Reflective Writing Exercise on Ozenfant & Jeanneret’s manifesto of Purism:

Mechanical selection began with the earliest times and from these times provided objects whose general laws have endured . . . In all ages, for example, man has created containers: vases, glasses, bottles, plates, which were built to suit the needs of maximum strength, maximum economy of materials, maximum economy of effort . . . From all this comes a fundamental conclusion that the respect for the law of physics and economy in every age created highly selected objects, that these objects contain analogous mathematical curves with deep resonances, that these artificial objects obey the same laws as natural selection and that, consequently, there reigns a total harmony, bringing together the only two things that interest the human being: himself and what he makes. (qtd. in Silver 315)

Reflective Writing Exercise on Ozenfant & Jeanneret’s manifesto of Purism:

Today, Prof. Herbert analyzed several objects in this Ozenfant still life (right, below) that responded to the Purist design demand of “maximum strength, maximum economy of materials, maximum economy of effort” for a post-war France, that is “a total harmony” between man and what he makes. Among them is the iconic Picardie tempered drinking glass produced by Duralex. Tempered glass was a major industry in post-war France, both for the domestic market and international export. Picardie glasses are cheap, virtually indestructible, and ubiquitous in virtually every home and café in France (and my house!). At the same time, they are regarded as a design achievement and can be found in many decorative arts museum collections.

Reflective writing prompt:Do you think that there are industrial design objects that reflect this synergy of form and function today? In your own life, are there objects that are maximally strong, functional, and economical while also being aesthetically appealing? What are they and where are they made? Are there any problems that might exist in grafting this early 20th century exultation of industrial design and production onto the 21st century?

21st century marketing that insists on individuality and difference

21st century industrial production of “universal” design objects that complete the identification between man and his artifacts (devoid of any social implication)

Otto Dix, Kriegskrüppel (War cripples) (1920)

Questions from Prof. Herbert’s lecture on Victimization (last time)

1.  Think about the visual representation of war and its aftermath in contrast to verbal representations. What can pictures do that writing cannot? What can writing accomplish that is beyond the capacity of pictures?

2.  How can a single picture manage to convey the enormity of suffering and loss? What can it show, and how can it show it?

3.  Does exaggerating that severity of wounds enhance the message, by making things look truly terrible, or does it undercut the message, by abandoning claims to unadorned reportage?

4.  What is the difference between representing war and representing war’s aftermath?

5.  What is the difference between a picture showing something and it trying to persuade us of something?

6.  To which audience, or audiences, are Dix’s and Grosz’s pictures directed? Identify several audiences that might have seen such pictures. To which audiences would the pictures have appealed, and which would they have alienated?

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Still Life with a Stack of Plates (1920)

Questions from Prof. Herbert’s lecture on Reconstruction (today)

1.  How does being the French “victor” rather than the German loser alter a one’s perception of World War One? What had France won and what had it lost?

2.  Why does French art (at least, the art we are looking at) refuse to look directly at the consequences of war, and instead approach it indirectly?

3.  How can a glass be more than a glass? When can a simple thing such as a plate mean something much more, such as the French survival of the fittest?

4.  Imagine a photograph of a utensils and such on a table. How would the message of such a photograph differ from a Purist painting of such a collection of things? How do the pictorial devices—such as composition, line, color, and brushstroke—shape the meaning of these pictures? What are the relative roles of subject matter and style in conveying meaning?

5.  How do these pictures convey the ideas of planning and reconstructing for the future?

6.  Imagine two former soldiers, one French and one German, standing in front of a purist painting. What sort of discussion might they have about it?

Midterm Short Answer Questions

1. First, identify each film’s title, director’s name, and release year. (b) In one sentence for each clip, identify three key technical features of the scene (i.e., formal features that contribute in a significant way to the spectator’s experience of the scene).

Full Metal Jacket, director Stanley Kubrick, 1987Use voice-over narration, high key lighting, deep focus, close-up shots, slow motion, dramatic diegetic and non-diegetic soundtrack, framing of shots for maximum aesthetic impact, neutral mise-en-scène that highlights the color of the blood, completely grisly depiction of murder/suicide, etc.

Coming Home, director Hal Ashby, 1978Use of non-diegetic soundtrack (Rolling Stones’s “Sympathy for the Devil”) to build suspense followed by silence at the close of the segment, crosscutting between Bill’s suicide and Luke’s attempt to get to the hospital, point-of-view shot of Bill’s suicide from the seated position of the men outside the office (view is occluded by the trays of medication – critical prop in mise-en-scène), more distant depiction of suicide, close-up shots of Luke’s reaction, etc.

Midterm Short Answer Questions

2. Briefly compare and contrast how the two clips depict post-traumatic violence and suicide.

Answers vary, but from a formal perspective it is important to note that Kubrick’s depiction of Lawrence’s vengeful rage and desperation is heavily stylized, that is, treated in a non-realistic style (e.g., slow motion, camera shots that do not reflect point of view of characters, etc.). It also seems significant to note that Lawrence’s trauma is not combat, but simply the military training procedures that would ostensibly prepare a soldier for warfare. The gun that was so intimately tied to his ultimate success in making it through training is what ultimately is used to end his life. That is to say, the traumatic event that precipitates the suicidal act is military experience preceding actual deployment.

Ashby’s depiction of Billy’s suicide is much more naturalized, that is, attempting to be more realistic. The fact that his suicide takes place in a medical examining room and that medication bottles are in the foreground of the mise-en-scène is likely a political indictment of the VA’s excessive use of untested psychiatric medications on traumatized veterans in the Vietnam era. The traumatic event that precipitates the suicidal act is combat and subsequent institutional neglect upon ‘coming home.’

3. What is a “meat tag” and what is the usual reason that soldiers give for getting one when deploying for 21st century insurgency wars? How instead does Carol Burke understand the “meat tag” ritual in ethnographic terms?

Meat tags are an exact image of soldier’s official dog tags tattooed onto the torso. Burke writes: “Since the single most deadly weapon in the insurgent’s arsenal in these conflicts is the improvised explosive device, many soldiers make sure that their body, should it be blown up by an IED, can be distinguished from the remains of others. The stated purpose, however, is probably not the real function this practice serves. First, every squad leader and his platoon leader know who is going out on every mission and would instantly know who is missing. What’s more, bodies would likely be charred and the ‘meat tag’ unrecognizable were the explosion to leave only a torso. No, the ritual of going with buddies to get such a tattoo allows soldiers to acknowledge the worst might happen, note that harsh fact on their flesh, and then get on with the mission. Meat tags function in the same way as macabre battlefield humor; they symbolically inoculate the solider against thoughts that might otherwise incapacitate.” (“The Things They Bring to War” 20)

4. Today in lecture, Gail Hart described a set of artifacts. Are these primary or secondary sources? What are these artifacts, what kinds of scenes do they depict, and where/how were they circulated/disseminated? What was the intention of their creator?

Horrors of War bubble gum cards. In 1937, William Bowman heard a news broadcast on his radio about the war raging in China, while also reading about the Japanese invasion of the Asian mainland in the newspaper. He decided to make collector cards showing scenes from the handful of wars going on in China, Spain, and Ethiopia and use them to sell his gum. Bowman figured that children would be attracted to the cards showing battle scenes, but he was also determined to use the cards to alert impressionable minds about the importance of peace rather than the sensationalism of war (“To know the HORRORS OF WAR is to want PEACE”).These are a primary source, as original records created at the time historical events occurred and serves as the raw material to interpret the past, as Professor Hart does in her analysis of these cards.

5. What events inspired the director of Night and Fog to produce a documentary about the Holocaust only ten years after the end of World War II? Would an audience in 1955 have understood the term “Holocaust” in the same way that we do? Why or why not?

Alain Resnais, the director of Night and Fog, felt compelled to make a documentary about the Holocaust as a warning that the horrors of Nazism could be repeated during the French-Algerian War (1954-62), in which torture and internment of prisoners and protesters was already underway.

Ruth Kluger, in Still Alive, remarks “the word holocaust for the Jewish catastrophe came into general usage in the seventies.” In the1950s (when Night and Fog was released), “The Holocaust had no name as yet, and hence it wasn’t even an idea, only an event: among the other disasters of the Second World War, a lot of Jews had died.” Thus, no, an audience in 1955 would not have understood the term “Holocaust” the same way that we do now. As Kluger puts it, “A concept without a name is like a stray dog or a feral cat. To domesticate it, you have to call it something” (181).

6. Briefly describe the sequence of events that allowed Ruth Klüger to be transferred away from Auschwitz to Christianstadt. How does she understand this moment in her life history?

A selection process was established at the Birkenau concentration camp to send women between the ages of 15-45 to a labor camp. Kluger’s mother is selected, and she convinces 12-year old Ruth to go through the line a second time and lie about her age. A young female clerk also discreetly encourages Ruth to lie and say that she is fifteen. When the SS man in change looks over Ruth and says she looks small, the clerk assures him Ruth is strong and can indeed work. She is sent, with her mother, to the labor camp Christianstadt, and thus is spared death at Auschwitz (the death camp attached to Birkenau).

Kluger understands this “lucky accident” as “an act of grace,” “a free decision to save another person, in a place which promoted the instinct of self-preservation to the point of crime and beyond” (106-7). As such, neither “psychology nor biology” can explain the young clerk’s good deed: “the good is incomparable and inexplicable as well, because it doesn’t have a proper cause outside itself, and because it doesn’t reach for anything beyond itself” (107). She uses the philosophical work of Simone Weil (grace) and Hannah Arendt (banality of evil) to try and make sense of this totally selfless deed.

7. What is this object, who does it depict, and why? What is Carol Burke’s sociological explanation for this kind of artifact in U.S. military culture?

The object is a urinal target depicting the actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda in the center of a bulls-eye. These targets are sold on the Internet and symbolically figure Fonda (Hanoi Jane) as “the sole enemy from an unfinished war” (278). Burke contends that Fonda has become a kind of overdetermined symbol of the anger of the lost generation of Vietnam veterans. “Indeed those who view her as the enemy ritually exterminate her with each visit to the john. After explaining why Fonda’s 1972 appearance in North Vietnam was so repugnant, one vet recalled his pleasure at urinating on her face” (278). This anger is often correlated with bodily fluids: “the soldier sprays bodily fluid on the antiwar activist as an act of protest against the protester, and by proxy against the brutal captors with whom she sympathized. But Fonda is not just any antiwar activist; she is a civilian woman—civilian and woman being terms that in military culture tend to collapse into each other” (280).

8. What problems do the survivors and advocates interviewed in The Invisible War identify with the system in the American military for adjudicating sexual assault incidents? Identify two concrete political objectives on the part of that documentary’s director for reconstructing these stories.

Possible problems with the military system for handling sexual assault incidents include:•  lack of recourse to an impartial justice system (e.g., prosecution handled by

a unit commander who is the assailant or a friend of the assailant)•  professional reprisals against survivors instead of perpetrators (e.g.

unmarried rape victims being charged with adultery because their rapists are married)

•  sexual harassment and assault training that relies on victim-blaming and a nebulous idea of “prevention” in lieu of criminal punishment for perpetrators

•  inadequate mental and physical health resources for sexual assault survivors

•  inadequate criminal sentencing and the subsequent advancement of perpetrator’s careers (thus leading to repeat offenders)

•  forced expulsions of survivors from service

The political objectives you identify will likely be in line with the problems you isolated (e.g., shifting prosecution from unit commanders, restructuring the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, shifting to civilian criminal courts for assault cases, etc.)

Extra credit question:

Animal Mother’s helmet says “I am become death,” a version of a line spoken by Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita (“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”). This quote was famously deployed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist credited with inventing the atomic bomb.

Essential components of your research paper:

!  Your paper must delineate the humanistic significance of your chosen artifact in a particular cultural context. In as sense, you must present a specific, argumentative claim (thesis) about how and why your artifact generates meaning in a given cultural milieu.

!  Your paper must ask and answer humanistic research questions (questions about meaning and modes of interpreting of human artifacts) and consult humanistic scholarly sources. While you may refer to statistics, demographic information, or diagnostic sources (qualitative or quantitative research originating in the social or hard sciences), the core of your inquiry should be about how humanistic meaning is generated.

!  While you will likely consult and refer to periodicals, encyclopedias, and archival sites, you must also refer to at least 6 scholarly sources in your final paper and articulate the existing conversation between those sources. A scholarly source can be an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal or a monograph (a book published by an academic or university press).

Tasks that your research paper must accomplish [Part 1]:

!  Your paper must in some way “close read” your artifact. You could provide a vivid physical description of an object, conduct rhetorical or literary analysis of language, engage in formal or technical analysis of visual or filmic composition, etc. The type of artifact you have chosen will obviously define the appropriate terms and type of analysis (novels and poems require literary analysis of figurative language, non-fiction documents/ephemera require rhetorical analysis, films require film analysis, art object require visual and material analysis, etc.)

!  You must clearly define the specific cultural context in which the artifact operates (or compare a few specific cultural contexts). This means that you must provide your reader with adequate historical/cultural information to understand the background in which this artifact operates. This contextual background should refer to and cite reputable scholarly sources, not just encyclopedia/Wikipedia articles (when in doubt, track down and consult the sources that the encyclopedia/Wikipedia references in its bibliography – and be skeptical when those sources aren’t readily apparent).

!  You must conduct what is called a literature review, a term in university writing which is used to describe a survey of the existing scholarly work on this subject. This will primarily be composed of sources that present interpretative claims on your artifact or its context.

Organizing multiple scholarly sources (at least 6, remember!) into a literature review can be tricky, and this is where the “clustering” that you worked on in your secondary source annotations can be useful. Possible modes of clustering your secondary sources include:

!  Sources that provide historical/cultural context for your artifact

!  Sources that present some kind of interpretive/theoretical lens (e.g. philosophy, literary studies, history, visual culture, psychology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, race/ethic studies, etc.) for understanding or interpreting your artifact

!  Sources that present an interpretive debate about what your artifact (or artifacts like it, if scholars have not addressed your object in particular) means in a given cultural context

!  Sources that present an interpretive debate about what artifacts of the same genre or type as yours mean in a given cultural context

!  Sources that together demonstrate a gap in the scholarly conversation (scholars don’t talk about something, or don’t talk about it in the way that you think is most apt)

!  Sources that signal a lack of disciplinary interchange/conversation (scholars in discrete fields don’t seem to talk to one another, or seem adverse to taking up particular interpretive angles on your topic)

Tasks that your research paper must accomplish [Part 2]:

!  Your paper must identify what you hope to find in your research and how you see your project in relationship to the existing scholarship. Your conclusion will need to describe the larger significance of not only your artifact, but also of the research and analysis that you have presented in your paper. Possible ways of framing the significance of your work:

!  Unearthing an artifact that sheds new light on a cultural context?

!  Extending or deepening an existing field of inquiry?

!  Illuminating a gap or neglected area of inquiry?

!  Giving voice to a marginalized individual or population?

!  Providing a new way of examining a well-trod historical context?

!  Establishing a possible paradigm for examining other artifacts like the one you have chosen?

!  Bringing together disciplines or fields that aren’t currently in conversation with each other?

Assignment DeadlineBlog Post 5: Cluster 2 (four scholarly sources)

Monday, May 16th (today)

Blog Post 6: Research Paper Prospectus

Friday, May 20th

Working Draft of Research Paper Week 9 at scheduled individual conference with Tamara, beginning on Monday, May 23rd

Peer Review of Working Drafts Wednesday, May 25th in section meeting

Final draft of Research Paper to EEE Dropbox and turnitin.com + all prewriting blog posts fully completed and ready for holistic grade

Friday, June 3rd at midnight (no exceptions)