11.5 Short CNF

Journaling:  You started by writing a scene where you are with someone you love.  I asked you to use dialog if you can remember it.  Describe what you were doing.  But NOT to interpret your actions or say what they meant.

Next I asked you to write a definition of what you believe constitutes "love."

We then spent way longer than I anticipated analyzing our definitions of love.  We looked at the kinds of actions (thinking/feeling) and qualities implied in the language.  We considered what kind of agency or control someone invested in that definition would feel as the lover or as the beloved.  We noticed that most of the definitions were about giving rather than receiving love.  We also considered, valence,  outcomes (results of believing in un/conditional love, love as selflessness etc) and the power dynamics, and we talked about whether we were able to choose our definitions of love, or whether they just "happened" to us.

Although we didn't have time in class, the intention was that after thinking about these features of our definitions (actions, qualities, agency, valence, outcomes and power dynamics) => you would go back to your definitions and characterize your ideas about love.  Finally, I was going to ask you to go back to your description, and see how/whether your "description" of what happens in a loving relationship matches your definition.

This kind of brainstorming can open up ideas within a piec.  It's one way to "see through" cultural assumptions or ways of talking about who we are and what we do.  It can help define questions and/or construct ways to think about the possibility of choosing new definitions for belief systems which we might otherwise think of as "given".

Short essays.  We spent the rest of class talking about short form CNF, first talking about Accident, and then Fallout, and for five minutes at the end checking in on the other reading assignments.

As I said in class, I will be grading the long essays and probably will not be replying to your blogs until just befoer class next week, which means it will be of  much use to you if you put out questions abotu material for your short essay.  So - if you want some input on the short draft - email me.

For next week:
Read:  http://brevitymag.com/category/current-issue/  Try to read at least 9 stories from the Fall/14 issue (the link is on the landing page).  In class we will use a discussion of Brevity as an example of how to do the Rhetorical Analysis of a Publication Venue.
Blog 11: Post Short Draft Essay 1

Also, in addition to posting your Long essay => please send it to me as an attachment.  Have a great week and I hope to have these back to you by next class.