Non-Fictional Prose Course

Amanda Fortner

Final Project: Interview with a copyright lawyer about a book that advocates the dissolution of copyright.

David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has interested me for a while—all right, well, not so much interested as inflamed me. As an aspiring author and therefore creative artist, I am set to benefit from copyright law—simply, so long as I stick to writing my own words, or get the permissions from those whose words I borrow, I’m going to collect royalties from those who purchase copies of my works. If, however, David Shields’ vision of the world were to come true, as soon as the words were out of my pen I would not own them (of course, I don’t actually own the words themselves—this will come up in the interview. I mean I would own the order in which I place them): everybody would. Whoever wanted to could self-publish my books with his or her name on them, and if he or she could convince some people to pay money for them, that money would go to the swindler, not to me.

 For my final presentation in Nonfiction Prose I compiled all the individual posts of each member of the class, assigned each person a color, and arranged the posts chronologically.  The result was 55,644 words and almost 112 pages, 12 point font.  Assigning each person a color allows the viewer to notice the posting habits of each member of the class, and how we behaved as a whole.  For instance, most members of the class posted in clusters, i.e. make a post, respond to another member of the class.  There were several members of the class who posted regularly and their colors dominate.  It is interesting to contrast the members of class who dominated the online forum and class room, they were rarely the same people.

Our presentation was a sock puppet performance where Kate and I talked about all of the books we read for class. Going through all of the books we read and putting them in a pile showed that we really covered a lot this semester, and I think we, as a class, went in a variety of interesting directions to finally come to the overall idea of stories their importance. The conversation we tried to have with our puppets was our attempt to make connections between everything that we read and watched.

Reflection on Presentation

Firstly, I loved seeing everyone's presentations on Thursday. It's fascinating to me just that everyone came up with so many different ways to reflect on the experience of this course!

As for my group and our Taboo game, I thought it went well. We were hoping to represent just how difficult it is to define and represent what we mean by these problematic, forever-in-air-quotes terms like "fact," "fiction," and "truth." We stumbled upon the idea of making a taboo game in talking about how as the semester had progressed. We realized then that we had turned some of these buzzword terms into taboos of sorts--and thus the light bulb of inspiration was lit :)

 For our final performance, we made a video that uses the progression of our friendship as a metaphor for the evolution of our class' discussions. 

So, I'm really unhappy I didn't have this ready in time to show to the class, but I'm going to post a powerpoint of it as soon as possible. Basically it's a collection of pages loosely tied together by string, to symbolize the looseness but also connectedness of the different media we experienced (composite word for "watched," "read," etc.). Also to make it so the paper doesn't break when I try to fold the pages over one another. Each page contains a statement that answers the open question "Reality is..." and contains student commentary on each work, either addressing what reality was when we were reading/watching whatever it was, or contesting the statement, or agreeing with it, or even just making commentary on the work. There is one page for each work we read.

 Prezi Presentation

www.youtube.com/watch - Our Movie

Sandra and I made a short film in which we conducted 5 interviews with 3 freshman and 2 sophomores at Bryn Mawr. We asked them these questions:

ENGLISH PERFORMANCE