By this point students have been able to reconstruct an image of themselves as a writer and to work to express themselves within genre conventions. This exercise asks them to break the rules on purpose. The assignment is this: students should create a piece that deliberately frustrates the reader’s search for meaning within the piece. At this point, if the class seems to be embodying the experience of writing, it might be wise to give them the choice between a visual or written work, or a work in which they may incorporate both. I think the visual allows for metaphor that their written work might turn prosaic. Here’s a project I completed in Power Point that demonstrates the assignment.
In “The Rhetoric of Irritation: Inappropriateness as a Visual/Literate Practice” (in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers, U of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 2009), Greg Stroupe argues that breaking the rules can lead to new and productive ways of seeing things. Moreover, irritating readers frustrates the notion of the meaning or the point of the work. If we take Archibald MacLeish’s speaker’s lines from “Ars Poetica” to heart, that “A poem should not mean, / But be,” this exercise is an excellent way to lead students away from the mystery poem or the dreaded verse riddle. “Did you guess what it was?” Some of my strongest student writers have asked this question when they are prompted to speak after their students workshop their piece.
This exercise would ask them to frustrate the reader’s attempt to make perfect sense between the referent and the references. I feel you would want to follow up this exercise with some deeply embodied poets’ work. I also think this exercise is a valuable one to introduce early in a semester so that the teacher has a chance to reintroduce audience expectation as something to recognize in their works, not pander to, but not ignore or frustrate without reason either .
I couldn’t stop laughing. The PowerPoint is amazingly good.