Literature in a Wired World

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