Due Friday, December 15th
on the class blog
Sometimes the best way for a critic to understand a creative work is to get creative. Sometimes the best way for a critic to understand a structure is to build it. All semester long we’ve talked about the participatory potentials of new media platforms and the value of experimentation, but now it’s time to put our money where our mouth is.
As a small bonus project, due the same day as the final paper, and worth two extra blog posts—that is, if you’ve missed two or more blog posts, you’ll get those points back and if you haven’t missed any blog posts, you’ll get extra points—your assignment is to use a new media platform to produce something creative and/or critical that enhances your/our/the public’s understanding of one or more of the novels from class.
Potential examples include but are not limited to:
-Write an interactive short story that follows Nao from Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2014) using Twine (https://twinery.org/)
-Create a Twitter (https://twitter.com/) account for Adeline from Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet (2016)
-Contribute a detailed “characters” section on the public Wikipedia page for Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanah)
– Post a YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/) video book review of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014)
-Collect/create fan art about Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (2015) (does this exist????) on a Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/) or Tumblr (https://www.tumblr.com/) page
Post a link to your creative/critical new media experiment on our blog along with a 300-word explanation of what you’ve done, how it enhances your/our/the public’s understanding of one or more of the novels from the class, and how the act of creation influenced your thinking, if at all. Due by Friday, December 15th at noon.
If you’re nervous about your idea for any reason, please feel free to run it by me or stop by my office hours to brainstorm. Happy experimenting!
American Fiction in the Social Media Age 