By 9:00 am, Monday, April 24th one person from your group should post a description of what your group plans to do for the book project. Remember to check all relevant category boxes. If your group is a little undecided, you may propose two descriptions (but no more than two). Each description should include a WHAT and a WHY.
THE WHAT is a detailed description of the book (e.g. Making hand bound books from wasted copy paper from expired campus flyers. OR Launching a digital children’s book. OR Choreographing a living book where various students dressed in the words of various pages of the book walk around individually and come together. OR anything else.) You should be as detailed as possible about the WHAT. Don’t just say you’re going to make a physical book or do a performance. Explain the nature of the physical book (size, material, etc.). Detail the vision of the performance (Improvisation? Scripted, Lyrical, Dance? Musical? Three acts? A one person show? A Musical? And so much more.) Your description should be 2-3 paragraphs.
THE WHY is where you reflect on how your WHAT satisfies the requirements of the assignment (please see the assignment description). You should explain why you chose the form you chose, and while your explanation might be partly out of personal interest in that form, you need to articulate a rationale that relates that form/medium to the content of your book. How does the form of your particular book speak to the themes/questions/claims you want to highlight in your book? Your WHY should at least be 2-3 substantive and informative sentences, but if you want to write more, you are welcomed to do so.
I gave a quick example in class using The Scarlet Letter, but here is another detailed example: Maybe my group is doing the physical book made out of recycled campus flyers.
Maybe we came to the idea partly because we were just joking around and partly because half our group is passionate about making Baruch more green and the other half just thought the idea was cool. That’s a fine way to come to the idea (the logistical details of which we will spell out in the WHAT), but then in order to produce a strong WHY, we had to do the WORK of considering how a book made out of expired campus ads might speak to the ideas/themes at play in our novel Beloved? At first it was tough, but then we thought of two things, one that the main character was a fugitive slave, and so there’s something in the print ad that resonates with the danger of escape and hunt. But also the ads we are using are expired, which signifies a passing of the terror, but then by recycling them, we both honor the end of that present life of the ads while acknowledging that something of them lives on.
This WHY might be enough right here for the Monday check-in, but since the purpose of the check-in is to get the ball rolling, our group can go go further by 1) limiting the type of expired ads you used, so if you only used ads that seemed to ask students to market or sell themselves or conform themselves to the needs of institutions, well then you can now make your form in even better conversation with the content because just as the form speaks to the content (the ads for runaway slaves) the content of Beloved and the use of the ads in this way gives new life to the content of the ads, making us think about the content of those expired ads in a new light.