syllabus and schedule

English 264: New Media and Literature
Professor Jen Boyle
MW 1.10-2.40pm
Office: Swannanoa 203
Phone: 6433
Email: jboyle@hollins.edu
Office hours: Course Blackboard site: http://bb.hollins.edu/

PLEASE NOTE: PRINTED RESERVE MATERIALS WILL BE AVILABLE AT BLACKBOARD

Course Blog: http://newmedialit.wordpress.com/

More information on the Hollins Community New Media Project (see page at blog site)

REQUIREMENTS:
Weekly responses to discussion, blog forum (blog entries: at least once a week every student will post a reading response to the course blog.
) = 25%
Participation, writing revisions, presentations of secondary materials and project = 15%
Two media analyses (see below) = 30%
Final summative project = 35%

ADDITIONAL EXPECTATIONS AND CONTRACTS:

o All viewpoints or positions on the material are welcome (all!), but they must be offered with respect and in the spirit of healthy feedback and argumentation. All positions and viewpoints expressed should relate to the course material and concepts.
o You must participate in all writing revisions and workshops to receive full credit. As you will come to know, I strongly emphasize revision. Thus, the writing and new media exercises for this class are as much about the challenges of this process as they are about what you end up with as a final draft .
o Since revision is a process I value, I will offer opportunities for us to revise , discuss, and workshop writing assignments together (in individual conferences with me and as a class). The main objective of this class is to take risks and to investigate with expansive energy the concepts and texts encountered.
o The final project for this course will allow you to move across disciplines and genres and to experiment with various lines of critical, experimental, and creative expression.

Some tips for a good experience:

Come to class
Follow all steps to a given assignment, and make use of all resources – resources in class and outside of class
Don’t come in late too often
Don’t miss a class and then ask me to reanimate it in detail or spirit on email
Don’t resist taking risks that allow you to experiment with a new way of writing, thinking, or creating
Feel free to call me “Jen” or “Professor Boyle”
Come to office hours to talk about assignments , course material, or projects
Respectfully challenge readings and arguments that emerge in the class (mine included)

A further note about this course: We will be looking at a variety of literary and non-fiction texts in various forms, including conventional printed texts and electronic texts and artifacts. Many of the texts that we will read, discuss, and write about are only available in on-line or computer environments. Thus, it is a requirement of the course that you plan for regular computer access in order to participate in discussion and complete assignments. There will be some scheduled “laboratory” time where you can spend time learning specific software programs and working with computers on campus. However, you will also need to have computer access outside of these planned activities (I will provide an overview during the first week of class of the facilities and software available on campus). YOU MUST PLAN TO HAVE ACCESS TO THE ON-LINE MATERIALS, AND YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING SURE YOU USE A COMPUTER THAT IS EQUIPPED FOR VIEWING THE WORKS; CAMPUS COMPUTERS MAY WORK BEST IF YOU HAVE A SLOWER CONNECTION AT HOME (more about this on the first day of class) –

Texts:

Printed texts:

Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New TechnoCulture Fourth Estate; New Ed edition (August 20, 1998) [ISBN: 1857026985
Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers. (Pantheon, 2004) [ISBN: 0375423079]
Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2. Picador; Reprint edition (January 1, 2004) [ISBN: 0312423136]

Printed reserve materials:
“The Garden of the Forking Paths” (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges
“What is New Media? Eight Propositions” by Lev Manovich
“The Message is the Medium” by Marshall McLuhan
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson
“The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” by William S. Burroughs
“Prose and Anticombinatronics” by Italo Calvino
“Time Frames” (excerpted from Understanding Comics) by Scott McCloud
Excerpts, Narrative as Virtual Reality
Excerpts from Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
Excerpts from Writing Machines by N. Katherine Hayles
“The Virtual Barrio@the Other Frontier”;
“Culture Jamming” by Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Excerpts From Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal;
Excerpts from “Requiem for the Media” by Jean Baudrillard
The Fall of the House of Usher
 by Edgar Allan Poe
“A Rape In Cyberspace” by Jullian Dibbel
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century by Donna Haraway

SEE ALSO THE ELECTRONIC WORKS UNDER EACH UNIT/DAY

Required on-line materials: SEE INDIVIDUAL UNITS AND CLASS SESSIONS BELOW

W: 8/29: Lectures and on-line materials: Literature and/as media; hypertexts and interactivity
Read on-line: “The Original Author” (http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/eng495/paper2.htm)

Assignments: read and discuss in class: Hayles’ checklist and title page from the illuminated manuscript, Book of Kells
Images from Book of Kells
 (http://www.snake.net/people/paul/kells/); Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think” (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush)

On-line: The Jew’s Daughter (http://www.thejewsdaughter.com/)

M:9/3
FIELD TRIP TO HOLLINS CAMERA OBSCURA (LOCATED JUST OPPOSITE BOTETOURT, SMALL BLDG UNDER STAIRS

“The Garden of the Forking Paths” (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges (R); “What is New Media? Eight Propositions” by Lev Manovich (R) [see also, on-line version of Borges]

W:9/5
“The Message is the Medium” by Marshall McLuhan; Roland Barthes, excerpts, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (R)
on-line: Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (R)
(OL)
Sunshine 69 (1996) (http://www.sunshine69.com/69_Start.html)by Robert Arellano (OL)
Electronic Lit – What Is It? (http://eliterature.org/pad/elp.html#sec0 ) (OL)

Assignment for the week: blog entry

M: 9/10: “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin” by William S. Burroughs (R); Excerpts, Writing Machines N. Katherine Hayles (R)
On-line: Leslie Jarzabski, Apple (http://www1.hollins.edu/classes/eng335/jarzabskil/milton.htm)
Agrippa, A book of the Dead (http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/)
Secondary:
Electropoetics (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/sited)

Assignments: bring in material for cut-up poem

W: 9/12: Excerpts from Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie-Laure Ryan (R)
On-line: HTML – “The Basic HTML Tutorial”; WebMonkey tutorials on Tables and Forms (http://www.webmonkey.com/teachingtool/)

M: 9/17
Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones
On-line : John Cayley, what we will/riverlandQT
( http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/net/in/?riverisland.html)
Marrow Monkey (http://www.marrowmonkey.com/menu.html)

W: 9/19
Plant, Zeroes and Ones
“Prose and Anticombinatronics” by Italo Calvino
First Lab: “Coding”
On-line: Processing.org (http://processing.org/)

M: 9/24: Zeroes and Ones
On-line: TED conference Video Lecture: Richard Baraniuk, (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/25) Open Source Knowledge [Critical view: pay attention to rhetoric, metaphors, and modes of spectacle/address here…]
The Connexions site at Rice University (http://cnx.org/ ) [click on “languages” here and be prepared to discuss your findings]

W:9/26: Guillermo Gomez-Pena, “The Virtual Barrio@the Other Frontier”;
“Culture Jamming” (R)
On-line: Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (http://free-culture.org/freecontent/)
Assignments: in class writing

M:10/1: From Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal; Excerpts from “Requiem for the Media” by Jean Baudrillard (R)
On-line: Simon Penny’s Installations (OL) (http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/) [pick one from “works” for discussion/exercise on “degrees and sentiments of ‘freedom’”
Assignments: First Media Analysis

W: 10/3: Preparation for on site installation


On site Installation: “The Hollins Community Project”

Assignments: take home q PROJECT: “Binary Numbers”

M:10/8: “Time Frames” (excerpted from Understanding Comics) by Scott McCloud (R)
Group discussion on Hollins Community Project; group schedules

W: 10/10: In the Shadow of No Towers

M: 10/15: In the Shadow of No Towers

W: 10/17: In the Shadow of No Towers

Hollins Community Lab

M: 10/22: Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
“A Rape In Cyberspace” by Jullian Dibbel (R)
on-line: Second Life: Your World Your Imagination (http://secondlife.com/)

W: 10/24: Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (R)
On-line: Coco Fusco’s Virtual Laboratory (http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/index.html)

M: 10/29: Stephanie Strickland, vniverse
 (http://www.vniverse.com/)
Incunabula, works of on-line art by women (http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/incubation/gallery/featured_works.cfm)
Assignments: SECOND MEDIA ANALYSIS
Group discussion of FINAL PROJECTS ON “CULTURE JAMMING”

W: 10/31: “Ludology: Simulation versus Narrative”


M: 11/5: “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/lazzi-fair)
On-line: Tactical Iraqi (http://www.tacticallanguage.com/tacticaliraqi/)
Mary Flanagan, Domestic (http://maryflanagan.com/domestic/index.htm)

W: 11/7: q PROJECT: “Cryptology and Cryptanalysis of the Shift Cipher”

M: 11/12: Galatea 2.2

W: 11/14: Galatea 2.2
on-line: Reading Frankenstein (http://beallcenter.uci.edu/exhibitions/reading2003.php)

M: 11/19-23: T BREAK

M: 11/26: Galatea 2.2; Penny, “Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation” (http://ace.uci.edu/penny/texts/ethicsofsimulation.html)

W: 11/28: TBA; CULTURE JAMMING Presentations

M: 12/3: TBA; Presentations

W: 12/5: Presentations

8-13; EXAM WEEK: Final Projects and statements