WORK

presentation:

In 15-20 minutes, with or without PowerPoint or its equivalent, present one of the assigned readings or address directly the film(s) or television assigned. You may wish to write out your presentation in advance (a typical conference presentation is approximately 8 pages, double spaced, which will usually give you about 15 minutes; 10 pages will give you about 20 minutes), and read that in a communicative and pedagogically effective way. Your audience is chiefly graduate students and faculty, so write in a way that is comprehensible but intellectually sophisticated. (And really, why wouldn't you just do that all the time?) Your task is threefold: (1) explain the reading(s) and the arguments made in some detail; (2) explain how they are significant for our understanding of the films; (3) position yourself with respect to the readings—what are the advantages and shortcomings of the theory? What issues or problems are revealed in the films through the theory? What issues or shortcoming emerge in the theory because of the films?

A word on PowerPoint, since it is a pet peeve of mine. PowerPoint exists in order to provide a visual counterpoint to your spoken presentation. PowerPoint is not there to repeat your presentation, or worse still, to put up large blocks of text that people are supposed to read while you talk about something else. You might as well ask your audience to practice basketball while you talk. Some quick quidelines (these apply equally to Keynote, Prezi, etc.):

• Use only one template for the entire presentation.

• Use a maximum of two fonts (one for headers, one for text).

• A maximum of 3 font sizes may be used.

• Use simple, legible fonts—something assertive for headers, and a plain font for text.

• Most of your slides should consist of images, and just images.

• Never put a block of text on the screen, unless it is a passage to be analyzed.

• If the passage is too long, break it into multiple slides.

• Otherwise, if text doesn't fit, don't make it smaller—make it shorter.

• Every animation and visual "trick" you use will distract your audience from what you are saying.

• Approximately one slide per paragraph (more is okay—don't leave a single slide on screen for too long).

• An ideal slide has a gorgeous, shocking or funny image and perhaps 4-5 keywords.

seminar paper:

Seminar papers should be 15-25 pages in length, and should demonstrate good writing, and a serious engagement with the primary material and the scholarship on it. When you write a seminar paper, you are practicing to write an article—they rarely get to the stage where they are actually ready to be submitted to a journal, but you are striving to move them in that direction. That means you should have an important issue in the scholarship that you think you have an interesting or worthwhile take on, and you should have read a selection of the scholarship on the specific text or texts you will be writing on. Make it sound like you know a part of the field; spend a little time on Google; get an impression of the kind of work that people are doing. Your paper should deal directly with the material from the class, engaging with the notions of the non-human, the inhumane in cinema, object-oriented ontology, and the like.

Inhuman(e) Cinema