‘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 (cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats,
1976, p.51 )
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PROJECT Goals
1a. To get a taste of what it is like to be a professional writer aiming at perfection and adopting the necessary time management, rewriting, and proofreading to become a great writer.
1b. To get a taste of writing as a work of art. Up to this point we have been practicing informal writing as way to overcome writer’s block and as a foundation for becoming good writers. We will continue to do so, but now we are going to do formal writing, writing as a work of art, and thus the best writing you can possibly do. Think of your project as, say, a statue: you want it to have as few flaws as possible, to be as “perfect” as possible.
1c. To practice writing energized by positive rather than negative motivations, by love of your work of art rather than fear of deadlines, by creativity rather than going through the motions, by curiosity rather than compulsion.
1d. To get a taste of the new world-wide writing, the instant publication of web writing. Computers don’t do what you want them to do: they do what you tell them to do, and in their coding they demand perfection. They have no forgiveness for errors in code. Hence, proofreading and attention to detail is crucial.
1e. To get a taste of the new writing of multimedia and learn the relation of writing to the visual arts (architecture, landscape architecture, sculpture, murals, paintings, drawings), to music, etc; to explore multiple intelligences, the right as well as the left side of the brain.
1f. To practice the new writing as the product of conscious, deliberate collaboration as well as isolation, drawing on the help and advice of your fellow students as well as your instructor.
2a. To get a taste of semiotics: an expanded sense of reading of the whole world as text.
2b. To increase “a sense of place” (Carnegie) as querencia, inscape, instress, genius loci, etc; to learn how to write about space and place .
2c. To articulate a sense of one’s ideal place.
2d. To explore the relation between place and culture: esp. Austin, Texas, USA, as compared to Europe
2e. To get a sense of the university as a place, esp. the campus as an alma mater, a second home: comparing U.T. to Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca, Paris, Bologna, Heidelberg, etc.
3a. To explore the relation between place and time, esp. time as embodied in place, as in tracing the griffins in Littlefield House to the ancient monuments of Europe; to access the radically different sense of time and history embodied in the architecture and customs of a European culture.
3b. To explore the relation to of place to history, especially tensions between pastoral and urban, Hellenism and Hebraism, Greco-Roman and Gothic, modernism and antimodernism.
3c. To become aware of personal presence (ghosts, genius loci) as embodied in place, such as Joe Jones, Frank Dobie, and the students of 1969 and others in Waller Creek, and all the ghosts inhabiting the Harry Ransom Center; i.e. to give some sense of the social as well as environmental history of this campus, and comparable genius loci embodied in the social and environmental history of other colleges.
3d. To become aware of place in and out of time, to explore the relation between place and alternatives to consciousness of linear time.
4. To define our college experience, especially by comparing it to that of others unlike ourselves
5. To know oneself, one’s strengths and weaknesses in writing, as well as learning, reading, speaking, listening.
6. To become familiar with some of the loci classici of the literature of place as you find quotes to include in your projects.( O.E.D.: “locus classicus , a standard passage (esp. one in an ancient author) which is viewed as the principal authority on a subject.” )
7. To become familiar with some of the loci classici of world literature, including but not limited to those associated with the colleges discussed in our projects.
8. To make a good grade in this course: at 50% of the total, your projects are obviously a key determinant of the grade you will receive in this course.
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