This prompt is designed to lay some groundwork for the analyses that you will do at the Lilly. It involves a strong retrospective element, but since we are at midterm, that seems about right.
First responders: choose four essays (or their equivalent) that we have read at any point this semester and distill one methodological question from each. You will want to accompany the question with a short description of its derivation.
An example: How is the artifact, by the fact of its preservation, distorting or blocking my understanding of its performed use or value? (inspired by Phelan's notion of the ontology of disappearance).
As I hope the example above demonstrates, these questions should be of the sort that you can readily ask yourself as you go about interpreting evidence of performance. In other words, you should not feel obliged to cram into a single question everything that the essay suggests to you about reading performance.
Second responders: select one or more of the methodological prompts offered by your cohort, and test it/them in relation to an analysis embedded in one of our readings (so, for instance, Davis on Clinton or Cavell on Desdemona or Wexler on the Cook photograph of the "nursemaid" holding Cook's own son). How did the author attend to this question? Does he or she disprove it, uphold it, offer an exception to it, or otherwise complicate it? Be specific.
Class discussion leaders: having read your colleagues' work, come in on Tuesday ready to talk about how the questions posed and readings assessed might shed some new light on the props and stills posted in our last blog.
Everyone: feel free to comment and suggest distillations of your own. We will work these up into a worksheet.
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