make meaning. We have also seen films that challenge the spectator to invent new ways of seeing: David Holzman's Diary, Time Code, and Illusions. The original paintings we have examined in the MFA and the reproductions in our books and on our website also invite different ways of seeing.

Choose two of the thinkers and, in a 1-2 page (double spaced) essay, use examples from the films to describe the different approaches to how images make meaning taken by the 2 thinkers. You may want to narrow your focus by choosing one of the following concepts and exploring how the 2 thinkers approach it:

- the gaze - reproduction of images - abstraction - double consciousness (or split consciousness) - artificial obvious (Dillard) - photography and experience - art as a commodity - aura and the original - the camera eye - developing a subjective way of seeing - the nude and gender -

PART 2: Images about Words CHOOSE ONE:

A) In "Show and Tell," Scott McCloud shows (and tells) how comics make meaning through a sequence of related images and words. Draw/write a 4 panel (minimum) comic strip about an experience of seeing you have had in this class. Put at least 4 of his categories of how words and images relate (interdependent, word specific, amplification, parallel, montage, additive, etc.) to use. Please label your panels with the appropriate categories. (Suggestions: MFA trips, visiting Nan Freeman in her "studio" at the MFA, watching Time Code, images we've seen in class, etc). You can use any medium, from pencil and paper, to cut and paste collage, to Photoshop.

B) Using images on our website, make a collage that brings one image into dialogue with another, and in doing so, comments on the other. (For example, putting Manet's Olympia in Charles Sheeler's View of New York.) Write a paragraph explaining how your collage makes the two images comment on each other.
 
Essay 1: Digital Looks/Looking Digital
 

Many of the concepts we have discussed-- the gaze, double consciousness, relations of looking, the human eye vs. the mechanical eye, the consequences of reproduction, relationships between word and image, framing, icons, subjectivity, identity–become more complex in the digital age.

Your essay should be a well-organized, carefully argued 4-5 page essay that explores a clearly-articulated thesis statement in well-focused paragraphs with topic sentences, specific examples, and interpretation, analysis, or explanation of how those examples support the thesis statement. It should also have a conclusion that provides a synthesis of the ideas in the essay.

For this essay assignment, include an image on a cover page (or elsewhere) that could be linked to the essay.

OPTION A: Consider how one of the major concepts of the course might be (or already is) different in the age of digital media.

1) Write a 4-5 page critical essay on an example of hypermedia, digital cinema, digital imaging, a CD-Rom, etc. Use specific examples to make your argument about how the digital medium shapes the core concept (ie: the gaze, relations of looking, spectator, word and image, etc).

-or-

2) In a 4-5 page critical essay, IMAGINE how digital media might develop in the future and how that might shape the core concept. Write a well-argued essay that uses specific examples.

OPTION B:

Choose one of the poems in Seeing & Writing and make a hypermedia version of it--it doesn't have to be on the web, but think about how you could structure the links. Taking Steven Johnson's ideas about links into account, write a 2-3 page critical analysis of how your hyperlinks function to draw "connections between things" (Johnson 492), and how they enhance or change the poem.

DUE DATES:

W 11/28: First draft (bring in 1 copy of your rough draft for in-class writing workshop)
W 12/5: Essay due (bring to MFA and turn it in there)

**** On Monday Dec 3, we will have a special guest in class, Tom Perrotta, who will discuss his short story "13," show us the film version of his story, and discuss both. You'll get the short story as a handout when we get back from Thanksgiving break.
 
For example, do the links that Steven Johnson writes about create new ways of seeing because they encourage the reader/spectator to be active in seeing the connections between ideas? Or how might the role of the spectator be different if you could download movies as easily as you can download mp3 files? Or how does hypermedia change the relationship between word and image that Scott McCloud discussed? When the reproduction of art is no longer mechanical but digital, does that change the issues that Benjamin points to in his essay?