(The) Writer's Mind: The Memento Project
A fundamental premise of this course is that each of us exists within the world: there is no being without being in the world, a world filled with projects we are concerned with, and to fulfill on those projects, we take up our favored tools and work together with those who participate with us.
One method to enact this inquiry I call the Memento Project, the inspiration for which comes from the film Memento, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (story by his younger brother Jonathan).
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The Memento Project will include lots of leg work meant to help you develop several written narratives:
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The list of strengths
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Sketch at least 5 scenes, from which you will design your observation exercise.
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Interviews for your network of conversations
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List of successes that you have accomplished: sketch out 5 of these.
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Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory! As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break agonized and clear! --Emily Dickinson |
Discovering the "bite"
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Consolidate strengths into 2 or 3 "umbrella strengths."
Write at least 2 Cause Narratives after having sketched out at least 5 potential candidates.
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"Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan.
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Of all signs, the memento most seems to have a reality of its own. It refers to the past and so is effectively a sign, but it is also precious in itself since, as a bit of the past that has not disappeared, it keeps the past present for us. But it is clear that this characteristic is not grounded in the being of the object itself. A memento has value as a memento only for someone who already--i.e., still--recalls the past. Mementos lose their value when the past of which they remind one no longer has any meaning. Furthermore, someone who not only uses mementos to remind him but makes a cult of them and lives in the past as if it were the present has a disturbed relation to reality. |
Sources
Nearly every academic year since 2002, when I began teaching First Year Composition, I have taught the memento assignment, in one version or another. The assignment is a cross-appropriation into the writing classroom of Werner Erhard's distinction called the "winning formula" (normally delivered conversationally in a weekend-long seminar now called the Landmark Forum). The central concept is quite simple, and very much a commonplace of Western culture: character emerges in response to challenges or failures, and while the strength compensates for the failure, finding a way to cope with it successfully, the strength also poses limitations. This is a key thematic structure to the film Memento, where Lenny compensates for his "condition" through routine and conditioning. He sets up his future self to accomplish his goal of revenge through notes and tattoos.
The film throws us back on ourselves as we watch it, and discover that in some ways, we share more with Leonard than we might suspect at first. What is our quest? and what are the reasons for having such a quest? Is there anything possible outside the given quests there for us to pick up from our culture?
The film throws us back on ourselves as we watch it, and discover that in some ways, we share more with Leonard than we might suspect at first. What is our quest? and what are the reasons for having such a quest? Is there anything possible outside the given quests there for us to pick up from our culture?
A Bit of a Story
I have been working with Communications Studies scholar Bruce Hyde since 2007, until his death on October 13th 2015. I had read his dissertation ("Saying the Clearing") while in graduate school (2004), where it served to inspire and inform my dissertation ("Ontological Paideia"), which I completed in 2008. I felt then that his dissertation must be made available at some point for a wider audience, an audience interested in philosophy and "transformation," but an audience that would also include my field of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, and also Communication Studies. Our work to turn this dissertation into a book began in earnest in 2011, and in it we are working to elaborate the connections between Martin Heidegger's thinking and Werner Erhard's "technology of transformation." The book is called Speaking Being: Martin Heidegger, Werner Erhard, and a Technology of Transformation (2019).
In the process of this work, I have discovered another "source" for the commonplace I have used as the basic heuristic for the Memento project. It is in philosopher Martin Heidegger's work Being in Time. There he works to distinguish the "meaning" of human Being (Dasein) as "care." Care is being "ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)" (237). In other words: we always find ourselves already in the world, engaged in some project of living, coping with everyday circumstances. This is the starting point to teach writing in Writer's Mind: explore everyday life events, and the ways we deal with life. Using this way of getting into writing, I argue, values students using everyday life to grapple with central writerly practices: observation of the world and the self, and communicating that experience in a way that invites and brings audiences to experience something worthy of reading.
In the process of this work, I have discovered another "source" for the commonplace I have used as the basic heuristic for the Memento project. It is in philosopher Martin Heidegger's work Being in Time. There he works to distinguish the "meaning" of human Being (Dasein) as "care." Care is being "ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)" (237). In other words: we always find ourselves already in the world, engaged in some project of living, coping with everyday circumstances. This is the starting point to teach writing in Writer's Mind: explore everyday life events, and the ways we deal with life. Using this way of getting into writing, I argue, values students using everyday life to grapple with central writerly practices: observation of the world and the self, and communicating that experience in a way that invites and brings audiences to experience something worthy of reading.
In 2004 I presented (in a panel with my colleagues Erik Ellis and Leta Sharpe) the structure and philosophical background (principally Hans Georg Gadamer, a student of Heidegger's) of the assignment at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Antonio, Texas. Below is the paper I read there.