For Thursday’s asynchronous session this week, you will explore the various “situations” found in section VI of Rankine’s text. Choose one of the videos produced by Rankine and John Lucas, which you can find on Rankine’s site, and view it alongside the corresponding moment in Rankine’s text. In 500-800 words, posted to our blog, respond to the “situation.” You might consider:

• why is it called a “situation”? How does this text “situate” the speaker and the subjects it deals with? What are other valences of the word “situation” that might come into play?
• how does the text interact with the moving images? how does it “read” differently when viewing it as a film rather than reading it in a book. What does it mean that Rankine has supplemented her printed text in this way?
• what are the major themes in this “situation” and how does it relate to the rest of Rankine’s text?

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.