Length: roughly equivalent to 1000 words, adjusted for the media you choose to use
Due Dates: 8.12.15 (concept/proposal/rough draft), 8.13.15 (final draft)
We started this course with the difficult task of self-representation, and that’s where we’ll conclude. We’ve spent some time discussing various ways of representing the self: talking explicitly about oneself to introduce oneself to others, narrating personal experiences, articulating some personally important belief.
More recently, we’ve talked about the perhaps surprising complexity of the self: although we view our identities as stable, individual, and self-contained, they are in fact shifting, elusive, plural, socially conditioned, often shaped and influenced by context and circumstance. We like to imagine that underneath all the masks we wear to perform versions of our selves appropriate to particular contexts (in class, with our families, with our friends, with people we just met, etc.), there exists some true, stable, internal identity belonging to and created only by ourselves. But what if the masks we wear are our faces, in aggregate? What if the sum total of the identities we perform is, in fact, the most stable and accurate version of our identity?
This last assignment embraces the dizzying instability and complexity of our identities and our sense of self. When I asked you to write me a letter introducing yourself to me, the only guidance I gave you about what to include was that you should tell me whatever you wanted me to know or thought I should know. In other words, I was implicitly asking you to be rhetorically aware about your expression of self—to think about what version of yourself you wanted to present to me at the start of the class and at the start of your college life. Here, though, I want to get some sense not just of who you are or how you want to be seen in the narrow context of your English class, but of this more plural, dynamic sense of self we’ve begun trying to articulate in recent classes. I want to get a sense of who you are in a number of different spaces and contexts, of the ways those selves fit together (sometimes neatly, sometimes not so neatly), of the hybrid self that resides in the spaces between these other selves. I want to see you confronting the multiplicity of selves you manage day in and day out.
You should think not just about what remains constant about your identity when you shift from space to space, but about what changes. How are you a different person in your home town than you are at Penn State, or in this class vs. another class you might be taking concurrently? How are you a different person with your family than you are with your friends or your classmates? How are you a different person in the summer vs. the winter, indoors vs. outdoors, during the week vs. on the weekend? How are you different when you’re alone vs. when you’re with other people? When you’re speaking English vs. another language? When you’re the best version of yourself vs. the worst version of yourself? The argument of this unit is that rather than obscuring your true inner self, these various other selves are all part of you—not superficial disguises, but facets of a self that is complex and multiple.
Because this assignment asks you to pluralize your own sense of identity, thinking rather of the multiple identities you inhabit and perform from time to time and space to space, I will also ask you to pluralize your sense of composition. The general arc of this class has been to broaden our sense of communication and composition beyond the printed word, to include and account for numerous other forms of expression. We’ve discussed how part of writing in the 21st century is being fluent and articulate in a number of different modes and forms—not just writing an essay or a letter, but an email, a text, a tweet, a selfie, a podcast, and so on. In order to tackle the complexities of the hybrid self, it’s necessary for us to think about similarly hybrid forms of composition.
What this means is that for this assignment, you should broaden your sense of writing beyond the essay form you know so well. We construct, express, and articulate ourselves in many other genres and media forms beyond the written essay, so it makes sense to rope those forms into the task of self-representation at the heart of this assignment. You are, of course, a different version of yourself when you write an academic essay than you are when you compose in other contexts and media forms; in this way, the form and the content of this assignment are both after the same thing.
Accordingly, your final product should include at least two different media forms in addition to text: photography, drawing, painting, collage, comics, video, audio, etc. Even text might fall into any number of possible categories: essayistic prose, poetry, fictional or nonfictional narrative, lists, a journal, a letter to yourself or someone else, and so on. Some of it might be typed, some of it handwritten, some of it typed and printed and then digitally photographed. Think about how different media forms might fit different parts of your identity, different areas of your life, different aspects of your personality.
This is an experimental form, to fit the experimental nature of these conversations about self and identity (and, indeed, the experimental nature of identity in general—always provisional, always fumbling toward some fuller expression of itself). If you feel that you can’t draw your way out of a paper bag, for instance, don’t let that stop you from trying, if you feel that drawing is an appropriate component to include in your hybrid self-portrait; the point here is not artistic perfection but interesting and creative expression across different media forms. If writing about ourselves is one way we bring into being that thing we call a self, what does that process look like in the 21st century, now that various media forms are significantly more accessible to amateur users? For many years, people have used self-portraiture, self-photography, memoir, and autobiography to express and articulate their sense of self. What options for hybrid, cross-media self-expression are available to us now, and how might they better fit our complex understanding of self and identity?
If you’re not sure you have the resources for audio, video, scanning, or anything else you might want to try for this unit, I’d again encourage you to take advantage of the Media Commons in the library. They have a wealth of online tutorials for particular pieces of software, and they also have incredibly useful facilities for recording and editing audio and video, etc.