Final Projects!

There are two components to your final project; one part is group-related and one individual. For your group project, you will explore a field of English Studies and present on it to the class. The presentations will last 25 minutes or so and need to involve interviewing an instructor who teaches in the field and analyzing a relevant text that can be shared with students. It may also involve a performative or pedagogical element, e.g. you might want to create a powerpoint about the field you're studying, produce a short video, or lead the class in performing an analysis of a text within the rubric of your chosen field. By next Tuesday, you need to give me two possible areas your group might want to explore. I ask you to do this so that we don't have every group focusing on the same areas.

The second component of your final necessitates that you embark on a project of your own choosing that examines practices of reading and writing in at least two fields of English, relating them to a shared text or subject matter. Your work can take the form of a written paper, a website, a blog, a video, a sound file, a comic book, a zine, or the like. Be as creative as possible! I will show you some examples of student projects in class.

The Cold War Atomic Archive

For more on the backdrop to White Noise, check out some of the materials available in the atomic archive.

Don DeLillo and White Noise

Born in 1936, only a few years before World War II, Don DeLillo is one of American's most prominent and enigmatic postwar authors. DeLillo's works have focused on a number of archetypical postwar American concerns--from the power of film and television in a mass-mediated age to the terror of the JFK assassination and the rise of global terror.

In class, we discussed some of the ways in which DeLillo's White Noise was both a distinct "novel of the 1980s" and a uniquely postmodern work. What are some of the central themes in White Noise--and how are they postmodern? How does the novel manifest the tail-end of Cold War paranoia and the ambivalence towards technology often experienced during the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the U.S.? What kind of novel is White Noise? Would you label it a sci-fi or fantasy work? Or, something else entirely?