See the syllabus for more information about the expectations for the final paper. An additional assignment sheet with greater detail will be distributed in February.

Prompt 1

In her keynote address “Truth in Print” (https://youtu.be/r9j7HEo6Ddc?t=1448 ) Nell Irwin Painter argues “books play an outsized role in how we know what we know.” How does the history of the book and printing impact “how we know what we know” today? What are the advantages and injustices that result from the authority of the book in our popular imagination? How have artists scholars, amateurs, and “the public” challenged our sense of “the book”? One might explore a series of case studies, experiments, or new methods of composing, publishing, reading, and sharing texts. Alternatively, you could explore how the material contexts of texts have altered, obscured, or erased people from the historical record, charting efforts to rectify that injustice through recovery. 

Prompt 2

Studying texts in their various physical, conceptual, and social contexts underscores the social and political stakes at play in their creation and circulation. Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes in Generous Thinking, “The solution [to reading together], if we are to find one, is likely to require a significant rethinking of the institutional values and structures that determine the ways we work on campus….But it will also likely include an ethical, caring embrace of our more positive enthusiasms for the materials we study” (130). What “other materials” should academics embrace, and how do those materials contest disciplinary boundaries? What ethical or epistemological challenges do we face when texts transgress traditional formations? One might consider W. J. T. Mitchell’s “imagetext” or Drucker’s “artist’s book” or Souanisis’ Unflattening, or you could look to your own field for examples of “other materials” that academics should value.