Final Performance Description: Weaving Together The Stories of The Course

For my final presentation, I worked with Audrey Johnston, as we attempted to show a visual imagery on how we interpret the texts and film we have analyzed in class. We used the literary theory of J. Hillis Miller the "Line", as a basis of our analysis. Through a chalkboard image we portrayed how we saw these different stories of evolution interlace with one another. We began with Darwin' On the Origin of Species, as a thread that looks at patterns and examples of natural selection and evolution (represented as a disentangled thread that tie together as a linear theory of evolution) followed by Dennete's text which both explicated and complicated Darwin's theory (we represented it as unraveling, and tying of the linear theory). Then we move on to literary texts, Generosity and The Plague, which both intertwine and intermingle stories of evolution using inter and intra-textual interactions of literature (represented by intermingling of the threads). And lastly
the film Adaptation, which uses various literary forms used before, intermingling them in a way that cater to the publics consumer needs (represented as a jumbled mess of threads). This presentation showed us, that not only are we both very visual learners, but that all texts are connected in some way which is best represented by J. Hillis Miller's literary theory.