Write an essay of no more than 2500 words (up to 8 typed, double-spaced pages) on one of the following topics. Please use current MLA formatting. Please remember that these are prompts and suggestions: feel free to adapt and to re-focus as you see fit. Please note, as it says in topic number 8, that I’m also happy to encourage you to produce various forms of practice-based research and creative-critical hybrids, if you wish. The work should be roughly equivalent in size – check with me – to an 8-page paper.
1. At the beginning of Deactivated West 100, Don McKay presents what he comes to call a “geopoetic” project that creates a “reverse flow” between the human and the non-human, a project he focuses on writing “otherwise than place.” With reference to the work of two writers or artists on the course syllabus, investigate the tensions between place and displacement.
2. Near the beginning of this course, we read In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism by the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers; in one passage, she describes how contemporary concerns around the environment provoke “the felt necessity of trying to listen to that which insists, obscurely" (19). With reference to the work of two writers or artists on the course syllabus, discuss the re-imagining of forms of audition. How and why do these thinkers invite us to listen differently?
3. Most of the work we have read or looked at or listened to this term responds to a deep sense of human catastrophe, that what has been called the Anthropocene – or the age of the human – also marks a looming end to our species. How do these works address any possibility of hope or help for human life? Is remediation or redemption possible? Respond to this question with direct reference to the work of two writers or artists on the course syllabus.
4. How are the boundaries of genre or medium re-imagined in the work of two writers or artists on the course syllabus? How does their work become intermedia? What innovations, revisions, hybrids or expansions of conventional form do they enact? To what ends?
5. In what ways does the work of two writers or artists on the course syllabus trouble our senses of the human body? How is corporeality put at issue? What is an ecology of the body? How and why are bodies networked, or autonomous?
6. At the root of the term “ecology” is the ancient Greek word oikos, meaning “home.” What constitutes “home” in the work of two writers or artists on the course syllabus? How is the concept and the materiality of home put at issue in their work?
7. Revise, extend and develop one of your earlier papers or projects for this course. You must transform your thinking in some way: where does your earlier work lead you now? Please refer to the work of two writers or artists on the course syllabus.
8. A project of your own devising. I am happy to encourage your thinking around practice-based research and creative-critical hybrids. Please check in with me before you begin to write.
Due on or before the date of our final examination, Monday, December 19, 2016.