Box-Logic Assignments/Syllabi Ideas

The article “Box-Logic” by Geoffrey Sirc reminded me of a few different activities I've known other composition instructors to do in their classrooms and I thought I'd share them here:

“The box, then, is the historically preferred format to archive our most treasured baubles. Johnson-Eilola wonders at the underuse of programs like Storyspace and Dreamweaver in composition classes. In a pedagogy of the box, their blank screens could act as a blank canvas or cartouche, a flatbed frame ready to be inscribed with the flotsam and jetsam of textual fragments from the real or virtual world, objects, images, sounds, along with sound-bite poetry or pensees” (Sirc 21).

This quote made me think of an assignment sequence from a course called “Shaping Identities Through the Digital Sphere.” One of the assignments early on in the unit was to write a critical essay concerning Hypertext Fiction/Electronic Literature. Students would look at pioneering examples of hypertext narratives like Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl or Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story, and read examples of what is considered hypertext in print (sample chapters from Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler or Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch), and then students would write a five-page critical essay responding to the problems and concerns of a hypertext narrative. How do they challenge print-based understandings of plot, narrative, and rhetoric?

This assignment would transition into a final unit in which students create and design a themed-based website where they adopt a novel or a story into a hypertext fiction.

Similar to the website, I've known instructors to assign students to create their own graphic novels as one of the assignment sequences (in one of the textbooks I own, there is a chapter devoted to how you'd go about teaching this, if anyone is interested). The idea with both is that students use rhetorical strategies and research skills (the same things they'd be doing when writing a research paper) in a different light. They don't necessarily have to be excellent artists to do a graphic novel (they could do stick figures) just as long as they are thinking about audience and purpose, and communicating their ideas effectively. With the web design, they could do Dreamweaver (I think it's helpful) but they could design their website on storyboards, just as long as they understand the idea of how websites are structured and pages are linked/connected.

“What is it that writers do, exactly, if not (as Katherine Stiles describes the Fluxus box artists) “point to things in the world and negotiate their meanings through symbolic productions” (24).

This quote made me think of the conceptual artist Sophie Calle (I won't go into her work here but she's a wonderful artist whose work I'd love to introduce in a class). Calle reminded me of another syllabus I've known someone to do that focused on exploring a subculture through found texts.

I have copies of both these syllabi and assignments if anyone wants more information or wants a better explanation.