Began class by reading over the instructions for the
upcoming Lilly Assignment.
Notes to consider while doing the project:
What
might you search for that may feed another past, present, or future project?
(keep your own individual research goals in mind)
If you
have methodological question about what we’ve studied, consider how your
selected item might problematize those theories or prompt other questions?
This is
an excellent opportunity to work cross-disciplinarily.
Keep in
mind that the card catalogue uses an archaic system of terms!
Lilly
Hours:
Monday
to Friday – 9:00am to 6:00pm
Saturday
– 9:00am – 1:00pm
Sunday
– Closed
Discussion of Blog
Posts:
Amy: What was it like to do? Do you have specific feedback
concerning the experience?
Sara: It was a fun exercise; I live in a small home with my
partner who I told I needed to do some homework, he was skeptical when he saw
me watching the collection of videos on Cody’s blog; His interest in the videos
prompted a conversation that led him to ask, “How do all of the these separate
videos relate to each other?”
Amy: I love that question; we need to always be asking
ourselves those questions of our work
Jess: it is good to see someone else trying to figure out
what your are attempting; additionally nice to receive some praise; felt a
responsibility to be honest and careful about what she said concerning the
other person’s work (i.e., to honor Derek’s work on his blog)
Derek: also felt the need to be careful in responding,
partially due to friendship with other course participants, but didn’t just
want to say nice things
Ming: And you were right with your criticism – the ideas
don’t yet cohere and I needed to hear that
Derek: and that’s not a failing, the ideas don’t need to
cohere; it makes me want to hear more about these connections or to explore
them on my own
Jennifer: it did feel a bit like having Big Brother monitor
the work; but nice to hear someone else state a view of what is being explored
on my blog
Jess: been lurking on some of the blogs; it is good to see
how other people write and good to see work of people in different fields
Sara: for those new to blogging, always seems to be a fun
post that helps break open the idea of virtual work and to begin providing
metacommentary on the work that’s being produced; as it becomes an archive, it
has relevance to all of our individual projects
Kelly: love to have the chance to complain and to see that
others enjoy having that opportunity; but also to see how someone can then go
into the complaint and explore what else may be behind those rants
Amy: Explain what the value in that is
Kelly: by digging into the rants, it gives more of a
semblance of credibility and it is also good to possibly begin to embrace other
opinions
Derek: hard to find time to write about things in the that I
want; the blog becomes more like an annotated bibliography with thoughts that I
want to come back to later; but because it is public, it feels like it needs to
be polished – I have drafts of ideas but find it hard to come back to them and
make them publishable
Justin: absolutely agree; this assignment forced the issue
of putting material out into a public space for others to view, but also forces
me to eventually address those loose strands
Andrea: need to post something that will point the direction
of where this is going
Whitney: the mystery of what is going on in the blog posts
could be really exciting
Jenna: really appreciate structuring of Whitney’s blog;
images connect to the text, captions tie images back to text, interaction with
blog connects all of the pieces
Andrea: use of personal photos adds interesting dynamic to
Jenna’s blog
Jess: making the archive personal is a very important point;
yes, it may look self-indulgent, but maybe that’s not a bad thing; forces me to
reflect on how my life experience is important to my research; generally, we
tend to hid behind facts – opening up to the personal allows us to step out
from behind these
Mind: quick question – how did blogs begin?
Sara: internet forums transitioned into online journals –
instead of multiple individuals using the space to interact concerning a topic,
the forums tended to become diary spaces for an individual; this platform was
adapted into commercial forms giving us our weblogs; also related to early
forms of RSS feeds, where a person could request to be sent the multiple
entries by a person which would then be sent in a collected form to their email
Ellen: to consult Big Brother, the work you do there is
related to practical/research projects; should have a use-value for you; important
that you find something that is worth returning to in the future; this exercise
gave a better idea of the numerous forms that a useful blog post can take;
don’t worry about your method – I generally collect a quote and provide a quick
gloss on what it means and why I find it important, but that is just my own
practice; be strange in your practice if that is what you need to do; Do you
want to say something about the personal ideas that came out from the feedback
you received?
Whitney: the idea of absence that Jenna saw in my blog was
really eloquent and is completely new to me; it’s a really valuable tool for
looking at how I ask questions
Jess: other that a good pat on the back, to see Iris’s
response to personal stuff made me realize that I do write a story as I do
scholarly work; I want to make a reader’s heart fire, not just the reader’s
head; realized how important it is to think about the architecture of what I am
doing in my writing
Amy: it is easy for us to forget the centrality of narrative
to theoretical writing; use of narrative can make such work more persuasive and
more likely to ‘stick’; we must attend to emotion strategically in what we
write; there is a performance to doing scholarship and we must use a discerning
eye when viewing performance; Where does it help you and where does it not?;
How you perform scholarship and identity is important to your work
Ellen: blogs have an ability to orchestrate juxtapositions
in scholarship that are not allowed elsewhere; they have the ability to deploy
multiple forms of media all within the same site; this makes the curation of a
personal blog/archive very valuable over time; How will we be publishing in the
future?; Books make use of pictures and text, but will it always be that way?;
Let’s turn to the articles, which were meant to give you ways other scholars
document things and to allow us to think about their different approaches
Dorothy: viewing photographs in a scriptive way; not just looking
at a single object, and the objects viewed work on multiple levels; Wexler
doesn’t look at history of the ’type’ of photograph she is studying; it is a
problem but opens us up to new questions, not just the history of the image
Ellen: uses broader strokes?
Dorothy: Yes – but doesn’t get to history of the image as an
icon
Ellen: Wexler picks from the archive carefully; long
traditions, purpose is to set up sentimental purposes and work against it; make
a way of puncturing usual way of reading such images; were you satisfied?
Jess: see page 167; it must exist; idea that photography is
always objective, but through historical context see how it is not objective;
the photograph is not plain objective truth
Ellen: anekphrasis is a very valuable tool; What is
methodologically successful and what is not?
Dorothy: Wexler makes many assumptions about what her reader
would agree with her about, which made me struggle to agree with her reading;
for instance, can we really be sure that the baby in the image is not the child
of the woman holding it?
Jennifer: Wexler makes an attempt to escape this problem on
page 161; her really significant failure is to set up various methodological
terms in the beginning of the article and then not return to them in her study
Derek: after setting it up, punctum returns only one more
time in the text; what happened to the rest of her terms?
Jennifer: Wexler seems to only need parts of the framework
she sets up
Amy: Wexler is reading sentiment in photographs in subtle
ways; How? Does she need the methods she sets up? Does her argument about
sentiment bear resemblance to Freud and Lacan?
Dorothy: yes, it does, especially in her reading of the
dialect poetry; this is where I connected her notion of ‘sentiment’ with that
of the Pre-Reconstruction South; wish this had been addressed or set up earlier
in the article
Ellen: the article is
from 1997 and the terms have shifted since Wexler produced this work; What was
her definition?
Courtney: that is the problem I encountered in the text; it
was clear she wasn’t pointing just to emotion, but it was unclear what else it
might entail
Ellen: she give us a small piece where she suggests it as a
mode for class to use in social elevation; it is part of a long historical
moment where the middle class was building and photography is being attached to
this rise; sentiment is normally addressed as an aesthetic achievement (
consider novels); it is hard to recover this historical moment without
disparaging it; consider the family album of photos placed next to the Bible
which Wexler includes as her example – highlights the powers of inculcating
sentiment
Derek: How it makes a house a home, but I like what she’s
setting up, her methodology seemed to be identifying the stadium and then
locate the punctum; it appeared theoretically interdisciplinary – Marx,
psychoanalytic, reading images
Ellen: are you not convinced that they belong together?
Derek: no – what put me off, she seems (page 163); attack in
order to show what she’s doing is relevant; felt unfair
Amy: What is she doing with the Family of Man example?
Jess: linking it to sentimentality?; exploring what middle
class did when it built itself up
Ellen: highlights a piece of literature which stops to
analyze a piece of art, it is meta-artistic; Wexler is teasing Updike for his
rediscovery of an artist’s notice of art; What does anekphrasis do?
Derek: Wexler seems to point out that photographers/everyone
(except possibly feminists) have been ignoring images
Dorothy: No, Wexler calls out feminists critics as well; she
seems to set up a high-low dichotomy where masculine view aligns with high and
feminist view connects to low; to include this in the discussion seems odd
Derek: I understand that, but I’m not convinced that there
isn’t anyone doing this kind of work
Courtney: I think it’s useful because people so often fall
into the trap of taking photographs as historical truth
Ellen: certain sites are considered less important and
Wexler is pointing out these blind spots; rhetorically it feels heavy-handed,
but her imagined readers likely don’t see it this way; consider page 176,
forced to ask what is intrinsic to an image and what do we bring to it
ourselves
Dorothy: brought up texts of direct narrative of women who
were slaves, these bring in reading into it; counter views naturally filter in
(i.e., viewer could just as easily project ideas onto the baby’s gaze)
Amy: same ephemerality exists for performance as it does for
photography; a scholar has to be really good about what is pointed to as
evidence; trying to train themselves to read photography in a way that hasn’t
been learned sufficiently
Ellen: both articles desire to make an evidentiary turn;
scriptive quality of photo pushes you to make a statment about what is ‘merely’
factual and it is almost impossible to resist that temptation; photos leave
questions open, and almost demand some kind of narrative quality; consider
Hodgdon’s article – it is useful that some of the same theory gets played out
here; What is transportable in this study?
Jennifer: important to note that photos (specifically photos
of theatrical performance) aren’t always true – often staged, and often aren’t
what was actually staged in the performance; also, considering who is taking
the photograph is important and their intention for the photograph; set in
context, theatre photos can provide historical information
Dorothy: reminded of Courtney’s blog post where she noted a
‘lifelike drawing’ on my personal blog – the image is actually a photograph but
looks artificial; first time to consider how a photo could point out what or
how a performance happened
Ellen: one thing, textbooks mandate that photos be used –
especially true for those time periods when photography had become a part of
popular culture; the text seems to mandate what photos are to be used, but they
just reaffirm what is already said; some of the images are so familiar, we no
longer see them anymore, we simply gloss over them; Do photos just shore up
what is said or can they do more for a text?
Derek: connects to Wexler, considering the performance of
everyday life; eventually we don’t look at photos displayed in our own homes,
they are no longer representative of what was actually going on
Amy: one central idea
– the stills fix yet also escape the performance [compare to baby due dates];
photographs stage the audience just as fixed as the events that they depict [it
is possible that no one had the view suggested by the photo]; Concerning
photographic evidence, what is capable of being said and what is not?
No comments:
Post a Comment