DWRL Lesson Plans - Jake Ptacek

Google Images and Book Covers - Tracking Cultural Change

Ptacek — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 19:37:08 +0000

Author:

Image Credit:

Screen shot of Lolita book covers retrieved with Google image search

Brief Assignment Overview:

Images on book covers, blurbs or reviews on dust jackets, and publishers’ summaries all provide constructed argumentation about the text within that is designed to provoke an emotional and analytic response. This lesson plan is designed to get students thinking about the ways in which cover images provide valuable evidence in the way in which a text (in this case, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita) is marketed and interpreted over time.

Type of Assignment:

Class Discussion

In-class Exercise

Assignment Length:

Single Class Period

One-Two Class Periods

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Audience

Visual Rhetoric

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Pre-Writing

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Open Access Software

Remediation

Visualization

Media Requirements:

Adaptable For Use Without Classroom Technology

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Required Materials:

I created this lesson for a networked classroom where each student could have internet access, though a classroom without could request that students print out their images the night before, or profitably use a projector as the groups present.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Useful Anytime

First Day/Week

Early in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

Students are often presented with paratextual apparati that contributes to determining their response to a work of literature. Images on book covers, blurbs or reviews on dust jackets, and publishers’ summaries all provide constructed argumentation about the text within that is designed to provoke an emotional and analytic response. This lesson plan is designed to get students thinking about the ways in which cover images provide valuable evidence in the way in which a text (in this case, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita) is marketed and interpreted over time. I found that this in turn could contribute to a discussion of a text as a historical document.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Before this class I had given a brief lecture on the history of the composition and publication of Lolita, and we looked at and analyzed the original French cover together, asking questions that were quite similar to the ones in the student prompt.

I had my students log into their computers and head to Google Images. I broke my students up into two- or three-person teams as I have 22 students in this class, but this is of course optional. (NB: Depending on the text, you may wish to enable the “safe search” function on your computers—searching Lolita brought up some occasionally questionable material.)

I handed out prompts to each group (see below in student instructions).

After 20-25 minutes, we came back together and we took a tour through the classroom, where each group gave a brief presentation based on their prompt for the rest of the class.

I did this in one 45-minute class, but the assignment could easily be expanded or transformed into a take-home exercise as needed. In the future I think I will try to make this a two-day exercise. I’d like to have the students upload their images to a class wiki, so that we could easily put them into chronological order, which would allow us to clearly and easily see how the images change (or remain static) over time.

Instructions For Students:

Your goal in this exercise is to think about how a cover image for the novel Lolita constructs a reader's response to the novel. What kinds of things does this image make us think? What does it say about the novel at that historical moment? To do so, you will use Google Images to find a striking cover image for the novel and analyze the image.

Once you’ve logged into your computers, head to Google Images
When you’ve arrived at Google Images you and your partner should search for some cover images used on the novel Lolita. Try some different searches—adding different key words (cover vs book) or countries (America vs Australia) will often provide you with different content.
Discover when and where your image was created—is it a Turkish edition from 1959? A Russian edition from the 1990’s? An American edition from the 2000’s? What type of image is it—a photograph? A drawing? A painting? Is it an identifiable piece of art (a famous painting or photograph) or does it look like it was commissioned for that edition?
With your partner, think about and brainstorm some answers to the following questions: What are the first words that come into your mind when you see this image? What does it make you think of? If you hadn’t read any of the novel, what would this image make you think the book was about? Now that you’ve read (some of ) the novel, what kind of relationship(s) does this image have to the text? Who seems to be portrayed? From whose viewpoint are we looking? Does this image spark any ideas about the cultural construction of the book? What kinds of people would make this book, and what kinds of people would read it? These questions are only a starting place. Please feel free to explore and think about more issues raised by your image.

Be prepared to enlighten the rest of the class about the image you’ve chosen (when and where it’s from, and a brief summary of your thinking about part 4) for about 3-5 minutes.

Evaluation Suggestions:

I did not formally evaluate this assignment except as part of daily class participation

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

This was an easy and even fun way to get a conversation started about how paratexts can affect the ways that we read, and also helped us to talk about how different cultural and historical moments look at texts differently. Students who are sometimes reluctant to traditionally close-read in class can often surprise themselves with a sophisticated reading of a visual text, and keeping the exercise group-oriented and low stakes allows them to demonstrate their skills with little pressure.

Course Type:

Literary Studies Course

Tags:

Using Storify to Analyze Poetry

Ptacek — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 21:14:34 +0000

Author:

Jake Ptacek

Image Credit:

Screenshot of Storify page by Jake Ptacek

Brief Assignment Overview:

Students often conceptualize poems as monolithic objects from the past. This lesson plan helps encourage them to visualize and conceptualize the content and influence of a poem in different registers.

Type of Assignment:

Major Course Project

Assignment Length:

Course Unit

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Visual Rhetoric

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

The goal of this exercise is to encourage students to transform their relationship with the words on the page, to see a poem as a living cultural argument rather than a set-in-stone text. It is also designed to encourage students to think about poetry as different kinds of media.

Media Requirements:

Media Console/Projector

Required Materials:

Students will require access to a computer, whether in class or outside of the classroom.

A computer and projector.

A Storify account.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Early in the Semester

Mid-Semester

Late in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

Poems are not simply one-time literary events. Instead, they make arguments about the culture a poet lives and practices her art in as well as arguments about the culture within which the reader lives. In this assignment, students will create a multimedia presentation using Storify to help elucidate a poem's meaning, but also to examine how that poem appears in our contemporary media culture. Storify helps them track appearances of the poem as a whole (or of selected lines) in social media.

This helps students see the present-day influence of a text. It also allows them to provide line-by-line annotation and to think about the poem as a visual or audio media event, rather than simply words on a page. Students may also provide interpretaive material: music from the time period, photographs or videos that reference images, characters, or places in the poem.

Storify provides an excellent platform for this analysis because it allows users to search social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as more conventional sites like Google and Youtube, for materials related to their project. This allows students to create a visually appealing presentation of the poem to their classmates with relative ease.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Familiarize yourself with Storify beforehand; be prepared to set aside some class time to create and navigate accounts for your students.

Instructions For Students:

This project will form the basis of your in-class presentation, so please plan ahead accordingly.

In this project, you will create a visual presentation of the poem you have chosen using Storify. You will type out the entire poem. For each line of the poem, you will find at least two images, quotations, websites, videos, or songs that will help us elucidate or make sense of the poem you have chosen. They may comment directly on the line in question, or offer a representation of a figure, place, image, or theme within that line, or they may have a more oblique relationship to the line in question. However, you must be able to demonstrate the relevance of each component to our understanding of the poem itself. However, you are free to--and encouraged to--be creative and exploratory in your creation of a Storify page.

You will present your post to the rest of the class in our penultimate week in a 6-8 minute presentation.

Evaluation Suggestions:

This assignment is still in the experimental phase, so I have not yet evaluated any student posts. It will be part of their presentation grade, which is determined by both content and professionalism of delivery.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

Again, this is still in the experimental phase. Undoubtedly I will need to make the "Student Assignment" directions clearer and more specific.

Additional Resources:

My thanks to Cate Blouke, who first demonstrated the power of Storify to me.

Course Type:

Intermediate Writing Course

Literary Studies Course

Course Description:

I am currently testing this assignment in my E314L: Reading Poetry course.

What’s so special about poetry? What makes it so popular throughout history? Why do figures as different as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Geoffrey Hill, Aristotle and Heidegger, John Stuart Mill and T. S. Eliot—even Bob Dylan and Morrissey—care so much about it? Why has it always been central to the practice of literary criticism? What does it mean to write a poem, to read one, or even, as Mary Poovey suggested, to live inside one? And what is a poem, even? Is it a matter of form, or function, or technique?

In order to begin answering these questions, we will investigate very different lyric poets and poetry—including, for example, Sappho, nursery rhymes, Shakespeare, John Donne, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christina Rossetti, William Butler Yeats, and the Smiths—with an eye to both the similarities and differences in their poetical practices. Each of these poets returns again and again to the lyric form—to express their fears about war, their anxieties about sex, their relationship to nature and to cities, trying to make sense of the world around them.

No prior knowledge of poetry or critical theory is required. As we progress, we’ll develop as a class a set of critical and formal vocabularies to help us make sense of the poetry. We will focus on developing literary analysis and research skills, and to that end we will read both classic and modern pieces of criticism in order to give us conceptual models for our own academic work. We’ll also work on honing our research and writing skills, and use the Oxford English Dictionary to help us make sense of how historical changes in the English language affect poetry and our understanding of it. These skills will prove useful not only to English majors, but to students of many disciplines

Tags:

Close Reading

Visual Analysis

Multimedia Presentation

Storify

Poetry

Literature