Hi everyone! More textual intervention this week 🙂 Hopefully “Bright Star” wasn’t too tough to work with. It can look daunting at first, but once you’ve worked through it carefully, there’s a lot to enjoy and appreciate in there – and also a lot to think about, use and work with to influence your own creative ideas. That’s what Textual Intervention is all about! Don’t forget that there’s a study guide for “Bright Star” linked under the “folio resources” section on the course page. And I’ve given a summary of the poem as well in the “Bright Star” forum post. For this week’s task, we’ll work on a second intervention using “Bright Star”. Intervention is all about creative possibilities and, as the Rob Pope quote from last week says, there are an infinite number of creative possibilities stretching out from every story or text. So for your second intervention, I’d like to to find a completely different approach for your textual intervention. Perhaps last time you changed some elements like character, time or setting – so how could you now use the poem to produce an entirely different type of text? Remember, you can take your intervention in just about any direction you like. In your 200-350 word commentary, you just need to explain what changes you made, why you made them, and what you’re hoping to communicate in your creative piece. Think about what the poem means, how it’s written, and then what elements you kept/used/changed/abandoned and what new text meaning you created. (And don’t forget to include at least one reference to a course textbook.) With the folio tasks, try not to go over 500 words for any piece of writing. It’s ok if you’re well under 500 words for some tasks, though. “Bright Star” is a short poem, and it’s fine if your intervention is also quite short. The word count for your folio is reasonably flexible to make sure that you have have the freedom you need to produce your creative work: so try to have a mix of longer and shorter pieces. If your previous Bright Star intervention was quite short, this might be a good week to try a longer one. (By the way, even though you’ll write two “Bright Star” interventions for this folio task, you only need to write one commentary. This commentary covers both interventions.) More about intervention Just changing a text into something else might seem quite straightforward, but we can also think about exactly why we’re making these changes. What are we trying to achieve by doing it? Maybe you just want to build on some interesting ideas to create a great story (which is fine!) but we can also use the process in interesting critical and analytical ways. To recap, textual intervention is: – Altering various elements of the text to create new perspectives, meanings, values, ideas, etc. – Also being aware of what these changes mean. Why these particular changes? What are these changes meant to provoke in the reader? Just a change of scenery, or something more? I always say that it’s really easy to create an intervention – just take a story and change one basic thing. For example, Harry Potter becomes Space-Harry Potter, the students all go to Space-Hogwarts, they play Space-Quidditch, they study space-magic, etc., etc., etc. Now, that’s an intervention – but it’s not a very interesting one! It’s changed the general scenery, but not much else. (It does potentially lead to some bigger questions, of course. What if Harry Potter was written as a science-fiction novel? Would we have different expectations of the story? Would the audience change? Would the social impact change? So the creative questions are there with every change we make – but we have to be willing to look for them and think about them.) This is a good time to point out that writing and creative works matter. Exactly how and how much they matter is tough to exactly define, but I like this quote from art historian Erwin Panofsky who said that art is understood “not as physical bodies or as substitutes for physical bodies, but as objects of an inward experience”. “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline”, in T. Greene ed. The Meaning of the Humanities, Princeton, NJ, 1940, pp. 89-118. In other words, we don’t just look at a picture on a wall or words on a page and coldly declare them to be “accurate” or “inaccurate”, but we experience them inwardly as part of who we are and how we experience the world. So by reading a text and asking ourselves “what if?”, we’re thinking about different experiences that the work could offer and different ways of looking at and understanding the world. Rob Pope says that “the imaginative act of asking ‘What if…?’ and the critical act of asking ‘Why?’ can be usefully – devastatingly, liberatingly – applied to just about every aspect of life as we (might) live it” (1995, ). Some “what if?” examples: – What if the central character was a different age or gender? – What if the text were presented as a stage play or film rather than a prose text, or as a poster or three-dimensional model? – What if the text was set in the distant past or future rather than the close proximity of now? – What if the writer (or constructor of the text) had chosen to develop a secondary narrative strand instead of the chosen primary one? – What if the narrative or central focus for the new text was developed from the viewpoint of a different character? – What if the same text were transplanted into a different cultural site, etc? These questions (which are just a few examples) can lead to new creative ideas, but they can also make us think about the impact that these things have on how we respond to texts and how they exist in the cultural spaces around us. Here’s one recent example of textual intervention that asks the “what if?” question about gender to highlight inequalities in popular culture that might remain largely invisible if left unquestioned: Some intervention approaches you could try: Parallel text: Co-exists with the original text, building upon it; . might be a complementary (or complimentary—know the difference?) poetical, or prose, reply to original poem. Alternative text: Challenges original text, or sees the situation differently; . instead of focusing on the ‘Bright Star’, might be a piece focusing on the author’s insomnia. Recentred text: Looks at the piece from a different perspective; anything other than the original protagonist’s. It might change the time it was set, or focus on a minor character or detail. Regenred text: Changes genre – . into a limerick, straight prose, jingle, thriller, horror story, anecdote. (Or any combination of those!) If you looked at the Looney Tunes version of the Three little Pigs last week, here’s a good example of how an intervention can use the same source text but still end up looking entirely different. Here’s a review of The Wolf Among Us by Telltale Games on Good Game (ABC TV, 29 October 2013): Play Video Play Video You can also access the review and a transcript here: Attendance task That’s about all from me! I want you to focus mostly on your writing this week 🙂 For this week’s attendance task, I’d just like you to share a second “Bright Star” intervention. You could post the whole thing, just a small excerpt of it, or you could give us a summary of how you plan to approach this second intervention. You can take this as far away from the original poem as you like. In fact, I’d really like you to try to make your second intervention as different as you can from your first intervention. For both interventions, aim to keep at least three or four links that an informed reader (someone who knows the original poem) should be able to spot. (It’s ok to be inspired by someone else’s idea, by the way! Just let them know on the forum and let me know in your commentary.) And also, give feedback on at least one other post emphasising things that work well and also things you like that could be developed some more (eg. expanded, made stronger/clearer, removed, re-worded for clarity, etc.). It’s been so good to see all of the supportive feedback being shared so far!! It’s always fun to see how far you can take your intervention away from “Bright Star” while still keeping three or four links to the original poem! Enjoy 🙂 Here’s the poetry of bright star “Bright Star” by John Keats Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
