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Final Performance Description: Weaving Together The Stories of The Course

ajohnston's picture

For our final presentation, Coral and I interpreted the interactions of the four texts, as well as Adaptation, through the “Line” literary theory of J. Hillis Miller, who proposes that the trajectory of a narrative can be traced as a thread through the tissues of the page, and on a broader plane, that of culture. Through a silly, simple chalkboard illustration we tracked Darwin’s original line of The Origin of Species into Dennett’s book which explicated (shown through an unraveling) and complicated (shown through a know) Darwin’s line. After Dennett, the we found a parallel line of literature along the scientific stories studied thus far, and both Generosity and The Plague intertwined to show the inter-and intra-textual relationship of literature. Adapation’s reference to all concepts studied so far, and its reach into a new dimension of representation could be seen as a third thread braiding all the plotlines together into the story of the course. 

 

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cwalker's picture

Final Performance

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.

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