When listening to and reading the online materials for next week, I’d like you to especially examine the way these authors are putting things together in a pattern. How are the three (very) different stories in This American Life put together around a single theme, for example? How is the Folksongs project putting various sounds together to make a pattern?

You will want to start thinking about the question of patterns for your own project. How can you put together different pieces of research and writing in order to find patterns in the “junk” you’ve collected?

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There will be NO CLASS on Thursday the 13th (our next class).

Spend time developing your topic ideas. You should commit to a topic by the 18th.

Hometown Badhdad

What’s the story being told in this documentary?

“Troops”

“Saif <3 Noor”

“Mentally F’ed Up”

“Market Boom“

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• Stranging your topic: Showing what we don’t know about ordinary or “obvious” topics

• Dialectical images: Expanding your scope and relevance.

• Montage in style and substance 

James Agee was writing during the 1930s, a terrible time for many Americans who depended on the earth for a living. Farmers were ruined, and families in the south turned to sharecropping in order to survive. It was a hard life—-harder than most of us could imagine. In fact, many northerners and wealthier Americans could not imagine it.

Read the rest of this entry »

• Method: What’s your writing method?

• Inventional thought: How do you develop, invent, and expand on ideas?

• Collection: Research as searching first, before eliminating.

• Montage/collage: Making arguments and narratives through non-linear fragments.

• Writing experiments as inventional process. In class writings.

- Ethnography: ethnos + graph (people + writing) Read the rest of this entry »

The Arcades Project shows a method of research, writing, and thinking. Yet, none of what is here might be recognizable as “research.” Benjamin’s methodology is inventive, but it is also a very different way of thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to English 3010. To get started, you should take a look at our syllabus, which you will find right here. You will also find a link to our course wiki under the blogroll links. You’ll want to check this page often for updates, more links, announcements, and other good things.

During our first week, you’ll want to get familiar with the wiki. That’s where we’ll be doing a lot of writing and reading. You will first need to set up an account on the wiki. From there, you can start editing your own page. Instructions are on the wiki itself. Plan to do this by Thursday’s class.

If you’d like to get in touch with me, please email me at ricejh [at] missouri.edu