Copy and paste your rough draft with clear body paragraph distinctions. Do not upload files. Do not share Google Doc links.
Review prompt’s requirements thoroughly: Essay 3 Prompt: Mixed Media Genre Analysis: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
Answer Keys: Essay 3: Secondary Texts’ Thesis & Golden Lines = Review Before Essay 3 Outline
5/11: Class Notes on Bluets
Essay 3 Student Samples of Promising Outline: Essay 3 Rough Draft Ready
REVIEW BEFORE ROUGH DRAFT SUBMISSION:
(1) Introduction paragraph must address TWO things= (A) Address in thesis or introduction if Nelson is her speaker or if Nelson creates a speaker? What is the difference and why does it matter? (B) Create and declare new genre name to address Nelson’s experimental / quasi-experimental writing / fragmented narration.
(2) Consider using BR’s critical lens in 1 of your body paragraphs, chapters: The End, Desire, Mutant, Post-Modern.
(3) Use each secondary or tertiary source in 1 paragraph only. Do not use the same secondary or tertiary source in multiple paragraphs. You are welcome to do your own tertiary research instead of just relying on texts that I provided.
(4) If you do not mention a secondary or tertiary text in your Topic Sentence, then you must declare it in your 2nd or 3rd sentence of each paragraph.
Your final draft should have a Works Cited page which contains: Maggie Nelson; 4 secondary texts; and 2-4 tertiary texts
How to cite Electronic Sources & PDFs (Links to an external site.)
How do you cite a song in MLA 8th edition?
Use the following structure to cite written song lyrics in MLA 8th:
Singer’s Last Name, Singer’s First Name. “Title of the Song.” Title of the Album, Names of other contributors, Album’s Publisher, Year of publication, track Number. Name of Website, URL (remove https:// or https://) (Links to an external site.).
Example of creative new genre: “braided narrative” 4-6 different strand/ tracks for the main braid
blue as symbolism for life’s pleasures, desire, darkness, obsession
plight of being a woman: shame, guilt, depression, loneliness
prince of blue (ex-boyfriend): death of relationship v. inability to finish writing book
friendship: absence of friend’s feeling v. speaker’s guilt for feeling too much?
art: color theory: color wheel: opposite of blue is yellow/orange/white (analysis of omission of blue)
chasing blue; chasing meaning of life, elusive, cannot capture color blue (popova ref)
ars poetica = metacognition / metafiction = artistic postpartum = prolonging the process of artwork in any medium = metaphor for relationship with prince of blue.
grotesque paralysis = self inflicted = inertia of blue
Readings for Essay 3: Nelson’s Bluets & Other Articles
Ted Gioia’s “The Rise of the Fragmented Novel” = THESIS = located in paragraph #5 =
http://fractiousfiction.com/rise_of_the_fragmented_novel.html (Links to an external site.)
“These novels do not simply delight us with their contrasting voices. They also send us through an enjoyable labyrinth. The books he describes are filled with sharp turns and apparent dead ends, yet we always reach our final destination. Their authors are not just displaying virtuosity in creating a range of voices, but also showing off their ingenuity in building coherent narratives out of starkly juxtaposed bits and pieces.Or, put differently, previous attempts to create fragmented novels tended to emphasize content over form. The current tendency in the fragmented novel is to exhibit a relentless formalism even while, at a superficial level, the books seem to reject it” (Gioia #5).
Ted Gioia’s GOLDEN LINES = Golden lines are polarizing lines that you may agree or disagree with. Golden lines are textual evidence that you will possibly incorporate into your essay to create a metaphorical conversation with Nelson’s BLUETS.
“The new fragmented novel is holistic and coalescent. It resists disunity, even as it appears to embody it” (Gioia #3).
“A passing note: The fragmented narrative is not just a trend in literary fiction. In 1978, a typical 30-second TV commercial had a camera cut every 3.8 seconds. By 1991, these same commercials inserted a camera cut every 2.3 seconds. Yet music videos were adopting an ever more rapid pace, featuring a cut every 1.6 seconds. Fiction is responding to these changes, rather than initiating them. Almost all of the arts now aspire to a pleasing sense of dislocation” (Gioia #9).
“Experimental novelists rediscovered the fragmented novel in the late 1950s. But their conception was diametrically opposed to that of Sherwood Anderson and other practitioners of the ‘fix-up’ and bears only a superficial connection to the new style of fragmented novel exemplified by Egan, Mitchell and others. The avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s did not want their textual fragments fit together, and devised a host of new methods to create a sense of dislocation and discontinuity among readers” (Gioia #13).
Ben Segal’s “The Fragment as a Unit of Prose Composition = THESIS located on page 158, paragraph 2 =
http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/47 (Links to an external site.)
“However they are labeled, the very aloofness of disconnected micro-texts allows them certain privileges and possibilities that a writer can employ and exploit. In such instances, the book of fragments may, almost paradoxically, gain a coherence as a singular work, all the more satisfying for its fractures” (Segal 158).
Ben Segal’s GOLDEN LINES:
“In other words, the composition emanates from the piles of junk left in its wake, but it in itself becomes perfect. It may be unfashionable, but I’m interested in this sense of perfection” (Segal 160).
This is an example of Maggie Nelson creating a metaphorical conversation between her writing and Virginia Woolf’s novel: “Think of Lily Briscoe at the end of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—after her long reverie, she eventually must make the mark on the canvas. She brings the brush down, then sighs: “There, I have had my vision.” To have made the mark, to have manifested the vision, brings with it a certain satisfaction, a certain euphoria and relief—but also a brand of pathos. Of all the possible books, you wrote this book. Of all the possible brush strokes, you made this one. How very strange!” (Segal 160).
This could be a new creative genre name for Essay 3 = Question 3B :”Preservation of potentiality” (Segal 160).
Maria Popova’s “Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion” = THESIS located on page 1, paragraph 4 =
https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/08/17/goethe-theory-of-colours/ (Links to an external site.)
“But perhaps his most fascinating theories explore the psychological impact of different colors on mood and emotion- ideas derived by the poet’s intuition, which are part entertaining accounts bordering on superstition, part prescient insights corroborated by hard science some two centuries later, and part purely delightful manifestations of the beauty of language” (Popova).
Maria Popova’s GOLDEN LINES
“Theory of colors stands as an absorbing account of the philosophy and the artistic experience of color, bridging the intuitive and the visceral in a way that, more than two hundred years later, continues to intrigue” (Popova).
“Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally” (Popova).
Anything under “BLUE” can be paired with Nelson’s numbered propositions about Goethe (#8, 23, 24, 25, 36, 111, 117, 183, 191, 196):
BLUE
As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it.
This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful — but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us.
But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.
Blue gives us an impression of cold, and thus, again, reminds us of shade. We have before spoken of its affinity with black.
Rooms which are hung with pure blue, appear in some degree larger, but at the same time empty and cold.
The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy.
When blue partakes in some degree of the plus side, the effect is not disagreeable. Sea-green is rather a pleasing color.
REQUESTED TOPIC SENTENCES
Bluets renegotiates the readership experience from tame to unpredictable by not giving explicit answers to its contents, thus allowing for individualized interpretation that resonates more personally to the reader in its unanswered questions.
Bluets’ nonlinear and fragmented approach pays tribute to the life’s confusing course and efforts to piece it together, allowing the readers to understand its contents through its structure.
Bluets’ complex, contradictory, and experimental nature resembles the enigma of love surrounding her ex-lover, The Prince of Blue.
Joan Mitchell’s experimental painting, Les Bluets, abstract blue cornflowers, parallels the negative space of Maggie Nelson’s confessional style of writing.
Despite how Bluets entices its readers to go down a meandering path with several forks, the end at the same destination.
Bennett & Royle’s critical lens of “The PostModern,” helps reader unpack how Bluets queers and “exploits principles of unity” and the “undecidability” of fragmented narration.
Bennett & Royle’s critical lens of “The End,” forces reader to accept that there is no such thing as unified ending to any literary work, but rather, how the end of Bluets is a perversion of kaleidoscopic effects.
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In Bennett & Royle’s critical lens of “Desire,” they quote Frederick Nietzsche ‘In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired’ (1989, 93). Perhaps, Bluets’ speaker does not desire the color blue, rather she is obsesses over the process of obsessing
Essay 3’s Secondary Texts. Read and incorporate all FOUR articles. You will use each article as a critical lens to unpack, unfold, and understand 2 different proportions per body paragraph from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets:
Ted Gioia’s The Rise of the Fragmented Novel
Ben Segal – The Fragment as a Unit of Prose Composition
Maria Popova – Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion – Brain Pickings
Lydia Davis’s “Les Bluets” = https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69935/les-bluets-1973 (Links to an external site.)
One chapter from Bennet & Royle’s book. Do not use the same chapter you have already used from Essay 1 or 2.
Essay 3’s Tertiary Texts. Read all FOUR; pick TWO to write about. You will use each article as a critical lens to unpack, unfold, and understand 2 different proportions per body paragraph from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets:
Rob Schlegel’s “Either Dissolve a Genre or Invent One – Book Review”
Thomas Larson’s “TriQuarterly Now Where Was I – Craft Essay”
Ray McDaniel’s “Constant Critic”
Full Stop Interview – Pathos Nelson – PRINT PAGES 2 TO 4 ONLY
ESSAY 3 PROMPT:
Essay 3 must be thesis-driven, well-organized, and 8-9 pages analysis of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.
Essay 3 is NOT a book review NOR is it an informative summary.
Theme/Thesis = must contain debatable argument; avoid summary and avoid obvious statements of facts.
Your thesis should:
Select one:
Does the content control the structure (new form: partially leans on preexisting forms)?
Or does the structure control the content (new genre: full experimental)?
Since Bluets is experimental, at minimum, quasi-experimental, you must declare a brand new genre name to describe this text. For example: Kaleidoscopic Confessions; Literary Junkyard; Conversations with Poets, Painters, and Philosophers.
Explore how Bluets queers, subverts, and challenges the traditional linear narrative arch to renegotiate the readership experience. How does the experimental and fragmentation style affect the reading process?
Your introduction paragraph should:
Select one: Does the content control the structure (new form: partially leans on and blends preexisting genres)? -OR- Does the structure control the content (new genre: full experimental writing)?
How does your new genre -or- form creation affect or highlight Bluets’ theme/thesis? You must create a name to call this mixed genre.
Address if Nelson is her speaker or if Nelson creates a speaker? What is the difference? What are the results?
Your essay should:
Analyze, explicate, and unpack 12-15 of Nelson’s numbered propositions. DO NOT analyze the entire text; there are a total of 240 numbered propositions. An analysis is (countable) decomposition into components in order to study (a complex thing, concept, theory); whereas, an explication is the act of opening, unfolding, or explaining; explanation; exposition; interpretation.
Evaluate the “Power Dynamic” of “text and readership”: What does it mean if readers are attracted to Nelson’s experimental style =vs= what does it mean if readers long for the traditional linear narrative arch (problem, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution) because they’re unsettled (reject) by Bluets’ new form and content?
50% (4-5 body paragraph) of your essay is an analysis of Nelson’s theme and content.
50% (4-5 body paragraph) of your essay is an analysis of Nelson’s form and structure.
