Introduction: Writing in Bullet Time

What is new media? How is it different than old media? Has the digital age changed the way we think? Should it change the way we write?

In this course, we will explore the rhetoric of the emerging digital media. We will explore the shift in ways of thinking and writing that is emerging as our culture shifts from print literacy to electracy (what one might call "digital" literacy). We will seek to explore how these new media occasion new ways of thinking, and demand new ways of writing.

Our exploration will work from the idea that aesthetic works are the front-line (the avant-garde) of cultural thinking. These works think in ways that most of culture has yet to attempt. Thus, if we study aesthetic works as models of electrate thought, we can winnow out methods for producing electrate thoughts of our own. That said, we will take The Matrix as our central text and seek the answer to the question: how can we write in bullet time?

Course overview

In the course of discovering how to write in bullet time, we will discuss three modes of communication, namely Narrative, Argument, and Image. We will explore how each of these modes functions in print and in digital media.

In the first unit, we will explore the shift in narrative between print and electronic media by examining the conversion of a story between one medium and another. We will look at Phillip K. Dick's short story, "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" and Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of it, Total Recall. Students will create a web essay exploring the transition from print form to film form. In addition, bands will converge and begin to discuss the narrative innovations at work in The Matrix (as opposed to Total Recall). This unit both addresses the issue of the change in narrative and introduces students to writing on the web.

Our second unit will address issues of structure and argument. Students will focus on short stories by two authors, Kate Chopin ("The Story of an Hour" and "The Storm") and Pamela Zoline ("The Heat Death of the Universe"). We will explore, in class discussion and responses, how these texts make arguments in different ways. In particular, we will look at the rhetoric of hypertext and the ways that its interface allows for non-hierarchical arguments. We will also attend to the disruption of the objective, rational argument with the subjective, aesthetic one. Bands will examine The Matrix to explore how bullet time can be an analogy for this new sort of argument.

In unit three, we will discuss the mode of the image and its rhetoric. This unit will concentrate on imaging as a method of making meaning, and the difficulties in reading images. We will view La Jetée and discuss it in terms of juxtaposition and "third meanings." We will read The Doll Games and write on the mixture of prose, poetry, and images in that text. In particular, we will note the inclusion of the personal and the aesthetic in such work, as well as the dominance of the collage method. Bands will work together to elaborate a ruleset for "imaging" based on The Matrix, with La Jetée and The Doll Games as relays.

Finally, in the last part of the semester, bands will sift their first three projects into a method for writing in Bullet Time. Given The Matrix's concern with the body, perception, and media, our target for the fourth project will be Videodrome. Final band projects will include both aesthetic and argumentative elements. These projects will be experiments, and so will be understood in terms of experiment, not success.