Week Thirteen: Remix Culture and Intellectual Property

This morning we will be visiting the current exhibit at he Selby Galleries, Evan Roth: Intellectual Property Donor. We will meet in our usual classroom and attend the gallery show for an hour. We will return to our classroom at 10:15 for an assessment of some of the reading skills we have worked on this semester.

The reading assignment for next week is to read Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage. The writing assignment is to compose your own page incorporating an insight or observation you have about the current mediascape to add to McLuhan's book. Post your page on your blog by next week's class, Nov. 25. We will review the pages in class and meet with David Houle the college's resident futurist.

Please bring your laptop to class today.

Week Eleven: Reverse Adaptation

Last week we looked at the adaptation of graphic novels into film. This week we are looking at this process in reverse.  Select a screenplay to read from the course resource page. Please select one for which, ideally, you have not seen the movie. Read the screenplay without watching the movie.






Writing Assignment: Select a significant scene from the screenplay you have chosen. Adapt this scene into a one to two page comic. Remember this is not a storyboard, please use any of the techniques unique to comics to try to energize your story. The completed work does not have to be produced in a finished form. The quality of the art is not important to this assignment, what is important is how you break down the story and shape into sequential art. The primary point is to focus on communicating what you think are the important threads that run through the scene in the screenplay. Please post your comic on your blog. 

After you make your comic you can watch the movie for your screenplay.

Looking ahead to the next assignment your will be asked to watch three movies from a list of directors on the syllabus. Discuss how the three films embody a point of view of the director as author, should you believe that such a point of view exists. Alternatively you can argue against the authorial point of view as a way to understand and read film.

Week Ten: Adapting the Graphic Novel

Reading Assignment: Please read the graphic novel Ghostworld by Daniel Clowes by next week's class. In class next week we will consider this graphic novel, the movie made from it, and the issues of adapting graphic novels into films. 

Project Assignment: Before next week's class please adapt one of the partial scenes from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing into a small film (cell phone cameras preferred) or audio play. You can reset the play, add to the play, subtract from the original script all that you need to in order to get your vision of the script to work. The idea is to take a thread that runs through the text and emphasize that thread in your adaptation.

The scenes that I am recommending that you choose from in making your adaptation are the following, there is a separate PDF for each scene that focuses on just the selection from the script of the play that you need.

Much Ado The Song

Act II, Scene 2 Don John conspires with Borachio

Act II, Scene 3 Benedick talks about not falling in love

Act III Scene 1 Hero and Ursula entrap Beatrice

Act IV, last part of Scene 1, Beatrice "If I were a man" speech

Act IV scene 2, Constable Dogberry interrogates Borachio and Conrad



To help your thinking about this project, here is Hollywood Madam's Three Laws of Adaptation which discusses what she considers the three most important criteria when translating a book into a film.

Week Nine: Pattern Recognition and Adapting Classic Texts

Publicity Photo for Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing

This week I am asking you to watch a movie adapted from a Shakespeare Play. The play is Much Ado About Nothing and the adaptation is a 2012 film by Joss Whedon. You should read the text of the play on the course resource page if you can. You can watch another film of the play (there are several) if you can't find the Whedon version. 

Here is an excellent interview with Whedon conducted by Tavi Gevinson on her Blog Magazine, Rookie. This is well worth reading and you should read it before coming to class if you want some excellent insight on Whedon's filming of the play. 

We will use our reading of the play in text and film adaptation to discuss approaches to adapting texts. We will discuss some various ways to approach some selected scenes from the play and work through some of the steps to planning adaptations of our own.  The general point of our inquiry is to explore some of the the elements of transformation of individual and specific works across mediums.

Sixth Writing Assignment: Post a discussion on your blog about an aspect of the way in which the text of Sleep Donation by Karen Russell is situated.  You can substitute a discussion of the short story, "Vampires in the Lemon Grove," if you need a shorter text to read. I am asking you to consider the work in context, and discuss just one thread of the way in which the text is connected to other works along whatever thread you have chosen,  We have been focusing on ways to read that are grounded in the ways we make or can't make connection with the work. This week we are focusing on ways to read that are founded in the modes and manners in which a particular work/event is connected to other works/events.

Week Eight: Defining the Writer's Position and the Situation of the Text

Karen Russell from the MacArthur Foundation Awards Site

Last week we worked toward understanding how the position of the reader effects the reading of the text. To underscore that concept, the Fifth Writing Assignment is described below.  Please complete the writing by next week and post it as an entry on your blog. (See revised course requirement below about student blogs).

Reading Assignment for Week Eight: Please read Sleep Donation, a short novella by Karen Russell. Please try to have it read before coming to class. There will be additional in-class reading next week.

Preview: Karen Russell (Wikipedia Entry) has emerged as a prominent writer of the millennial generation.  She has been the recipient of a number of awards including the MacArthur Fellowship. You can go to her Amazon page and read some of the mediated and unmediated comments, the reviews on this page are generally intelligently written by readers who are interested in reading good writing, they can be generally helpful to preview the work we are reading (Her Amazon Page). Popular writers attract a lot of empty discourse and self-important flatulence in their Amazon reviews, but literary writers tend to get a high percentage of thoughtful responses. This can be a good place to enter the conversation you will be carrying on in your own blog.

Here is a link to an interview in which she talks about How She Writes.

Required Film: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2013) dir. Wes Anderson,

Fifth Writing Assignment: Write a blog post that discusses how your situation, your personal position, affected your reading of The Dewbreaker by Edwidge Danticat. You should have at least read the first story in this novel made of short stories. One way you might define your position on the story is to consider what you don't relate to or what elements of the story are not similar to your life or experience. In other words, contrast your situation with that of the story instead of compare.

Revised Course Requirement: As we discussed in class last week, I am suspending the regular use of Canvas as the course interface. Instead I am asking you to create a blog on Blogger or similar network and use your blog to post your writings and comments for the remainder of the course. As soon as you have created your blog and posted something on it, send me the URL so I can add it to the blog list for the class on this page. Please do this before our next class meeting. Bring you laptop or table to class please.

Week Six: Howl, and the Generational Strategy to Cultural Work

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at the grave of Jack Kerouac 1975 by Ken Regan

The featured work we are reading this week is the long poem, Howl by Allen Ginsberg. A version of the text is available online at this link:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308

The link includes not only the print version of the poem but an audio recording of Allen Ginsberg reading the work. We will be considering this poem, the significance of what we came to call the "Beat" writers and the strategy of addressing a generational audience. Please read/listen to the poem before coming to class.

Required Film: Please watch Kill Your Darlings (2014) dir. John Krokidas starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsburg. 

We will have had two weeks since last we met so it is expected that you will have completed reading Siddhartha and posted your discussion about the experience of reading a particular passage, scene or segment of the work and your understanding of it. Feel free to express your personal connection to the portion of the text you are discussing.


Writing Assignment: Write an extended comment about a work or set of works you think embody the perspective of your generation. You might discuss what you are defining as the characteristics of your generation and how that is expressed in cultural works you respond to. Discuss a few specific works that in your opinion give "voice" to the outlooks and attitudes shared by your generation. Discuss how the specific work you've chosen is an exemplar of the characteristic(s) you've illuminated. Post your comment on Canvas in the a queue for the fourth assignment.

Week Five: Reading As Mind Expansion

This week we are reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. This is a short novel whose reading is intended to inform the actual practice of our lives. Not all books are designed to do this, but many texts are surrounded by a rhetoric of application that goes beyond entertainment--the idea that a text should be useful and an aid to the increase of our understanding of the world and the people in it.

During our discussion of the work in class, we will explore the nature of meaning in the work, how "meaning" is created by the narrative, and how that meaning might be applied. We must also consider how texts contradict themselves and offer a variety of doorways into multiple constructions of meaning. Please read the book before coming to class. If you have read it before, try reading it again and see if your idea of the book and its application to your life has changed since the first time you read it.

Writing Assignment #2:  This week please post your second writing in Canvas. Your writing should consider an extended passage or scene from either True Grit or Pride and Prejudice and the four levels of discourse the passage incites. Start with a restatement of text and then a description of what the text seems to be doing. Move on to an interpretation of the passage and finally discuss how this interpretation is affected by the elements of  mediation that contextualize the text. The target length for this exercise is about 500 words. 

No Class Next Week: Next week there will be no classes on Tuesday because of faculty professional day. There will be a writing assignment as well as an assignment to read "Howl" by Allen Ginsburg. We will discuss the poem in more detail in class in our next class meeting on Sept. 30.

Week Two: Transmedia Culture--The Hunger Games

Still from amateur Propo for The Hunger Games

This week I am asking you to read whatever volume of The Hunger Games that you haven't read yet. In what ways is The Hunger Games like The Wizard of Oz? What elements are similiar? Are the themes alike? Why is this the case? How is the Hunger Games a transmedia text? How has the Hunger Games become spreadable media?

Jennifer Lawrence read Mockingjay

We will discuss these issues and begin writing your written response to the first two texts in the course during this week's class. Please watch at least one of the Hunger Games movies before this week's class discussion. 

On the set of Mockingjay

Remember to check the course resource page and please remember to bring your laptop or tablet to class. We will be writing in class this week.

Week One: Wizard of Oz

Illustration by W.W. Denslow 1900

Welcome to Literature and Media Studies, the required course in literature at Ringling.  I will go over the syllabus with you when we meet on Tuesday morning in room 208 of the Academic Center. 

Before our first class please 

read The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. There are several free versions of this text online but I have placed a version with the original illustrations on the course resource page. You can access the course resource page using this link or the link in the course links box in the upper right of this page. The username and password required to access the course resources are your Ringling username and password. 

If you have read the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz recently, read another of L. Frank Baum's Oz books. These are available on the course resource page to download and read electronically or on an e-reader. The pdf versions of these books have been scanned with original illustrations which is an important aspect of reading these books.

After you have read an Oz book please read one of the selected short stories on the course resource page by contemporary authors who revisit the concept of Oz. It would be also good, if you get the chance, to see the 1939 Movie, The Wizard of Oz or the 1985 movie, Return to Oz especially if you have never seen them before. Please do not watch the movie and think this substitutes for reading the book. 

So here is your check list for what you need to do before class on Tuesday:

1. Read The Wizard of Oz, or one of its sequels. Read the book, just watching the movie of the Wizard of Oz is fine but does not meet the assignment.
2. Read one of the short stories revisiting Oz.
3. Try to watch the required movie for this week, The Wizard of Oz.
4. Bring your laptop or Ipad to class on Tuesday morning.

You can email me any questions. I will see you on Tuesday morning. If you want to read ahead our next book will be Suzanne Collin's Mockingjay, the third book in the Hunger Games Trilogy.