The Illustrated Novel

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 senior seminar at UVM, and you have filled me with pride about the quality of UVM’s English majors.

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.

Extremely Introspective & Incredibly Retrospective
Due: IN CLASS Thursday, November 30th

As we will be finishing the final book of the semester, this seems an appropriate time for reflection. For this, your last exploration of the course, I want you to reflect on the readings and discussions we have had thus far as a class. Your reflection may address whatever you feel is most important when thinking back on this course.

If you’re stuck for ideas, here are some sample questions to get to going:

• What have you found most interesting? Why?
• What have you found most useful? Why?
• What have you found surprising? Why?
• What was your favorite work? Why?
• What was your favorite critical/theoretical work? Why?

1) Check this out. Boing Boing just posted a link to the National Library of Medicine’s online collection of antique anatomical illustrations. Talk about coincidental. There’s even a link to our good buddy Andreas Vesalius and his now-infamous Fabrica. You have to check this out.

2) As part of our ongoing dialog over book covers vs. content (or maybe not), we discussed the cover of Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The cover was designed by Gray318, the nom d’arts of Jon Gray, a graphic designer living in East London. Here’s the cover:

You may find this cover to be familiar. That’s because HP recently launched an ad campaign whose tag line is: “The Computer is Personal Again.” The ads were produced by San Francisco ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Here are a few examples:

Notice anything?

“Dominic” at Fortune Magazine’s Business Innovation Insider blog asks, gently enough, “Is it just me, or does the artistic layout of the new Hewlett-Packard marketing campaign (”The computer is personal again”) remind you of the book cover of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close?”

Seth Stevenson takes a firmer position in an article for Slate, noting that the entire campaign design is “ripped off from the cover design for Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel.” Well, yeah.

An internal fact sheet from HP on the campaign makes no mention of the novel:

The hand will be a unifying theme across all campaign elements, reinforcing the personal aesthetic, with a hand-lettered graphic used to deliver information about products and their role in the customer’s life. For print and web ads, stunning, back-lit product photography will use a colored glow to highlight the key features of some of HP’s most differentiated offerings.

The total campaign spend worldwide is several hundred million dollars, including traditional, web and viral marketing elements across a wide range of network and cable television, major newspapers, grassroots efforts and a variety of web sites such as Yahoo, MTV, MySpace, MSN, WeatherChannel, CIO, Forbes, Entrepreneur, InfoWorld, and CNet. The campaign will be rolled out across key countries in North America, Europe and Asia over the next six months.

It may be that Gray318 worked with (or for) GS&P on the campaign design, but he makes no mention of it on his web site. And I can’t imagine a graphic designer would willingly dilute his own book cover design by using the main elements (even down to the font! compare the “A”s!) in a worldwide, multi-million dollar ad campaign.

For that matter, I can’t imagine why HP would want to do the same thing, especially with a novel by a non-obscure writer.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (But No Cigar)
Due: 10am, Thursday November 9th

You’ve struggled and strained and finally generated a topic for your final project.

Now some loser goes and assigns you a whole new illustrated novel to read. And he expects you to write about it. Doesn’t he realize there’s a final project to complete?!

Actually, he does.

For this exploration, you are to find some way to connect Foer’s novel to your final project, then write about EL&IC in relation to that connection.

It’s all too easy to develop tunnel vision when working on a project. Let this brief exploration help you to think laterally about the issues, possibilities, and problems relating to your final project. Your engagement with your final project will benefit.

Here’s a follow-up to our fascinating discussion yesterday about appearance vs. reality, and the prejudices and assumptions we bring to our acts of interpretation.

First is the ad by Dove Soap that makes the bold claim, “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” It then immediately exhorts consumers to “Take part in the Dove Real Beauty Workshops for girls.” You have to see it to believe it.

Second, here’s the post from my old blog that discusses the library program in Sweden that allows patrons to check people out:

File this one under… “Please Do Not Reshelve”….

(Malmoe, Sweden) A library in a small community in southern Sweden has started a novel program to promote diversity and break down stereotypes.

In addition of borrowing books on different cultures the Malmoe Library is now offering people.

The living library project is called “Borrow a Bias.” It allows townsfolk to borrow any of nine different minority people. Borrowers have 45 minutes to confront the prejudices in the library’s outdoor cafe.

“You sometimes hear people’s prejudices and you realize that they are just uninformed,” said Ulla Brohed, the chief librarian and the person who conceived the idea.

The group includes a lesbian, a gay, an imam, a Muslim woman, a journalist, an animal rights advocate, a Dane, and a Romany or Gypsy and one other to announced later.

Although Sweden has civil rights protections for gays and recognizes same-sex couples with partner rights many Swedes, especially in smaller communities, have little knowledge of gay issues including the desire to marry and adopt children.

“It’s a fun idea. Prejudice is something you have when you don’t know each other. If you confront each other, then the prejudice is broken down,” said Lilian Simonsen, the Dane who will be on loan.

A similar project is already underway in Copenhagen, Denmark.

I have to assume that the Danish program doesn’t include a Dane, but who can say. Maybe they just hand patrons a mirror….

On a more serious note, what do you think the impact of something like this would be in the States? What would you add to the “collection”?

Additionally, teachers everywhere decry their students’ aversion to actually going to the library. Why bother, students argue, when everything of importance can be found via Google? Would this increase or decrease student interest in libraries, do you think?

[Via 365Gay.com and a tip from Coeurlion]

Due: 10am Thursday November 2nd

You’re gonna take a walk in the rain
And you’re gonna get wet. (I predict)
You’re gonna eat a bowl of chow mein
And be hungry real soon. (I predict)
Are my sources correct? (I predict)
Sparks – “I Predict”

For your final project of your senior seminar, you are required to engage critically with the phenomenon, interpretation, meaning, significance, literariness, literacy requirements, themes, tropes, rhetorical strategies, capabilities, limitations, marketing, frequency, artistry, presumption of sophistication, presumption of juvenileness, pedagogy, production, and/or etc., etc., of illustrated novels in general, or of particular illustrated novels.

This engagement may take any form you like. Illustrated novels are hybridized from extant forms of narrative representation, potentially expanding the boundaries of narrative and affective communication for each of the various modes employed in the novel, while still remaining more-or-less recognizably novel-ish narratives. In a similar way, you are free to hybridize, deconstruct, or innovate in the form your project takes, provided it retains the recognizable features of analysis and interpretation expected from a final project.

I encourage you to challenge yourself both in subject matter and in execution – the degree of difficulty of your project will be taken into account.

I expect your final project to be around 10 pages long, or a reasonable facsimile or substitute thereof.

For your final project proposal, you will need to identify the following items:

• A tentative thesis/argument/hypothesis you envision motivating and organizing your project
• At least one primary work which you anticipate using as a central source for support and/or evidence in developing your t/a/h
• The relevant secondary works that will help you to develop your t/a/h, and/or explore your primary work(s)
• The form you envision your final project taking

There is no page requirement for your proposal, though more detailed proposals increase the quality of feedback I will be able to provide to you.

Here’s another e-mail that may be of interest to you. 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

Well, if you are, you won’t want to miss this workshop:

Applying to Ph.D. Programs in English
Friday October 27th, 3:30-5pm in the John Dewey Lounge

Your truly will be one of the faculty presenters!

We’ll discuss such things as:

• Which programs are best in which areas of English Studies
• How to decide to which programs you should apply
• What should go on/in your application
• What graduate school is really like

Everyone’s invited, so make sure your grad-school-bound friends know about it.

Due: 10am Thursday October 26th

For this Exploration, read The Sensualist pages 183-295 (i.e., the rest of the novel), and Anne Francis Wysocki’s article “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty” (available on electronic reserve) and respond in some way to one or both of these works.

I encourage you to find a topic or a question or a concept that particularly interests, provokes, or disturbs you in one or both of the works and explore that.

As always, if you have any questions, let me know.

REMINDER: your Annotated Bibliographies (18 copies) are due in class on the 26th as well. Don’t forget to bring them!

There appears to be quite a bit of confusion about the Annotated Bibliography. This post may help with that (and I’ll post it to the course blog for your future reference).

1) The Annotated Bibliography will now be due on Thursday October 26th. That gives you an extra week to get this done, and to get it done well. If you’re done this week, feel free to turn yours in this week. There will be no penalty for taking the extra week. I just want these things to be good.

2) The assignment asks for two different types of works on your bibliography. You need to find and annotate 3 primary works and 5 secondary works. Primary texts are texts that you treat as texts in and of themselves.  They can be novels, poems, short stories, travelogues, autobiographies, whatever. Secondary texts are texts that are explicitly about other texts.  They comment on, theorize about, or explicate other texts.  So, the Trumbo essay is a secondary text because it talks about other texts (or at least about other illustrations).  Fun Home is a primary text because even though it includes passages from and references to other literary works, it’s mostly about itself and the story(ies) it’s telling.

The secondary texts you find do not, themselves, need to be multimodal.  They only need to be about multimodality and/or illustration/print combinations.

3) If you’ve never had to find your own secondary (i.e., critical and/or theoretical texts), here are my best strategies:

3a) Start running searches through the MLA online bibliography (you can extend this through the other bibliographies — JStor, ERIC, Academic Search, etc.) All of these bibliographies are accessible through the library’s web page. If you’re accessing the library from off-campus, click the “Connect from Off-Campus” link on the left side of the main page, and then choose EZ-Proxy. That will ask you for your UVM NetID and your password. Then you can “Find Articles and More” to get to these bibliographies.

3b) Comb through the works cited pages of the articles I’ve assigned in the class — if it’s important to Kress when he’s writing about multimodality, for instance, it may be relevant to your project.

3c) Browse the subject headings on books at Bailey-Howe — there may be good texts there (or the books there may lead you to even better works).

4) Online articles and multimodal works are fine, as long as they are reputable.  Someone’s blog post on MySpace about pictures isn’t going to carry much academic weight.  However, there are lots of reputable online journals and any of them would be fine. Likewise, there are lots of multimodal primary works online. Just make sure your online work is worth writing up.

5) If you haven’t read the work you’re including on your bibliography yourself, you’re treading on thin ice.  It may be excellent, it may stink.  Unless you can go through it with your own eyes, you’ll never know.  It’s a risk that I’d advise you not to take.

6) Including more than one essay/article/work from the same person is okay.  However, it will make you seem like a 1-trick pony.  I’d suggest picking the most important/significant/useful work and briefly mentioning the others in the annotation to that entry.

7) Your secondary sources need to be *about* multimodality, but they do not need to be multimodal.

As always, if you’ve got questions, let me know.