Recent Literary Genres Posts

 For my final performance, I focused on the idea of a house.  Since Literary Kinds was all about genre, I called the house "A House Built on Genre."  The house was made out of clay, and on the foundation of the house I wrote the names of genres, each one in a different color.  Then, on the surrounding walls of the house, I wrote titles of different books or other works that fit into the genre.  Through my performance, I meant to give the idea that genres act as foundations that authors build on with their work.

skindeep, rachelr and I decided to do our final presentation on moving from labels to framing. At the start of this class we spent a considerable amount of time discussing labels. Then we related labeling to genres and after long discussions on genre we have landed on discussing framing.

In class, we handed out a piece of paper to each member of the classroom and asked them to put down a word that either they label themselves with or a label that they have been labeled with. Then, everyone held up their label. Using our hands, all of us created frames and looked at others holding up labels.

We wanted to show that there exists a frame in everything we do and all we have. There's a certain way that the world is viewed and it is all determined by past experience and perceptions.

It was an interesting project to work on, however there wasn't much conversation and because of this we had a hard time engaging with the class.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/7462

heres the link to my report on our class presentation

 For our final performance, aybala50, skindeep, and I wanted to talk about two overarching themes of the class- labeling (or genres) and framing. First we gave everyone a strip of paper and had them write a word on it that they had been labeled with or would label themselves with. We then had the class hold up their labels at the same time and to look around at everyone else's labels. We wanted the class to discuss how seeing these labels affected how they now saw each other, but there was little participation. We then asked half the class to hold up their labels while the other half made blinders with their hands so that they had a limited view of the class. We asked those making the blinders how it felt to see only part of the "whole." We also asked the people holding up the labels how it felt to be exposing themselves like that with people staring at them and their labels. 

The point that our group was demonstrating with our presentation was that labels change how we as humans perceive the world- whether we mean to or not. Limiting our vision was a means to demonstrate that everything in life is framed: our present is framed by our past; books are framed by the cover, pages, and backstory; photographs of our lives are framed, as are paintings; and our visions of how we see the world are framed by how we lived our lives and what experiences we have been through. 

Instructions for submitting papers
Visit with Paul Grobstein
    Thinking about what came before blogging
    Going hi-tech with a blackboard
Why do we talk?
    Go crazy if didn’t
    Communication
    Loneliness
    Get point across
    Need help
    Share
    To try to express oneself to others
    Figure out what you yourself think
    Be understood
    To cause trouble
    Be powerful
    Validate/support others
Why do others talk?
    To fill the silence
    Be heard
    Feel important
    To be doing something bc nervous
    To dominate a situation
    To change people’s minds
    To get a reaction
    Craziness
    Responding to other people
    Out of obligation
Why do we read?
    To learn
    For fun
    To escape
    Boredom
    To improve our writing
    Follow instructions
    To find something to relate to
    To hear what another person thinks
Is reading different from talking?
    Some things on both lists?
    Talking is a back and forth/reading is receptive
    Talking is more socially intimate than reading
Why do we write?
    Expressive
    More private
    More controlled
more permanent so mistakes are more serious
Pole of who likes reading, writing, and talking to find the difference?
    Talking has an immediacy that writing doesn’t have
    Less audience dependent
    Talking is more spontaneous
Social interactions
How do these lists help us understand conversation and its higher technology elements
Risks of false information vs. learning and inspiration
    Who has the authority to speak?
You can be sure of communication as social grooming
Communication of truth and reality we cant be sure of
    So what does that leave to talk about?
Talking to listen?
Truth and reality are subjective
    Not generalizable
    People keep searching and so communicating
    Truth by consensus
Loopy science
Elucidation vs. edification
Talking makes the world the way it is
Existentialist
We’re selfish, putting ourselves at the center of the universe
Conversation creates the world
Experience with chatter breaking down a category
    The power of chatter
        Especially in the last 50 years
Chatter as a dismissive term for talk, conversation, discussion
Shared process of constructing new worlds
    What problems does this suggest?
    How does that relate to being
Vote on how many of us think that there will be things that have never existed before in the future?
    Are wheels new?
What is new in the future is something that we can not now conceive
    Motivation for conversation
How many of us think we can create something new?
Creating new understandings
Questions, babies,
    Each individual baby is new, but babies as a concept are not new
 

For our project, sweetp and I made a presentation on our evolution in this class as it pertains to technology.  We made a PowerPoint presentation highlighting the differences between our approaches to computers and the internet, adding humorous pictures to our slides to make them visually engaging.  Sweetp talked about being a technophobe in a class where much of the assigned work was done on the internet and how she has learned to use the internet much more usefully and efficiently since the beginning of the semester.  I focused more on how this class helped me to focus on the reasons why I liked the internet and spent so much of my time on it.

the above posted images were part of  a slideshow that we were goingt to show at the end of class.

The slideshow consisted of pictures by a traveling artist. This series in particular was called ‘Step into Life’ – I thought this was relevant because it showed us where we had come. Each of the pictures is greatly detailed and needs to be viewed as both an entirety in itself and then needs to be zoomed in and broken into segments and appreciated in more detail. Like adjusting the boundaries of our frames – somthing we had learnt to do.

Play House Bingo while reading our script!

From: http://users.livejournal.com/_thickasabrick/3867.html

Here is the script for our performance today of House M.D.

by mkarol and xhan

We want to start this off with an exercise.

As you can see, we have the names of most of the characters from House as well as a list of seven characteristics. Everyone should break into groups of two or three, and what we want you to do as a pair (or trio) is to “define” each person using ONLY ONE of the attributes. You can just pair each number with a letter so it should only take about 3-5 minutes to do. We know that several people have only viewed a few episodes, so if you that’s the case, it might be a good idea to pair up with someone who watches the show more frequently. Otherwise, just do the best you can!

Characters:

1.  Gregory House
2.  Chris Taub
3. Eric Foreman
4. James Wilson
5. Lisa Cuddy
6. Robert Chase
7. Remy (thirteen) Hadley

“Definitions”:

• a.     Caring/concerned

• b.    Sarcastic
• c.     Argumentative
• d.    Diplomatic
• e.     Mischievous/playful
• f.       Uptight
• g.     Eager/opportunistic

(wait about 3 minutes, ask if everyone’s done)

Okay, now we want everyone to tell us how they matched people up…

    (students shouted out their answers)

So, not everyone attached the same characteristics to the same people. Many of the characters have similar traits, or maybe display more than one of the adjectives that we’ve asked you to use. When we try to fit something into one specific space and define it using only small terms or just one word, we make it one-dimensional. The only problem is that people AREN’T one-dimensional, and neither are books, blogs, stories, movies, and so on. So to try to give a definite label to something as a genre is to ignore the other facets of the work. And sometimes when we classify something (or someone), we’re just basing it off our own experience, without any other form of that “genre” to compare it to. This means that the categorization and “genre-fication” of a piece of writing is very reliant on the audience itself and the way it is received, transforming the boundaries of genre into a permeable membrane.