January 2008 Archives

Download from this page: http://faculty.ithaca.edu/direnzo/docs/scholarship/mastersvoice/

Recent activity on the blogs of all members of this course. This page will update regularly, though it will often lag a few hours behind. To force an update, post a comment anywhere on this website or the NMJ website.

Jeremy Barrick
Daniella Choynowski
David Cristello
Dennis Jerz
Stormy Knight
Rachel Prichard
Leslie Rodriguez
Kayla Sawyer
Christopher Ulicne

This means the Plato selection in the anthology Writing Materials.

This is the large, thin text that is simply called Book.

Write a personal essay (about 750 words) that makes a specific point about your relationship with books.

The whole essay will represent your opinion, so avoid overusing terms such as "I think" or "I feel."  Avoid summarizing the plot of your favorite book, or giving a strictly chronological survey of your development as a writer.

A note on "the essay" as a literary genre:

As  a means for communicating ideas, as a means of documenting the individual author's attempts to come to grips with an idea, and of being a potential vehicle for the reader to experience a personal intellectual journey, the essay is a relatively new form (closely related to the history of books).

The word "essay" comes from a French word meaning "to try," which in turn comes from a Latin word meaning "to sift, to weigh, to separate by getting rid of waste." 

An essay, then, is a focused, thoughtful attempt to make a point, by introducing several different ways of solving a problem, and sifting through them in order to support the best alternative.  (All this is accomplished through the careful weighing of evidence.)

Think of the essay as a tool for your reader to solve a problem, to make sense of a dilemma, to understand a complex issue -- not merely a vehicle to express your personal thoughts.

oral -> manuscript -> print -> digital

• personal (one-to-one; one[-speaker]-to-many[-listeners])
• interactive
  
• memory and improvisation (the agora & the courts)
  
• limitation: the sound of the human voice
  

• private (one-to-one; several-to-several)
• contemplative
• scarcity and fidelity (scriptoria and the church)
  
• limitations: access to writing materials; access to written documents (for study or copying); hundreds of hours of precision labor for each book
  

• public (one-to-many)
• compartmentized
• accuracy and efficiency (standardized manufacture, standardized education, university culture)
  
• limitations: cheap paper only lasts a few centuries; competition favors authors with mass audiences; mistakes harder to correct

• impersonal (many-to-many)
• ephemeral
• immediacy and interactivity (erosion of privacy, erosion of print culture borders)
  
• limitations: spam & crap; competing notions of "ownership" (file-sharing and digital rights)

For every assigned text in the course that gets its own item on the Outline page, including an article, a section from a book, or some other document, I am asking every student to use the RRRR sequence contribute to an online discussion.

First we will start out simply posting a comment to the appropriate page on the course website.

But once everyone has had some time to experiment with the SHU weblog system, I'm asking for everyone to employ the following four-step process, designed to prepare for a productive online discussion.

The book is technology. The book is art. The book is as artificial as a Facebook profile. People have died for books.