First Semester: Art in the World
The expository writing program defines a progression as a series of reading and writing exercises; the connections among these exercises have been designed to lead you towards making an essay or other work of reflective criticism. During this semester, you will work on a series of progressions; at least two of these will be written essays, and you may also be asked to work in other media. The writing and thinking that you generate will be informed by a close encounter with other writings, your engagement with works of art, and your experience of the world around you.
Over the course of the first semester, the work that the course asks of you will become increasingly complex: your reading, writing, and thinking tasks will become increasingly demanding. In tandem with that increasing complexity, you will also gain increasing levels of independence over the course of the semester.” As your teachers ask you to do more, they will also give you more choices in how you approach that work.
Skills and Techniques:
Analyzing written texts as sources of ideas.
Documenting written texts that are cited in an essay.
Selecting and incorporating evidence from visual texts and written texts to substantiate ideas.
Representing texts (whether written, visual, or performed) in ways that accurately and compellingly present them to readers.
Practicing the art of textual incorporation.
Reading and analyzing a complex written text’s rhetoric and its persuasive strategies.
Developing a conversation among a group of ideologically-related texts.
Using a body of texts (including an art object) to generate ideas and explore their far-reaching implications.
Using research to situate an art object (e.g., a film or performance piece) in relation to genre, to more general cultural contexts, or to theoretical perspectives that shed light on that object's significance.
Practicing the art of meaningful analysis and reflection.
Understanding the role of recursion (of returning to prior evidence, thinking, or language) as part of the process of developing a coherent idea.
Understanding an essay as a form in which one uses evidence to develop one’s own idea.
Developing an idea of your own.
Second Semester: The World Through Art
In the second semester, you will write two essays. In this work, you will need to incorporate all of the skills and techniques that you learned in the first semester. You will also be asked to develop a broader set of research skills: finding sources via scholarly databases and other Internet tools, evaluating those sources’ reliability, selecting relevant sources, and synthesizing information and ideas (recognizing patterns, categorizing and clustering those patterns, and interpreting their significance).
CREATIVITY AND CULTURE PROGRESSION
Learning to Research as a Means of Developing Ideas
In this progression, you will write a research essay about an artist of your choice. In addition to examining that artist’s body of work in detail (including the creative processes involved in its making), you will explore how that work responds to, builds on, and departs from its contexts, both those that influenced its development and those that have shaped its reception.
Some questions to consider: Where does the work of art come from and how was it made? What are the contextual factors (biographical, material, intellectual, aesthetic, cultural) that may have shaped it? How is the audience anticipated in the work and how has the critical reception of the work affected its significance? Finally, what does the work disclose about its cultural setting?
There is no formula for building these various areas of inquiry into an idea, but at the most basic level, you need to do two things: first, using selected insights you’ve gained from your interpreta- tions of the work, show us why your artist matters (build a case for the work’s significance using the most compelling evidence you’ve found); second, later in the essay, you’ll want to turn the tables—show us what your artist’s work teaches us about the world around it. Your goal is not simply to gain some insight into the art but to use the art as a means of gaining other insights.
Skills and Techniques:
Performing formal readings of your artist’s body of work; looking for formal patterns (similarities, variations, oppositions) within the various pieces.
Making nuanced claims about the role those formal patterns play in generating the work’s significance/meaning (which will likely also involve relating your formal readings to the work’s content).
Connecting those claims to aesthetic and/or worldly contexts (e.g., artistic movements, or social histories that have affected, or that shed some light on, the work).
Researching those contexts and employing scholarly texts to help you present them in ways that clarify the significance of the artwork under consideration.
Weighing the reliability of information and ideas from different sources.
Engaging with research material in ways that complicate your idea about the artist’s work.
Learning to develop an idea that makes a claim about the relations among your disparate evidence (artist’s work, contexts, scholarly texts). Your idea must emerge from your inter- pretation of the significance of those relations.
ART AND ITS PUBLICS PROGRESSION
Learning to Research as a Means of Generating and Developing a Topic
In this final progression, you will write a research essay investigating how at least two different artworks engage with, respond to, or become drawn into a public issue.
In this context, public issue refers to a significant matter of public concern, one whose problems and tensions have been articulated in a variety of forms—e.g., in the popular press, in web com- ments, in documentaries, in scholarly articles, and in works of art. As you consider these sources, you will need to think flexibly, not just about what a public issue is, but also about how works of art can become involved with or entangled in public discussions.
As a critic, your job is to consider your chosen artworks’ significance within a wide public frame: What pressures do social issues put on artistic representations, and how do these issues affect what an artwork can mean? How does this meaning help us see something further about the public issue, something that might not be visible without the lens provided by a work of art?
Skills and Techniques:
Performing formal readings of artworks as a means of identifying connections to issues of public concern.
Identifying modes of representation in artworks and public issues: finding overlaps and divergences.
Weighing the reliability of information and ideas from different sources.
Discerning patterns across a variety of sources to develop an understanding of and insight into a public issue.
Researching the discourses surrounding a public issue across a variety of media; represent- ing contexts relevant to that issue.
Using research as a means to delineate and define the scope of the project’s inquiry.
Learning to develop an idea that helps you organize the relations among your disparate evidence (issue, artwork, contexts, texts); more than merely finding connections among that evidence, this idea must emerge from your interpretation of the significance of those relations.