Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences MA CAST

Period 4 2013/2014 Course RCA5008

Research Master CAST

RESEARCHING THE INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE ARTS:

SELF-FASHIONING

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RESEARCHING THE INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE ARTS: Period 4

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Course Theme Course Design Course Objectives Course Assessment Tutor and Coordinator WEEK-BY-WEEK COURSE OUTLINE Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 Week 8 3 4 5 5 6 6 7 8 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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RESEARCHING THE INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE ARTS: Period 4

INTRODUCTION

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RESEARCHING THE INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE ARTS: Period 4

Course Theme This course deals with the confluence of the arts and sciences in every day practices of self-fashioning, i.e. the performance of a specific identities on (semi-)public fora. Since the late nineteenth-century, the arts and sciences have grown apart institutionally. The sciences were professionalized and institutionalized within the university, which solidified the rule-governed, certified nature of scientific research and education. Meanwhile, in the wake of Romanticism, the arts were increasingly exempted from all rules, precepts, and codified procedures, which left them to reinvent themselves with each and every new avant-garde ism that was introduced in the course of the twentieth century. The rules and protocols of science discouraged scientists from seeking for guidance and inspiration in the aesthetic realm, while it became increasingly difficult for artists and authors to gain access to scientific knowledge. As scientific and aesthetic practices were driven apart institutionally, it became quite futile to seek for direct influences of twentieth-century scientists upon artists or the other way around. This does not mean, however, that the two are worlds apart. It is just that we cannot conceptualize their interrelations in terms of causal influence patterns. Notwithstanding persistent claims to scientific and aesthetic autonomy, both sciences and arts have proved to be powerful forces that shape and are shaped by the surrounding socio-cultural context. Rather than directly influencing each other, they mix and mingle while impacting on contested cultural, social, and political sites. Individuals may at times feel the need to write back to the pervasive normative impact of the psy-sciences and the biomedical sciences on personal identities, looking for creative escapes through narrative form. Conversely, scientific models may also serve as sources of inspiration for criticizing cultural clichs about the crucial social differences that structure our identities (sex, sexuality, age, ethnicity, race, nationality ). At times, scientists model themselves after artist s (e.g. the scientist as Romantic genius). On other occasions, artists stylizes themselves as researchers, as in contemporary practices of so-called artistic research. This makes for a more complex picture of interaction than the linear influence model. This course offers concepts, methods, and perspectives for scholarly inquiry into the interplay between the sciences and the arts in everyday practices of self-fashioning. Hence, life writing in all shapes and sizes is a central object of inquiry here. Methodologically, we will focus on discourse analysis, including the tools of narrative and rhetorical analysis.

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RESEARCHING THE INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE ARTS: Period 4

Course Design Group meetings come in three types: a. Lectures that discuss key concepts, theories, and methods for coming to terms with the aesthetic and scientific co-construction of identity. b. Seminars, for the joint discussion of reading assignments with a methodological focus. c. Research meetings, for the presentation of and (peer) feedback on your own ongoing research projects. As this course is about researching the interrelations between the sciences and the arts, your own individual research projects will begin as soon as the course starts, following the set-up presented below in the week-by-week course outline (in free style letter type). You are free to team up with a fellow-student if you want to, but not with more than one, for group work will be practiced in period E. You will have two weeks at the end of the course to devote fully to writing a 6000- word research paper on a case study of your own choice. Reading assignments will decrease towards the end of the course as your work on the research paper increases. When you start producing draft chapters in weeks 6 and 7, peer feedback will assume a more organized form, i.e. every student will receive two feedbacks from fellow students. You will be teamed up by the tutor. Course Objectives This course aims to: Enable you to conceptualize the interrelations between the sciences and the arts beyond the standard views of autonomy and causal influence in a concrete way, using various instances of self-fashioning as case studies. equip you with conceptual and methodological tools for analyzing the aesthetic and scientific co-construction of identity alert you to the ways in which the construction of individual identity is constrained by social, cultural, and political factors, i.e. to identity politics. Train you in (some tools for) discourse analysis Practice the art of giving and receiving feedback on scholarly work-in-progress

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RESEARCHING THE INTERRELATIONS BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE ARTS: Period 4

Course Assessment In addition to regular evaluation criteria (spelling and punctuation, grammar, vocabulary, style, soundness of argumentation, sense of audience, clarity of problem statement, argumentative logic, coherence, lucidity, compliance with APA, accuracy), your 6000-word paper will be evaluated according to your success in bringing the concepts, theories, and methods discussed in class to bear upon the case study at hand. Position within the CAST curriculum The focus of the first CAST course was on producing a discussion paper that reviews the use of a particular concept in the (inter)disciplinary fields relevant to CAST. The second course dealt with everything students need to know to produce their first CAST research paper, not just studying other peoples research, but also doing research themselves, on a topic of their own choosing. This course takes the last approach one step further, through more focused inquiry into a somewhat more delimited research field. Within the overall course theme of self-fashioning on the basis of scientific and aesthetic repertoires, you are still free to pursue your own lines of interest, but the idea is that students feedback on each others work will be facilitated by a shared focus. In addition, the purpose of this course is to foreground the A in the CAST curriculum. Tutor and Coordinator Dr. E. (Lies) Wesseling, Department of Literature and Art/Centre for Gender and Diversity, Grote Gracht 80-82 (Soiron Building), room 2003, tel.: 043-3883309/82669/83317; Lies.Wesseling@Maastrichtuniversity.NL

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WEEK-BY-WEEK COURSE OUTLINE

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WEEK 1

A. Lecture: - Course introduction

Start thinking right away about your research topic. Choose a scientist, traveler/explorer, artist/author, politician or other (semi-)public figure who catches your interest, and meets the following demands: There is sufficient autobiographical material available (this can entail memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, letters, blogs, vlogs, personal homepages ) The subject at hand is likely to have been susceptible to input from both scientific and artistic discourses You may choose a public personality or celebrity, but you need not do so. You could also choose an ordinary person who is likely to have been policed by science and who relies on narrative forms to shape his or her experience, e.g. a parent (cf. mommy blogs), a teacher, a doctor, an entrepreneur, etc. Alternatively, you may also elicit oral life stories from the subject of your own choosing through indepth interviewing or through online ethnography and then analyze the oral life stories emerging from this endeavor, but this implies, of course, that you have access to this person. Write 1-2 pages on the subject of your own choice, answering the following questions: Who have you chosen? Which (auto-)biographical materials are available? How do you expect this person to draw on both scientific and aesthetic repertoires in the construction of a public persona? Why is this topic of interest, to whom, with respect to which issues? Upload your pages on eleum, 24 hours before the research meeting in week 2 at the latest.
B. Lecture: On Self-fashioning - Seminar: Self-fashioning, Theory Erving Goffman, 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. While studying these and all the other assigned readings, always ask yourself the following questions and report back on your findings in class accordingly: - What are the key theoretical concepts here and what do they mean, what are their uses? - Which methods does the author apply? How does s/he defend his/her choice of methods, if at all?
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If the author does not explicate anything, could you infer the method(s) from the publication yourself? Does the author identify crucial allies and/or opponents amongst fellow scholars? If so, who are they and why these? Does the author defend his or her affinities and disidentifications convincingly, or are we dealing with mere adulation cq. bashing?

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WEEK 2

A. - Seminar: Self-Fashioning, Learning by example: Steven Shapin, Nobel Savage, London Review of Books, 1999 Elisabeth Wesseling, Judith Rich Harris: The Miss Marple of Developmental Psychology, Science in Context 17(3): 293-314. - Research Meeting: Discussion of research topics: Give a 5-minute presentation on the topic of your choosing, on the basis of your written pages, while explicating the points you would like to receive feedback on. During this meeting and all other research meetings, try and put clarifying, probing questions to each other so as to sharpen and specify each others problem statements, as a minimum form of feedback that everybody should be able to provide to everyone. Anything you manage beyond that (come up with constructive solutions, suggest interesting publications on the topic at hand, etc.) is, of course, wonderful. B. - Seminar: Self-Fashioning, Learning by Example: Carl Edward Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007.

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WEEK 3

A. - Lecture: Life Writing: Theory and Practice - Seminar: Life Writing, Theory: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chapters 1,2,3

Between A and B, start working on the formulation of your problem statement: a. use the topical questions (who, what, where, when, why?) to narrow down the topic of your choice b. explicate as fully as possible for yourself why you are drawn to/intrigued by the topic of your choice c. settle on the rhetorical purpose of your research paper: do you want to formulate and defend a claim, answer a research question, nuance or correct the communis opinio ? d. select a research question or claim that refers a real problem, i.e. it should not be a question that you already have an answer to or that has already been settled by the discussants, nor should it be a question that you can answer with a simple yes or no and not much else. e. formulate your problem statement as precisely and concretely as you can possibly can: who or what does your ps refer to, within which context, during which period, within which situation, ? f. why is this question pertinent/relevant: on which problems will it shed light, and how, and why are these problems urgent? g. What are the knots that you still need to cut, the aspects you are still unsure of, the things that need further inquiry? Write 1-2 pages to present your problem statement and upload it 24 hours before the upcoming research meeting.
B - Seminar: Life Writing, Learning by Example: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography, Chapter 9. Sidonie Smith, Americas Exhibit A: Hillary Rodham Clintons Living History and the Genres of Authenticity, American Literary History 24/3: 523 542. - Research Meeting: 5-minute presentation of your problem statement in class, discussion of each others contributions.
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WEEK 4

A. - Lecture: Discourse Analysis - Seminar: Discourse analysis: theory James Paul Gee, 2010. Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. New York: Routledge, Chapters 1,2,3,4 (available online).

Between A and B, formulate subquestions and an outline, and compile a provisional bibliography: a. Divide your problem statement into 3-4 subquestions that zoom in on specific aspects of the topic at hand b. You need to formulate these subquestions in such a way that they can be dealt with in 3-4 successive chapters c. Produce a first draft of the table of contents of your paper, providing brief summaries of the envisaged content of every chapter. d. Primary sources: which sources will you analyze to tackle the problem at hand? What type of sources are these, which aspects of your topic will they illuminate, which aspects will they obscure? e. Secondary sources: explore what has already been published about your topic/problem statement through google scholar, google books, J-Stor, BNTL, MLA, AHR, the cumulative bibliography of the journal ISIS, Picarta f. check the availability of these materials through Picarta and J-stor g. describe any difficulties you may run into when collecting your primary and secondary sources Produce 3-4 pages on these assignments and upload them 24 hours before the research meeting
B. - Seminar: Learning by Example, Gee, Discourse Analysis, Chapters 5 and 11 - Research Meeting: Outline and bibliography, 5-minute presentations.

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WEEK 5

A.

Lecture: Narrative Analysis Seminar: Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography, Appendix A Joanna Thornborrow, 2013. Narrative Analysis. In: James Paul Gee and Michael Handford, eds. Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, 51-66.

Between A and B, identify your conceptual framework and method: a. Which concepts will be particularly useful to your topic and why? b. Which method/s will be particularly appropriate in the light of your problem statement and primary material and how will you apply them?
c. Motivate your choices in a 1-2pages and upload it on eleum 24 hours before the next research

meeting.
B. Seminar: Narrative Analysis, Learning by Example: Gillian Beer, Darwins Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Ark Paperbacks. - Research Meeting: Give a 5-minute presentation on crucial concepts and methods in your ongoing research project.

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WEEK 6

A. - Lecture: Rhetorical Analysis - Seminar: * Craig Smith, 2004. Ethos Dwells Pervasively. In: Michael J. Hyde, ed., The Ethos of Rhetoric. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1-19. * The Normative Structure of Science included in Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations University of Chicago Press (1979), 267-278.

Between A and B, produce a draft of the first two chapters, upload them 24 hours before research meeting
- Seminar: Learning by Example: Linda Walsh, Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, chapters 1,2,3,4, Research meeting, organized peer review of first two draft chapters.

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WEEK 7

Before B, produce a draft version of the last two chapters, uploading them 24 hours before the research meeting.
B. Research meeting: organized peer review of last two chapters

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WEEK 8

Submit final version, drinks

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