The topic of our discussion on Friday and Monday will be your own “self-portraits,” so this assignment has two parts: (1) making your self-portrait and (2) looking at others’ self-portraits and thinking of questions about them.
The first part has to happen before the second, so your self-portrait will be due by noon on Thursday (1/17). I encourage you to get it in before then, and I’ll post these (on both the web and Moodle sites) as I receive them.
1) The instructions for the self-portrait are simple: produce something involving text and possibly images that serves some purpose served by a literal self-portrait. (I am not specifying what that purpose might be because one of the topics for discussion is what self-portraits can and should do.) More specifically,
• regarding content, you should produce some text, either (i) a substantial paragraph (say about 1/2 of a page) or a short poem or (ii) an image (a photograph, drawing, painting, diagram, etc., which doesn’t need to be an image of you) with a few sentences as a caption; and,
• regarding form, a document that you can attach to e-mail is fine, but it would OK, too, to put your text in the body of an e-mail message and attach any image to it.
I’d prefer to receive these by e-mail (though hard copy is OK if you get it to me Thursday morning); and, again, they should reach me by noon on Thursday at the latest.
2) I doubt that I have to say anything about how to prepare for discussion of these: just look them over and come with questions—I expect you’ll have more than we can get to. We will look at the self-portraits one by one over the course of two classes, so you should think of at least one question about each one of the portraits (your own, too) though I won’t ask you to actually send me your questions. You won’t be expected to present your self-portrait apart from being ready to respond to questions about it.
I’ll send out instructions for finding the self-portraits to look at once the first ones have arrived and have been posted—something should happen no later than early Thursday afternoon—but you can expect that one route to them will be from this pagethe web page giving this assignment.