Greetings and goodbye! Your grades have all been given to the Registrar, so they should be online now for you to check.

This has been an exciting semester for me, and I want to take this moment to thank you all for being such a great class. As I probably mentioned, this was my first fresh-folk class at UVM, and you have filled me with hope for the future at UVM.

I leave you with this to enjoy as you head off to wherever it is you go during the Winter Break — The Guy I Almost Was, a web comic by Patrick S. Farley. It’s all about the world of the future — the far-off year of… 1990! It starts off in the past, and then gets up to what really happened in the 1990s.

This much I knew:
In the future, all cities would look like the one that appeared behind Kaptain Kool & the Kongs on Saturday morning’s Krofft Supershow. Bloated, curvaceous structures — engineered by the same people who designed Corvette Stingrays and Yes album covers — built out of shiny fiberglass, pristine chrome, and pulsating neon light — Tomorrow’s city would be a Space Age coral reef, teeming with millions of funky life forms, its limitless nooks and enclaves seething with parties, discos, arcades, and mind-blowing good times….

Check it out, and have a great time.

Remixing the Assignment
Due: 3pm, Friday December 8th

I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadows
If I fail, if I succeed
At least I live as I believe
No matter what they take from me
They can’t take away my dignity
Because the greatest love of all
Is happening to me
I found the greatest love of all
Inside of me
– Whitney Houston, “The Greatest Love of All”

Whitney’s “greatest love” is inside of herself. Your greatest ideas and passions are also inside of you. This revision will give you the chance to tap into that storehouse of thought and interest inside of yourself to remix one of the last two writing project topics from this semester.

I gave you the topics for Invention 2 and for the Dialog/Debate, and I tried to make them broad enough that you could find a way to make them relevant and interesting to yourself.

Invention 2: select one of the three worlds in which Edward Wozny is or has been immersed (books, games, or work), and discuss “the exercise of power, social roles, and intellectual practices” in it.

Dialog/Debate: for The Asylum, what is the most important aspect to explore first, and why is it the most important aspect?

This is key: the best papers you will write in your life will be the papers in whose topics you are most interested. Your interest, your love, in Whitney’s terms, will show. Conversely, when you are bored with a topic and uninterested in the work, that too will show.

Remember this as you go on to write many, many papers in college: find some way to make the topic personally relevant and interesting to yourself. Your grades will be better for it, and you will enjoy writing papers much, much more.

So, for this revision, revise the assignment of one of these two writing projects so that it represents a topic you care about, an issue you are interested in, one that you want to see completed because it addresses issues that you think are important.

Your remixed topic can be as brief as the ones I provided. The only restriction on you is that your remixed topic should, in some way, address Codex or The Asylum.

Your remixed topic should be followed by a 1-page (double-spaced) explanation of why your remix is the best topic for you.

Revision 1
Due: Thursday, December 7th

Turn in the following IN CLASS:

• Remixed Invention
• Original Invention 1 (with my comments)
• Exploration 8 (with my comments)
• Your Outline of your Remix
• Both Peer-Reviewed Drafts, with Comment Sheets

Now that you’ve planned out your remix of essay 1 and created an outline for that plan, it’s time to start composing your remix.

Bring 2 copies of your remixed essay 1 to class on Tuesday. The more complete your remix is, the more benefit you’ll get from Tuesday’s class.

Your remix should be 4-5 pages long, double-spaced.

We’re beginning our final unit this week on remix culture and revision, which has me thinking even more than usual about revision.

Specifically, I keep coming back to the questions of parody and satire as revisionary modes. Every parody is a revision of an earlier work, but is satire also inherently dependent on earlier productions? Counter-intuitively, the answer may be yes. Think of all the satires you know — do any of them not depend on clear generic conventions to make their point?

Further complicating matters: can you think of any satires that are not also parodies, and vice versa?

Now that we’re all befuddled and wrapped up in ever-shrinking Venn diagrams of parodicity, satiricism, and revisionary thought, here’s a fun example of a parodic satire revising Justin Timberlake’s mindless jiggle, “SexyBack“: The Grey Kid & Daniel Stessen’s “PaxilBack“:

(X-Posted to: Digital Digressions)

Remixed Trailers, Remixed Inventions
Due: 5pm, Monday November 27th

Narrator: “Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive.”

Oscar Goldman: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better … stronger … faster.”
-Six Million Dollar Man ©1974, Universal Television Productions

Next week we will begin discussing what I and others have called “remix culture,” the rise of entire genres of compositions formed by remixing, re-editing, and re-purposing existing works. We see this is music mashups (both for songs and videos), in game mods (new games formed from the “engines” of existing games, as when Doom is modified to replace all of the demons the player hunts with Barney the Purple Dinosaur), and in the remixed movie trailers we will be looking at.

For this exploration, you are to take your own Invention 1 and remix it. For that invention I gave you the topic (“Is ‘An Ode to Pants’ or the Gunn films literature?”) on which you were to write. Now you have the opportunity to explore whatever interests you the most about these works. Find an idea, a point, an approach in your invention and see where it takes you. In the remixed trailers, for instance, Shining takes the characters from The Shining and remixes them into romantic comedy figures. Cabin Fevertakes the original film’s plot (a mysterious sickness kills) and remixes that into a tearjerker about friendship and the meaning of life. You do not need to find a way to satirize either your earlier paper or “Pants” or the Gunn films; the remixed trailers work, when they work, because there is enough potential in the elements that are emphasized to achieve a new, unintentional (to the original creators) purpose. Each of your papers has material that is strong, interesting, and insightful enough to achieve a new, unintentional (to you, when you wrote your invention) purpose.

Your exploration must include the following:

1) Copy-and-paste the part/idea/word of your old invention on which you intend to base your remixed invention. This will be the core of your remixed invention, the center around which you will compose your better, stronger, faster version.

2) A brief explanation of what appeals to you or provokes you or leaves you still curious about your core (i.e., why you’ve chosen this to be your core).

3) A brief description of what your remixed invention will explore.

Due: Bring this with you to your advising session

To prepare for your advising session, you will need to do the following:

• Select three possible majors you might consider adopting. Click through to the department pages for any that interest you. Read about their disciplines and the requirements each demands. Pick your top three programs and write them down. From the UVM home page, you can see a list of all of the undergraduate degree programs here: http://www.uvm.edu/academics/undergraduate/?Page=aos.html
• For each major on your list of three, investigate the course requirements for that major. Look specifically for the introductory courses to the major, and write down two or three introductory courses that would count toward satisfying that major.
• Note which College of Arts & Sciences graduation requirement each course on your list would satisfy. Courses may satisfy both a General Requirement and a Distribution Requirement – be sure you check to see if any of your courses do. (You can find this out using the double-sided “Distribution Requirements” sheet.)
• Finally, pick two of those classes and begin to construct a schedule for your Spring Semester around those classes. The Spring schedule of courses can be found here: http://giraffe.uvm.edu/~rgweb/batch/spring_soc/spring_soc.html
• Once you have your schedule assembled, fill in the relevant courses on your Quick Advising Checklist.

Bring to your advising session:

• Your filled-in Quick Advising Checklist
• Your Distribution Requirements sheet
• Your List of 3 Possible Majors, with Introductory Courses

Due: 5pm Monday October 30th

The Asylum and Reagan Library are both complex works that require you, the player/reader/viewer to engage in complicated activities to navigate, interpret, and if possible, complete the work. Today you will have voted for one of these two works to be the topic of our dialog/debate. As we have discussed in class, there are many different aspects of each of these works to consider, and as we have seen in our class discussions, exploring certain aspects of the works leads us to consider other aspects in turn. (At the same time, our focus also prevents us from considering other aspects, but that is always the case.)

Your dialog/debate will address this question: for the work the class has chosen, what is the most important aspect to explore first, and why is it the most important aspect?

There is no page requirement for the Position Paper. The final document will probably be around 2 pages long, but if you include all of the required parts and it is either longer or shorter than that, fear not.

Your position paper will include the following parts:

• A well-developed statement that clearly and forcefully articulates your position, and that can be forcefully argued against
• Talking points explaining and supporting your position (at least five)
• Documentation/citation for all of your claims (it’s not enough to simply say “Moulthrop/The Asylum says…” — you need to be able to point us to the specific passage(s) that support your claim)
• A conclusion developing from your position that shows in-depth analytical engagement with the material

The Position Statement

Your statement of position is similar to a thesis — it’s the arguable idea that guides and structures your work in the paper. It can be one sentence or it may be longer — this will depend on the complexity of your position and how you feel you can most persuasively express it.

Talking Points

Your talking points are brief encapsulations of the reasons why we should agree with your position. These should be polished rhetorical messages that work to persuade your audience (and even, ideally, your opponents in the debate) to agree with your position. These should be brief, and yet you may include a paragraph or so of text to support/explain your meaning.

The Importance of Rigorous Citation

You must cite to all of your assertions, quotations, and references. This may be done parenthetically in the text of your paper, or with footnotes or endnotes — whichever you prefer. This requirement is non-negotiable, because during debate, you must be able to instantaneously respond to a challenge of your ideas. Going to the text is an excellent method of refuting such challenges. For Reagan Library, I expect you to cite to the title of the page from which you took the text/image (“Blue Pavilion,” for instance). For The Asylum, things are a little trickier. Citing the animal being treated, the treatment you performed to prompt the material you’re citing, and the relative progress of the treatment should be plenty for us to be able to duplicate your progress. So, for instance, you would cite the growling coming from inside Dolly thusly: (Dolly, Medical Examination, early in treatment).

Your Conclusion>

Your conclusion is the “so what” of your position. Let’s assume that you have advanced your position and supported it well. So what? What does your position mean? What does it suggest to us about the work in question? What does it suggest to us about digital literature in general? Or about games, or about virtual reality, or about (stuffed) animal/human relationships, or about storytelling, or about our own responses to narratives? What does it suggest about you or about us as readers? Any or all of these questions might provoke your conclusion.

The conclusion is often the most important part of a political position paper because it sets forth the action(s) to be performed by all right-minded individuals who happen to read the position paper.

Your conclusion is the most important part of your position paper, because it explains why we should care at all about your position. (Yes, yes, we care about your position because it is your position, and because you are a unique snowflake whose positions deserve care. But the conclusion gives us a view of the bigger issues at stake in the debate, and that makes us care in a different way.)

Thinking About the Conclusion in Academic Papers

When writing academic papers, the same process should apply. Your position is analogous to a thesis, your talking points to the prongs of your argument, and your conclusion sets forth the important issue(s) at stake in your analysis. In writing an academic paper, ideally your conclusion (which you will probably only reach after thinking through all of the other steps/parts) should inform the entire paper.

By this I mean that if your thesis is that, for instance, Codex demonstrates the equally addictive properties of books and video games, then you may conclude that Grossman is attempting to show that video games are no more “harmful” to modern mental health and productivity than books have ever been, and that the current panic over video game violence is no different from the fears that have always accompanied narrative and/or immersive media. You’re proving that Grossman sets these two media up as parallel sources of “danger,” but when you have proved that, you and your readers are able to reach the conclusion that this source of “danger” is not very dangerous at all, and that the crusaders against video game violence probably need to find a more productive hobby.

For your follow-up to Exploration 7, write down your thought(s) on the connection(s) among the four (we presume?) narrators in Reagan Library.

Your thoughts don’t have to be fancy, and they certainly don’t have to be a full page long. Just write them down or type them up (isn’t it funny how our prepositions change in different compositional situations…) and attach them to your Exploration 7. Both will be due in class on Thursday.

Occassionally I get e-mails that may be of interest to you. This is one of those. If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, check it out.

Hi,

I am writing to tell you about an exciting research study [at SUNY Stony Brook] related to the experiences of gay male undergraduate students. All gay male students at public universities between the ages of 18 and 25 are eligible to participate.

You will receive $100.00 for completing all aspects of this study. Your participation will involve a total of 4 hours spread out over six days. Everything can be done online (I will call you to explain the study and answer any questions you have). Here is a breakdown of your participation:

• Day 1: 60 minutes ($5.00)
• Day 2: 20 minutes ($10.00)
• Day 3: 20 minutes ($15.00)
• Day 4: 20 minutes ($20.00)
• Day 5: 60 minutes ($25.00)
• Day 6: 60 minutes ($25.00)—this day will occur three months after Day 5

All participants should participate every day. All participants should also have access to a personal computer in a secure, distraction-free environment for five sequential evenings and to be able to receive telephone calls from the researcher throughout the course of the study.

If you are interested in this study, please send an email to me at
John.Pachankis@sunysb.edu. In the email please provide your telephone number and the best time(s) to call you in the next three days.

I hope you will choose to participate,

John Pachankis
Department of Psychology
State University of New York at Stony Brook