Writing Rock and Roll C: Spring 2010

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Postmodernism and Revision

One hallmark of the postmodern is an interest in engaging with the past and its own influences, revising the texts that inform them and recontextualizing them in new and different ways.  In this course, we will read a number of postmodern novels that either revise other texts or that deal with the topic of revision.  In some cases, we will view films that go on to add another level of revision.  Finally, in our interactions with them, we will create our own revisions of these texts, using technology to translate them into new media and open them up to new audiences.

One goal of the course is to think about the role of postmodernism in the modern world – where can we see the influences of postmodern writing?  How do we see its influence manifested in popular culture?  How has our engagement with the outside world, in a sense, been “revised” by postmodernism?  Another goal is to look at how and why postmodern texts engage with their forebears, focusing on these particular novels but also opening the question up more broadly to consider it in terms of both how postmodernism works and how this revision manifests itself in contemporary pop culture.

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Reading Ulysses at Georgia Tech

Over the course of Ulysses, the eighteen episodes provide a panoramic vision of Dublin; Joyce himself famously claimed that if Dublin were destroyed, Ulysses could be used to recreate it, down to the smallest detail.  Many scholars have attempted to “map” Ulysses in various ways, both textually (through exhaustive annotated editions) and visually (through print and electronic mapping projects).  These projects have resulted in a number of useful models to help readers navigate the book and imagine what Dublin looked like on June 16, 1904.

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Writing Rock n' Roll B

In this course, we will discuss the ways in which music is tied to individual identity, focusing on a number of literary and film texts that portray the struggle of individuals to define themselves in the modern world.  We will also listen to and write about a variety of important rock music from the last fifty years, from Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” examining the ways that both producers and consumers define themselves through music.  We will read essays that explain, that praise, that bash, that analyze; we will write essays that do the same things.  We will read, discuss, and participate in the growing field of internet music journalism.  We will create websites that present the work we do, and we will operate and update them over the last five weeks of the course.  We will rock.  We will roll.  And we will write about it.

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Writing Rock n' Roll A

Writing rock n’ roll can be understood at least two ways; songwriters like Bob Dylan, PJ Harvey, and Damien Rice “write” rock music in the way that we traditionally think of writing rock music.  They write music and lyrics, and then they usually record them.  This rock n’ roll writing is what we buy, or what we download, or what we listen to on our iPods.  But the other kind of rock n’ roll writing is writing about rock n’ roll, the writing that rock n’ roll provokes from its audience.

This is the kind of writing that we will be interested in during this course.  We will talk a lot about identity – how rock artists create their identities both through the music that they write and through a variety of other methods (stage shows, interviews, album art, etc.).  We will also talk about the identities of rock consumers, those of us who listen to music rather than create it, and how, like the artists we listen to, we forge our identities both by the music we listen to and the things that we do with it.  This course is intended to force you to consider the place that music holds in today’s society, the way that our identities are shaped and molded by our musical taste and the way that that taste manifests itself in the rest of our lives.

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The Technologies of Popular Culture

This section of 1101 will focus on the interaction between technology and popular culture.  We will study iPod ads, watch videos on YouTube, read a book called Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, discuss the difference between "alternative" and "indie" rock, read essays about The Simpsons, debate the effect of violence in video games, make a list of technological innovations that we could not live without, and argue about the significance of American Idol.  The larger goal of the course will be to arrive at a better understanding of how we can read pop culture productively, paying special attention to the ways that technology mediates our interaction with these texts.

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