Welcome to Visual Thinking and Writing
Your homework to complete before we meet again on Thursday:
- Read over this website very carefully as it constitutes the syllabus for this course. Note that the Syllabus page includes a number of subpages, covering such topics as: how to contact me; the course learning objectives; the texts you need to buy; attendance, participation, and other policies; and how you will be graded. There is also a calendar of reading and assignments; and pages describing the major and minor assignments this semester.
- Add this site to your bookmarks. Make certain that you can find your way back here, because you’ll be spending a lot of time visiting these pages over the course of this semester.
- Sign up for a basic, free WordPress site.
- Leave a comment on this post asking a question about the syllabus. Put the URL for the site you created above in the “website” line on the comment form.
- Join the class Aula site: simply go to https://app.aula.education/, select “Join a class” and use this class key when registering: bpl526
- Reply to this survey form, which both asks some basic information I’ll need in order to manage communications with you and also asks some questions that will help me get to know you a little bit better.
- Read the introduction to Understanding Rhetoric. We’ll spend some time discussing it in class on Thursday.
https://haileykarten.wordpress.com
What was your approach to choosing the texts that we will be reading and exploring this semester?
Maus is such a foundational work in the history of comics — especially nonfiction and literary comics — that it pretty much had to be on the list. It won the Pulitzer in 1995 and is still probably the most well-known graphic novel ever. I also wanted to teach Fun Home, which I have taught before and is amazing, but then when I read Spinning, I knew it belonged in this class and I didn’t want to have more than one straight memoir on the list. And those two are similar in many other ways, so I decided to drop Fun Home from my list. But Maus and Spinning are both kind of “creative nonfiction”; in other words, they tell stories, albeit grounded in fact. Having journalistic comics was also important to me — war and history are also important genres for graphic novels. I considered a number of different examples, but Palestine is such a powerful and important text, with some connections to Maus that it felt right to include it. And Pyongyang is more recent, and also has strong connections with Sacco’s book, so that made sense too.
I’ll be bringing in some short excerpts of a few other texts along the way too.
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Where were you when you wrote the syllabus?
Hmm … I guess that depends on what counts as writing “the syllabus.” I proposed the topic for this class in spring 2016 and starting then I’ve been keeping a Google doc of ideas that I’ve added to as things have come up. I put together the text that makes up the current site in a couple of Google docs and as physical notes on a pad of paper mostly while I was sitting in my office. I actually built the current iteration of the website in the span of an hour or two while sitting on my couch at home halfway watching my partner play Zelda Breath of the Wild.
https://natesblog951731639.wordpress.com/
Do you have an estimate for when the individual conferences will be?
Are we responsible for setting up a meeting or will time slots be offered in class?
Thank you.
Usually I will require a conference during the first paper — I’m still a bit undecided about whether in this class that will be designated as while you’re working on the literacy narratives or while you’re working on Tracing Maus — and for that one I will circulate a sign up sheet with a list of times when I’m available and you’ll choose a slot then meet with me. Sometimes I do the same thing a second time later in the semester. Sometimes I will leave it to you to set up a second meeting with me at the time when you decide will best serve your needs. Which of those paths I take is determined by my read of the class as a group and which will be most productive for you.
I require two conferences at a minimum, but my hope is that I’ll meet with each of you more frequently than that.
Will there be an overlying theme of the sketches that will evolve into one grand project that we turn in for our final portfolio? Or will it be more of dipping our toes into a little bit of every area?
There is a bit of method to the madness of the sketch assignments, but more on the level of the sorts of skills they develop. They don’t evolve into a single grand project, exactly, but one of the things I’ll want you to think about as you develop your final portfolio is how they cohere together in your development as a writer and thinker. We’ll definitely talk more about this question as the semester goes forward.
Would it be possible to mess around with the HTML and CSS of my WordPress website if I wanted to? Thanks.
If you have your own domain and server space, then you can very easily mess around with the HTML and CSS on your site. However, if you are using WordPress.com for your site, then having access to the code is a “premium feature” and you need to pay more for that. It’s been awhile since I looked at that, but as of a couple of years ago, at least, it was $100/year to have that feature — definitely do not pay money to WordPress for access to premium features like that though!
I am wholeheartedly in support of you getting your hands into the code on your site, so if that’s something you’re interested in, maybe talk to me soon about getting server space and switching over to WordPress.org.
Because some of you don’t have copies of Understanding Rhetoric yet, I uploaded a scan of the intro to course reserves. One note: my copy of the second edition was probably delivered today while I’m on campus, so the scan I uploaded is from the first edition. I am pretty sure there aren’t any changes to the intro except for page numbers, but just so you are aware.
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Whats your favorite color?
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What is your favorite your favorite piece of art from any form of art?
That’s a really difficult question to answer. Maybe Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. or Fountain or The Treachery of Images by Renee Magritte. But if you ask me on a different day, you’d probably get a very different answer.