Sunday, February 26, 2012

Prompts on David/Gilligan/Marcuse

Option #1:  One reason that I assign choose your own adventure books is that, from my point of view, they are capable of presenting much of the variability (and much of the bad writing!) characteristic of video games and other interactive media in a compact, digestible form.  That's just an introduction to the assignment.

After having thoroughly reading Gilligan (exploring many possible endings, and thinking through the relationships among the endings), make some kind of argument about its interactivity.  Should we understand its interactivity as real?  As fake?  Is there a relationship worth exploring between the interactive form and its content as a particular kind of adventure story set in Japan?  Does it provide a way (perhaps by analogy) for us to understand interactivity more generally?

You don't need to answer all of those questions, by any means.  What you need to do is simply present some kind of argument about Gilligan and interactivity, which may or may not incorporate some other work (say, a favorite video game), and may or may not use Marcuse/Haraway/Heidegger.

Option #2:  This is probably your most open prompt so far this semester.  Using specific passages from both authors, use Haraway, Heidegger, or Marcuse's theory to interpret some aspect of Davis' text, focusing on specific passages in both, and keeping in mind that Life in the Iron Mills was published in 1861 (well after Frankenstein, but long before anything else we've read).  Or, if you'd rather think of it this way, you can use Davis to reinterpret (perhaps having an argument with) one of the theorists.

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