"Only connect! . . .Live in fragments no longer.”
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), ch. 22
‘One
day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form
in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are
half-asleep, ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity’.
For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did
by that sentence [...]” William Butler Yeats (Nobel Prize, 1923; cited
in Frank Tuohy, Yeats,
1976, p.51 )
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PROJECTS
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SUBJECTS, TOPICS
This semester we have an opportunity to be on the cutting edge of the new reading and writing. Those who choose to do so will be working together to some extent, contributing parts if not all of their projects to a joint project, rather like builders of the great monuments of the past: pyramids, temples, cathedrals, and centers of government. (Hence the extra relevance of one of our unifying symbols, the carpenter's hammer.) Unlike cathedral builders, however, each contributor will be named. You will have a chance for not only personal "immortality," therefore, but also that kind of awesome collective "immortality" embodied in the great monuments of the past. We will be working with students of the past and the future, and a graduate student in educational psychology, Alex Games, as well as the Center for Instructional Technology.
AND it will be more fun, because you will playing a video game, albeit an old-fashioned text-based quest explorer game with images and, if you wish, artificial intelligence, sound, video, animation, etc.
The game is housed in what is known as a MOO, a multi-player object-oriented game. "Object-oriented" in our case simply means we are able to create new spaces and characters.
The Center for Instructional Technology is supporting this project because it may help solve these pedagogical goals:
- Developing the ability of students to write about space, place, and personality.
- Increasing the students' knowledge of and connections to this campus and this town -- their own place, their second home, their alma mater.
- Developing the students' historical imaginations, freeing them to explore other places, other times.
- Conveying to a Texas-bound student the experience of other countries, especially their important places and buildings.
- Encouraging Texas students to access the radically different sense of time and history embodied in the architecture and customs of a culture of the Eastern hemisphere.
- Enabling Texas students to experience this semester a very different university experience, Oxford, with a thousand years of history.
- Inspiring students to feel the presence and support of their predecessors, the "ghosts" of the past associated with the places and spaces around them here and elsewhere.
- Technology's Role:
- To simulate places, spaces, and personalities as much as possible and to provide a platform for writing about them.
- Expected Outcome:
- A relatively permanent MOO architecture that can be used for many different literature, language, history, geography, and architecture classes.
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1. The first project is to be a contribution to the "building" we are constructing as a class in our cyberspace or MOO. (So get out your hammers.) It is to be an introduction to a place and/or a character associated at any time with Oxford university or the university of Texas. (You might begin with this incomplete list of Oxford alumni or this incomplete list of U. T. alumni.) If it is a character, you, are to focus on how the spirit or legacy of that person is embodied in the campus as place. The two options may be described in this way:
a] DESCRIBE PLACES. Write a narrative text where a guide leads a tour of places that reveal the heritage of the University of Texas or Oxford. Integrate citations from our readings from either semester. UP TO 150 POINTS. (Extra points for multimedia.)
b] CREATE A CHARACTER, REWRITE OUR TEXTS
Write a descriptive text for a character, and for key places in his/her life. If the character is one from our texts, use aspects of the character in our texts to create his/her personality and background and aspects of places in our texts to create his/her setting. If the character and/or place is not in our texts, or there is only limited information about the character and/or place in our texts, you are expected to research the character. Having done so, you can use your poetic license to some extent, but you are expected to be as faithful as possible to what is known about the character and/or place. Use the MOO object editor, if you can, to make the places your character inhabits. UP TO 175 POINTS. (Extra points for multimedia)
2a. The second project can be a continuation of the first, or an exploration of another person and/or place along the same lines. UP TO 150 POINTS.
2b. OR:
c] CREATE LIFE, OR AT LEAST A GHOST DRAMA.
Create a character “bot,” i.e. a ‘robot” who can interact “live” with others
in the MOO, providing it with responses it can give to certain questions
based on keywords. For example, you could write a conversation with
a famous person associated with Oxford or the University of Texas.
Assign this personality to your bot (from now on called a ghost) and test
the conversation in the virtual world. UP TO 200 POINTS. (Extra points
for multimedia)
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STORYBOARD.
The first step in project one is to create a storyboard of places and characters you would like to write about and choose where they would connect with the MOO as it stands now. Storyboards are usually quite visual, but in this case the emphasis is on your writing. Hence for this assignment the storyboard is more like a combination of a storyboard and an outline or prospectus. It will be the equivalent of the first page of your project (at least 350 words). The only requirement is that the storyboard show how the project will result in six pages or more ( it can be as many as six different miniprojects).
RELATION TO OTHER PROJECTS ON THE MOO.
If your project is about persons or places nobody has put on the Moo yet and nobody wrote about last semester and you cannot see how your writing would connect at this point, don't worry about it: we will probably be able to find a way to connect it to the MOO.
If your project is about persons or places that have already been connected to the MOO you need to explain in your Storyboard how your project will fit in with its predecessors. As the preceding projects were not written specifically for the MOO you can propose changes in how they are presented in the MOO to make them fit in better with your project.
If your project overlaps with one or more projects from last semester on the list below** you need to suggest how those projects and your projects will be connected to the MOO.
If you want to do the early history of our campus, some obvious places on our campus to write about are the Littlefield House, Gebauer, Battle Oaks, Waller Creek, and all the Victorian buildings downtown. You also have the option of introducing us to ghost buildings such as Old Main, perhaps using St. Edward's Main building as an example of what our campus would have been like if we had chosen to stay with the Gothic style of Old Main. As for characters, anyone associated with U. T. could be a good to add to the MOO; some of the oldtimers would be J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, Walter Prescott Webb, O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), George Sessions Perry, Katherine Anne Porter, and various campus personalities such as Littlefield, Brackenridge, W. J. Battle, etc. all born before WWI.
Oxford is a much richer mine of possibilities of course, and many of the options are already in the MOO with pictures and a lot of reseach materials are available.
As we are focusing on the period 1837-1901 in our course, here are some of the Oxford Victorians and some of the Oxford places with important Victorian heritages (though they may be much older of course) already on the MOO that could be chosen:
Christ Church college and cathedral: ghosts: Lewis Carroll, John Ruskin, E. B. Pusey, etc Specific places at this college you might choose are the meadow (can be connected to Matthew Arnold via his poems "The Scholar Gypsy" and "Thysis")' the cathedral with stained glass by Morris and Burne-Jones; the Cherwell stream by the meadow which, along with the Thames, figures in Hopkins's poem "Duns Scotus's Oxford." The Thames is also associated with Lewis Carroll and Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson .
Carfax, the Martyr's Memorial, Broad Street, Top of Sheldonian theatre, the busts of the "Emperors" guarding it, Balliol College, etc. are all connected to Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure
The Union Library ceiling is associated with Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets.
St. Michael's church is where William Morris was married to "the stunner" Jane Burden who then had an affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Balliol College (Oxford's version of Plan II?) is the home of Hopkins, Arnold, Swinburne, Jowett, and associated with Browning, etc......
Magdalen College, is the home of Oscar Wilde.
In addition to these associations many of the Oxford colleges have great Victorian buildings and thus the architects could be added to the Moo, such as Butterfield who did the chapel at Balliol, or Ruskin who inspired the University Museum.
On the other hand, there are many fascinating possibilities for Oxford in other time periods. Take the Middle Ages, for example. Already on the MOO is a connection at Christ Church Cathedral to St. Frideswide, a fascinating saint of the seventh century or so, and her shrine includes Green Men or, in this case, Green Women, who could be related to the green giant in Gawain. (Green men appear again in the ceiling of Balliol college library.)
And of course all the gargoyles and grotesques all over Oxford embody great story-telling possibilities.
Merton has a number of buildings that can be traced to the Middle Age and thus offers more connections to Gawain, and Tolkien's room there suggests parallels between medieval Oxford and Tolkien's fictional worlds. New College also has a medieval past. Duke Humphrey's room in the Bodleian library is high medieval and can be related to John Donne, etc.
Some resources for University of Texas subjects
Campus
and Austin Area Architecture and Nature Sites
Lewis Carroll does U. T. Austin
Thomas Hardy does U. T. Austin
Max Beerbohm does U. T. Austin
Oxford University subjects
Previous student projects connecting U. T. and Oxford
Our
Primary Research Tool: the Victorian Web
PreRaphaelite Painting and Design
(The Binsey poplars are near Oxford)
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* * Projects from last semester not yet connected to the MOO:
E603A:
Becca: Jowett
Merrell:
C. S. Lewis
Chris:
Janis Joplin + Oscar Wilde
Amanda: Hardy
Amie: Snow White: President Faulkner, President’s Office, Parlin 104 (our course), Bump ranch, the Drag, Atomic Tattoo, webspace, Evil Empire
Ashlie: Carroll*
Becca: Places
Jason: Salinger
Katie: Carroll
Merrell: Baum
Phil: Carroll
Thida: Carroll
Will: Carroll
Senior Seminar
Oxford
U. T. parodies:
Freshman Seminar
Oxford
Ben: Blackstone
Aaron: Hawking
Texas
Bertha: George/Cowan
Jessica: Whitman
Jessica: Dobie
Jose: Moore
Katie: Jordan
