As part of preparing for our discussion of Placher’s talk, you should think of questions about the text that we might discuss. I’ll almost always ask you to send me one such question. It should reach me before 8 am on the day of our discussion so that I can assemble the questions and have them ready at the beginning of class.

The questions you submit for discussion should always direct people to a particular location in the material we are discussing. The way to do that will depend somewhat on what we are discussing, but it will usually be a page number. And that’s the natural way of doing it for Placher’s talk.

So, your assignment is to send me one question for discussion, with a page number, before 8 am Wed. (Send it by e-mail to helmang@wabash.edu.)

The topic of our discussion on Friday and Monday will be your own emblems, devices, or self-portraits, and this assignment has three parts: (1) devising your image along these lines, (2) looking at others’ images and thinking of questions about them, and (3) thinking about questions concerning your own image.

The first part has to happen before the second, so your image will be due by noon on Thursday (1/23). I encourage you to get it in before then, and I’ll post these (on both the web and Canvas sites) as I receive them.

1) Your image can be of a number of different sorts, but it should be something whose discussion will be in some way a discussion of you. It might be a picture of you chosen less because it tells people what you look like than because it shows something else about you. It might be a “device” you choose to represent you in some way (as Louis XIV chose the sun to preresent him). It might be an emblem (in the sense used in speaking of emblem books) representing an idea that is important to you.

This is not intended as a test of artistic skill, so you should think more about content than about form. In another sense of ‘form’ it would be easiest for me to receive these as electronic files (as e-mail attachments), but hard copy is OK if you get it to me early enough Thursday morning that I’m able to scan it before noon.

2) I doubt that I have to say anything about how to prepare for discussion of the images other people devise: just look them over and come with questions—I expect you’ll have more than we can get to. We will look at the images one by one over the course of two classes, so you should think of at least one question about each one of them. You won’t be expected to present your self-portrait apart from being ready to respond to questions about it, and I won’t ask you to send me your questions about others’ images in advance.

I’ll send out instructions for finding the images to look at once the first ones have arrived and have been posted—something that 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.

3) After your image has been discussed (before our next class), you should send me a paragraph describing one question about your own image that you think is especially telling. This might be a question that someone asked, but it might be one that you can think would have been a good question for someone to ask. In addition to stating the question, you should say a little (a few sentences) to explain why you think it is a good question about your image.

Send this to me by e-mail (either in an e-mail message or as an attachment before the day of our next class—i.e., before Mon. 1/27 if your image is discussed Fri. and before Wed. 1/29 if it is discussed Mon.