AML 2070.0541
Creative Project Assignment


-- read this page all the way through --
(99% of all questions about the project are answerable as "Read the website.")
Nick Melczarek, instructor Department phone: 392-6650
Office: Turlington 4357 e-mail nickym@melczarek.net
(send no attachments!)
Office hours: TR 9:35-10:25 a.m. Office phone: 392-6650 x295
»»Project due Friday 10 April, by 4 p.m., either in my mailbox (Turlington Hall 4th floor), or through special arrangement with me.
»»Project Rationale & Assignment

Rationale:
As stated on both the paper and online syllabus, this course requires a "project" that counts for 10% of your total grade. This project provides you the opportunity to explore the literature we've read through means other than the formal papers or e-mail responses. I'm asking you to think in ways that do not necessarily involve text, or at least not linear academic text.

»»Assignment:
You can choose any ONE of the novels we will have read for the course:

1919 by John Dos Passos
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Dreaming in Cuban by Christina Garcia.

Choose one of the following options as a creative project (10% of your course grade):

  • VISUAL and/or AUDIAL:
    Create an original artwork, video, website, or performance piece based on your chosen novel. How do you explain or depict your chosen novel visually? How do you translate it into images? (Such a project must clearly refer to your chosen novel. This is a serious project that counts as part of your grade.)
    CAVEAT: no cheesy macaroni sculptures or the like; no simplistic and easily-assembled collages of images clipped from magazines or newspapers and stuck randomly onto posterboard; no picking a song by someone else and playing it.

  • TEXTUAL but not academic:
    Write an original short piece (no more than three pages, no less than two) that closely imitates the style of your chosen work but that applies to or discusses the present day or your own life. Make it read and look as much as possible like work you imitate. (This exercise depends on absorbing a writer's style, which entails very close attention to her/his work.)
    CAVEAT: this is not an excuse to cheese off something the night before and turn it in as "stream of consciousness;" a good imitation takes work. Think seriously about what effect the part of the novel you imitate achieves, and go for that effect.

    »»General Caveat: no original poetry (too easy); nothing that breaks or infringes copyright (that's illegal); nothing violent or dangerous that will get you or me arrested (tout s'explique).

    »»E-mail me a general project idea by 3/28/03

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