Literature in a Wired World

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