Due May 9, 2017
Integrative Seminar 2
“Cross-Course Reflection”
As a freshman BA/BFA student studying Photography at Parsons and Literature at Lang, my first year living and working in New York City was a wonderful collision of two very different worlds. Unlike most first year students at Parsons, my workload was evenly split between studio art courses and readings-heavy seminars. As a result, instances of one discipline would always pop up in the other: in my Poetry class, I drew connections between Modernism and Russian Constructivist art; in my Time class, a goofy Edwardian short story became the basis of my first graphic novel. Philosophy was another common thread that appeared throughout my work, as it provided the common link between my Seminar and Studio projects this past semester.
Curiously enough, however, I find that my working methods in both areas are polar opposite. When it comes to writing papers, I need as much time as possible to prepare my material: I like to research extensively, outline in great detail, and then use that immense preparation to write my paper as quickly as possible. With art, my chronic need to plan goes away. I take pictures with little forethought, but then spend an enormous amount of time editing and tweaking the image either manually in the darkroom or digitally in Photoshop. The times where I was left entirely to my own devices, particularly when writing research papers, were my very favorite creative moments. Reading obsessively and putting my ideas together is always a great deal of fun, especially when I was able to formulate something entirely of my own. Further research would have been nice were I given the time, but most of these papers (particularly my research paper for Seminar 2) allowed for a much shorter research period than I am accustomed to.
One major highlight from this year was a 15-page paper I wrote comparing Dostoevsky’s polyphony to the multi-voicedness of social media. The paper was a self-directed final paper for a 300-level class on The Brothers Karamazov. I had actually been itching to write about polyphony since reading a friend’s paper on it in my senior year of high school, so in some ways I had already started much of the research before the project was even assigned. From there, it was just a matter of gathering an array of primary and secondary sources that were relevant to the argument I was trying to make (which was a little tricky because, as far as I’m aware, no one has actually ever published anything containing the polyphony/social media comparison).
A second highlight was the graphic novel mentioned earlier. It was based off of “Sredni Vashtar,” a short satire about a young boy named Conradin who discovers a ferret in a shed, begins to worship it as a deity, and then calls on it to murder his governess while he sits and eats a celebratory piece of toast. I made the novel in InDesign by collaging together bits of photographs from the Edwardian period alongside contemporary illustrations of various objects (keys, doorways, toast, etc.) Through some serious networking, Shannon Wheeler (a famous cartoonist who works for The New Yorker) took a look at my novel and gave me some very helpful feedback.
Both of these highlights represent times where I was given a great deal of freedom to follow whatever esoteric interest struck me, and times where I obsessively followed through in creating a very detail-oriented and carefully considered final product (which often had a fair amount of humor to it). In the future, I hope to continue to engage in projects such as these, picking up on things in my reading and taking them to their furthest limits. In the future, I hope to continue honing my independent research process, and work on mastering the various digital softwares like Premiere, Photoshop, InDesign, etc.
