In today’s class I will introduce our second project, which I have decided to term the “Affective Objects” project. This project will have two different stages. In stage one, we will read a series of texts. The purpose of such reading is to invent an assignment. Think of these texts as offering ingredients, and of stage one as writing the recipe. How do you transform these materials into an assignment?
Materials for Project 2
- Henry Jenkins, “Death-Defying Superheroes” (PDF)
- Eric Shouse’s “Feeling, Emotion, Affect”
- Maira Kalman, Favorite Things
- Christine Harold, “On Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of ‘Design Democracy'”
- Erich Werner’s review of Joddy Murray’s Non-Discursive Rhetoric: Image and Affect in Multimodal Composition”
After we have read these materials, we will spend time in class working with video production. In the end, I will ask you to produce another website that showcases 3 short videos that that each explore the affective dimensions of a particular object (note, the previous sentence is the starting point for inventing the second assignment; I leave the specifics to each of you to work out via the readings and materials I have listed above).
Homework
For homework, I would want you to read Jenkins essay (PDF) and the Shouse article (link above).
