WORK

readings:

Each class, please come prepared with something to say about the readings for that day (if you can't come prepared for some reason one week, come anyway and just let me know in advance14*5).

presentation:

In a maximum of 15 minutes, with or without PowerPoint or its equivalent, you will present one or more of the assigned readings as applied to a particular film, television series, podcast, work of art, or other concrete example of "media". You may wish to write out your presentation in advance (a typical conference presentation is approximately 7-8 pages, double spaced, 12 point font, which will usually give you about 15 minutes), and read that in a communicative and pedagogically effective way. If you are including film clips or sound samples, then your presentation should be less than 8 pages. Clips take up time.

We have a very full class this semester, so it is imperative that your presentations take up no more than 15 minutes so that we can fit them all in, there is time for conversation and questions and the like. All presentations will be in the last three weeks of April (4/12, 4/19 and 4/26), with five presentations each day. You will need to let me know earlier what media you are planning on exploring, so we can make some version of it available to the rest of the class with enough time to get familiar with it.  Presentations are intended as practice for conference papers, so I will hopefully be able to organize them into panels as at a real conference.

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 solve a crossword puzzle while you talk. Some quick guidelines (these apply equally to Keynote, Prezi, etc.):

• Use only one template for the entire presentation.

• Use the least obtrusive, least flamboyant template possible

• Avoid templates that leave very little space for text or image

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

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

• You provide the words; PowerPoint should provide an image.

• Never put a block of text on the screen unless it is a passage you will analyze.

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

• 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, less is not so good).

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 at the end of the semester, but you want 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 voice, sound and the environment, phenomenology, the Adornian critique of music, and so on. I love close readings, I love theory, but ultimately, you want a seminar paper to build up your archive, your internal bibliography of texts and authors you're familiar with, and to build a repertoire of possible articles.