PWR 2GMJ: In Search of the Most Human Language

Our work can be done by machines, our writing can be written by algorithms, our attention can be held, indefinitely, by a 6 x 2” piece of Gorilla Glass. VC and Tech entrepreneurs have said they want to replace all human labor as soon as possible: all the thinking will be done by AI, all the doing will be done by robots. What is a human to do? This course responds by studying communication that is not mechanized, anaesthetized, predictable, indifferent or disembodied. In search of what is particularly human in our writing (speaking, singing, performing), we are in search of a rhetorics that cannot be replaced. Together, we will articulate what this vital rhetoric knows and practice it in our academic writing and speaking. 

Students are encouraged to create dynamic, interactive, multimodal projects that draw on the affordances of technology while surpassing it in cognition, in imagination. Students might develop an interactive analysis of a text they’ve researched to show what the text does uniquely, rhetorically; or take an entrenched political or ecological problem and rethink it by drawing on the lessons of poetic attention, reimagination, estrangement; or study a rhetorical form (tests, ballots, driving directions, CV’s, twitter feed, algorithms) that mechanizes our thinking and redesign it in a way that remakes that experience as abundantly human.

Research Proposal 

(3-5 minute live oral presentation; written proposal of 900-1200 words; reflective memo of 250 words) The goals of this assignment are: (1) to find the initial, key texts you want to wrestle with in your research project and (2) describe them to the class in a way that helps us to see why they are unsettling and urgent and what is at stake in studying them. In other words, this is a chance to not only describe but model the skills we’ve been discussing in class.

Written Research-Based Argument

(10-12 pages or 3000-3600 words of research-based writing) In this paper you will be invited to reimagine the academic essay. As a genre, it appears to have been replaced by ChatGPT. If we are going to write, and thus think, in ways that ChatGPT cannot, then what needs to change and what needs to remain? How can we retain the fundamental components of the essay (expository, discursive, researched, logical) while also drawing on the qualities of poetry that make its writing powerful, vulnerable, necessary? What might the academic essay, in its most contemporary, poetic form afford? What can your idiosyncratic, imaginative, logical mind do with this genre that a machine cannot? You will be supported in this process with workshops, peer review, much feedback and time for experimentation and revision.

Delivery of Research 

(10 minutes of live oral presentation with multimedia support) As with the essay, you will be asked to draw on course readings/discussions/workshops and reimagine the parameters of the oral presentation. Can we rethink not only its purpose but its form in order to increase its exigence? We will draw, not least, on lyric traditions in theater, performance and slam poetry.

NOTE: The course will include attendance at one of the Stegner Fellow poetry readings. Stanford’s 3rd annual spoken word event, “Poetry Live!” will also be happening at the Studio. The event is curated by lecturer in Creative Writing and former Stegner Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen and hosts the award-winning poetry and multi-hyphenate talents of Safia Elhillo and Jamila Woods plus members of Stanford's Spoken Word Collective. Guest speakers.