Mystory Prompts (Organized by Discourse/Institution/Domain)
Career
- "Make a website documenting an important discovery, or a (founding) invention, in your career domain (your university major, or a field of disciplinary knowledge in which you have some interest) [...]. Think of this site as a documentation, a curated display of details related to a discovery [...]. There is no need to explain [your choice...]. This first assignment resembles a conventional research topic, except that rather than being asked to form an argument, you are considering the material in terms of your identification with it: an event in a field of knowledge used as a feature in a self-portrait” (21-22). The purpose of this assignment, Ulmer says later, is to recognize “the intersection between the anecdotes of my life and the aphorisms of thought in my career field [...]” (27). Though he hastens to add that students should not try to formally articulate this intersection, the "wide site," until they have finished the mystories in all the other domains.
- One theoretical fragment that Ulmer offers is the "inventive etymology," which can be used "to dislodge dead metaphors" that frame (without sensitivity to implication and nuance) a situation or experience in one's career domain. Ulmer gives an example: rather than thinking of our writings about our career as "texts" (translated as textiles, woven strands of homogeneous material) we might think of them as "felt" (a garment, rather than an object, something worn rather than used, that is made by pressing, by "applying pressure" in a certain way rather than a procedure for splicing together (35-36). This contrast of tropes for setting one on one’s course (of discourse) is a fork in the road between “western logic [the production of texts] that goes behind or below or transcends appearances to locate essence (concept) [and] Eastern reason [which] stays with surface, appearance, accident, and names the attributes that evoke a moment of experience (a mood)” (48).
- Another figurative prompt Ulmer includes departs from the observation that people often think of their career fields in/through the images/feelings of some "craft or applied practical physical practice or process." Ulmer asks students to consider which activity configures their notion of a particular career.
Family
Entertainment
- Family memories "cluster around problems," Ulmer suggests. Rather than defining these crises in a familiar/generic way, Ulmer suggests that we come at our memories askance by “declassifying” our understanding of what happened and what it meant. Instead of mapping pat narratives onto the event, we find an image that "stings" (think: Rosebud) and then infer what it is about the thing/events that reflects an internal crisis. We read the event/situation through the lens of our emotional memory/image and discover not a conventional way to parse it but an unconventional way to ‘access’ it. (And if, for instance, other people’s image treatments of similar situations/events resonate with ours, then we’re on to something: perhaps the differend?)
- Noting that the “power of a photograph to stimulate involuntary personal memory” or “obtuse” meanings (“links” between a signifier and a “scene in memory”) is unappreciated by many critics of visual culture, and being cognizant of the fact that, as many primers on webdesign testify, the “principles of brevity and aesthetic design” are crucial to successful electronic communication (51), Ulmer suggests that in creating our Family mystory we create poetic and art images that help us discover whether we resonate to the mood(s) of the dominant culture (taken here to mean: whatever images of and advice for family life that Oprah magazine would present). Ulmer uses Joyce to explain that epiphany is not translatable as "I realized then [...]" (a lost and found narrative) but is rather a structure, not unlike a Brechtian performance of a “social gest” ("a gesture or set of gestures [...] in which a whole social situation can be read” (61). Epiphanies and gests alienate us from routine/default themata, they detour us from routine/default intersections between aphorism/anecdotes and create the space of insight, or the flight of insight, which is perhaps no more than a feeling of possibility or joy or pain. Ulmer provides several theoretical fragments/relays that help writers locate and document “disturbances” those 'scenes' which seem to recall “nonutilitarian, inefficient, irrelevant events and experiences” but which "sting" nonetheless (76).
- Ulmer finds a "ready-made" technique of reading family photos in Annette Kuhn’s instructions for doing “memory work” with family photos (87). He suggests that writers can use her procedure to create a wide image of their positioning within the family system. Alternatively, students can talk with a family member (or record a conversation) and then work from the Barthesian “punctum principle” to find signifiers that access a wide image. Either way, Ulmer urges, this is not “confession” with its revelation of a ‘dirty’ secret (some big or little ego defeat or trauma). It is an aesthetic rendering of the punctum: that which “stings.” Once you’ve arrested some signifiers, details in an interview, some pictorial or verbal images, you appropriate some aspect of what you’ve captured as a FORM for this aspect of the mystory to take. Examples: an altar, a bathtub, a roadtrip, a shouting match, a lost sled. Ulmer writes: you “inventory” the features of this activity/place and “translate them into design elements for your website” (114).
Community
- Ulmer asks writers to find a minor character, or a movie that impressed them and explain some aspect of their lives/identities in the images it provides. In my rendering of how "Charlie's Angels" or whatever resonates with one's self, Ulmer encourages students to create a “middle voice,” a kind of ventriloquism, which they use to impersonate the STARS(s) (this technique resonates with Brechtian gest). A star may be iconized (like Farah or Brittany or Arnold) or not; the task is to identify those signifiers that make (or would make) the (would-be) star iconographic, larger than life. Alternatively, writers find a fetish (“something that you possess or do that gives you a sense of confidence and security”) from their daily lives as consumers and re-present it through pictorial and verbal imagery. Ulmer here and elsewhere suggests that in giving their accounts of their involvements in the various domains that students anchor their mystories in the reverse the order of the preferred schemas for literate American culture:
. argument (exposition)
. narrative (story)
. character (biography)
. musical (theme and variation patterns)
. image (atmosphere through signifiers)
- Ulmer asks: How do we think about community and, more importantly, how does the community think (for) us? If school (or church or some other community) were a movie, what was the “premise” (was it High Concept? 187; 197). Alternatively, we might get at our interpellation in a community by asking: who or what was the scapegoat in our community? How did it/they serve the community by creating an inner/outer, and safety/danger bipolar opposition? What gaps in this monumentalization of (rigid) identity were we left to fill? Or, another option still: we might instigate memories of the community-in-use by asking: How were we creolized or 'misogynated' (or kept from that)? How did the race/class/gender Other factor into our characteristic expression?
The idea throughout these questions (which look at the community as a movie we’re in, possibly as extras, rather than as writers/directors/editors) is that “we are inside a belief system of the community” (208).