"Only connect! . . .Live in fragments no longer.” E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), ch. 22
‘One
day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form
in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are
half-asleep, ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity’.
For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did
by that sentence [...]” William Butler Yeats (cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats <,
1976, p.51 )
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PROJECTS
goals of the 375L projects
1a. To get a taste of what it is like to be a professional writer aiming at perfection and adopting the necessary time management, rewriting, and proofreading to become a great writer.
1b. To get a taste of writing as a work of art. Up to this point we have been practicing informal writing as way to overcome writer’s block and as a foundation for becoming good writers. We will continue to do so, but now we are going to do formal writing, writing as a work of art, and thus the best writing you can possibly do. Think of your project as, say, a statue: you want it to have as few flaws as possible, to be as “perfect” as possible.
1c. To practice writing energized by positive rather than negative motivations, by love of your work of art rather than fear of deadlines, by creativity rather than going through the motions, by curiosity rather than compulsion.
1d. To get a taste of the new world-wide writing, the instant publication of web writing. Computers don’t do what you want them to do: they do what you tell them to do, and in their coding they demand perfection. They have no forgiveness for errors in code. Hence, proofreading and attention to detail is crucial.
1e. To get a taste of the new writing of multimedia and learn the relation of writing to the visual arts (architecture, landscape architecture, sculpture, murals, paintings, drawings), to music, etc; to explore multiple intelligences, the right as well as the left side of the brain.
1f. To practice the new writing as the product of conscious, deliberate collaboration as well as isolation, drawing on the help and advice of your fellow students as well as your instructor.
1g.To carry collaboration to a new level, beyond discussion and peer editing, to an elaborate joint enterprise:
This semester we have an opportunity to be on the cutting edge of the new reading and writing. Those who choose to do so will be working together to some extent, contributing parts if not all of their projects to a joint project, rather like builders of the great monuments of the past: pyramids, temples, cathedrals, and centers of government. (Hence the extra relevance of one of our unifying symbols, the carpenter's hammer.) Unlike cathedral builders, however, each contributor will be named. You will have a chance for not only personal "immortality," therefore, but also that kind of awesome collective "immortality" embodied in the great monuments of the past. We will be working with students of the past and the future, and a graduate student in educational psychology, Alex Games, as well as the Center for Instructional Technology.
AND it will be more fun, because you will playing a video game, albeit an old-fashioned text-based quest explorer game with images and, if you wish, artificial intelligence, sound, video, animation, etc.
The game is housed in what is known as a MOO, a multi-player object-oriented game. "Object-oriented" in our case simply means we are able to create new spaces and characters.
The Center for Instructional Technology is supporting this project because it may help solve these pedagogical goals:
- Developing the ability of students to write about space, place, and personality.
- Increasing the students' knowledge of and connections to this campus and this town -- their own place, their second home, their alma mater.Developing the students' historical imaginations, freeing them to explore other places, other times. Conveying to a Texas-bound student the experience of other countries, especially their important places and buildings.Encouraging Texas students to access the radically different sense of time and history embodied in the architecture and customs of a culture of the Eastern hemisphere.Enabling Texas students to experience this semester a very different university experience, Oxford, with a thousand years of history. Inspiring students to feel the presence and support of their predecessors, the "ghosts" of the past associated with the places and spaces around them here and elsewhere. Technology's Role:To simulate places, spaces, and personalities as much as possible and to provide a platform for writing about them.Expected Outcome:
- A relatively permanent MOO architecture that can be used for many different literature, language, history, geography, and architecture classes.
2a. To get a taste of semiotics: an expanded sense of reading of the whole world as text.
2b. To increase “a sense of place” (Carnegie) as querencia, inscape, instress, genius loci, etc; to learn how to write about space and place .
2c. To articulate a sense of one’s ideal place.
2d. To explore the relation between place and culture: esp. Austin, Texas, USA, as compared to Europe
2e. To get a sense of the university as a place, esp. the campus as an alma mater, a second home: comparing U.T. to Oxford, Cambridge, etc.
3a. To explore the relation between place and time, esp. time as embodied in place, as in tracing the griffins in Littlefield House to the ancient monuments of Europe; to access the radically different sense of time and history embodied in the architecture and customs of a European culture.
3b. To explore the relation to of place to history, especially tensions between pastoral and urban, Hellenism and Hebraism, Greco-Roman and Gothic, modernism and antimodernism.
3c. To become aware of personal presence (ghosts, genii loci) as embodied in place, such as Joe Jones, Frank Dobie, and the students of 1969 and others in Waller Creek, and all the ghosts inhabiting the Harry Ransom Center; i.e. to give some sense of the social as well as environmental history of this campus, and comparable genius loci embodied in the social and environmental history of other colleges.
3d. To become aware of place in and out of time, to explore the relation between place and alternatives to consciousness of linear time.
4. To define our college experience, especially by comparing it to that of others unlike ourselves
5. To know oneself, one’s strengths and weaknesses in writing, as well as learning, reading, speaking, listening.
6. To become familiar with some of the loci classici of the literature of place as you find quotes to include in your projects.( O.E.D.: “locus classicus , a standard passage (esp. one in an ancient author) which is viewed as the principal authority on a subject.” )
7. To become familiar with some of the loci classici of Victorian literature, including but not limited to those associated with Victorian Oxford and Cambridge.
8. To make a good grade in this course: at 50% of the total, your projects are obviously a key determinant of the grade you will receive in this course.
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