Final project: description

Short description

From the syllabus:

  • the final project, making a marvel
    • form: written (anything except the standard academic essay or final paper), audio, video, multimedia, a recorded performance, a comic, a material object, a game, a continuation, a creative work, a translation (broad and narrow senses), a marvel
    • in relation to (echoing, inspired by, riffing on, remixing, etc.) at least one of the course set readings and at least one global premodern extra reading (as discussed and agreed in stage 1+3 meetings)
    • [finished, stage 5] final projects could continue stage 3 of the project or your “prof for the day” session
    • they could intersect with Arts Multilingual Week (March 10-14, week 10 of term)
    • your project should include a close reading of your own marvelling, as commentary or storytelling
    • submission: Canvas “a world of marvels” discussion as students’ community online exhibit
    • due: week 13

Long description

Your final project is a marvel and it will inspire marvelling in its audience. It will incorporate the following five elements:

  1. Our course theme of MARVELS: a marvel, marvelling, marvellousness
  2. A course required reading
  3. A global premodern extra reading, from the period around 400-1799 CE
    • If at least one person in your group is doing this course as RMST 301:
      • your extra reading is a literary (word-art) work in one of the Romance vernaculars: Catalan, French, Galician, Italian, Ladino, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sicilian, Spanish, etc.; and their older forms and range of linguistic variants (Old Occitan, etc.); can be multilingual, and the multiple languages can include non-Romance and non-vernacular languages
      • and/or from a Romance-speaking area of the world; not necessarily in a Romance vernacular: for example Arabic or Hebrew in 11th-c. Spain; Breton or Latin in 12th-c. France; Nahuatl in 16th-c. Mexico; Fongbe, Igbo, Taino, and 18th-c. Haitian Creole
    • If at least one person in your group is doing this course as MDVL 321:
      • your extra reading is a work (literary or otherwise: text, object, building, etc.) from the medieval or other “middle” period in any culture anywhere; depending on your choice of work’s home culture (ex. China, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Japan), it might date from before the 5th c. CE or after the 14th c. CE, or indeed after the 18th c. CE
      • it doesn’t have to be a literary (word-art) work: for example, you might be interested in other forms of writing or document, or in material history and archaeology
    • If your group is a mixture of MDVL 301 and RMST 321 people:
      • you choose: one of the two options above
      • declare your project accordingly in your stage 1 project meeting
    • (choice of project pathway has no consequences for course administration, registration, credits, etc. but might be useful for future research purposes)
  4. An additional text, artefact, feature, or element:
    • this could be a literary or other aesthetic work from any period and in any medium or form; including immaterial heritage and cultural practices
    • it doesn’t have to be made by humans: it could be natural, biological, geophysical, environmental
    • it could be an aspect that is “R/romance” or “Medieval” or “premodern” and shows critical thinking about what these words or ideas mean
    • it could be a comparative or translational exercise in medievalism (but still involving a medieval aspect)
    • it could be creative, made by you: continuation, translation (narrow and broad sense), adaptation, musical or dance performance, painting, sculpture, animation, …
    • see further down this page for a small selection of possible approaches to feed your imaginations, including an analogous project in RMST 201 in 2021 featuring a “spirit of R/romance” remixing
  5. A form that is appropriately marvellous—appropriate for your project—and ANYTHING EXCEPT THE ACADEMIC ESSAY

Because forms of project will vary, other formal constraints and parameters are flexible:

  • 2500-3000 words or 20 minutes’ performance:
    • this is an approximate total for the whole project: if you are quoting extensively from written text(s), you may go over the word-limit, as it is good to encourage you to use quotation as much as you need to for close reading
    • if you are making a visual or plastic art-work or writing poetry, and in some other creative or performance situations: word-count will be lower, to be discussed with me in stages 1 and 3 of the project
  • and a commentary of at least 500 words framing your project: a close reading of your own marvelling, as commentary or storytelling; form: an explanatory and critical text, podcast, or video
  • work expectation, in terms of time and energy, will be around 20 hours over weeks 3-13 of term, including thinking time (this will vary even more individually)

Example: sample inspirational idea-board, including non-written-text objects

Here is a practice exercise for the project.

If you’re stuck, use this part of the project description as an imagination-exercise: imagine:

  • your topic is: a close study, close up, of storytelling itself as a marvel
  • your set text (from our course required reading) is Charles Perrault’s Tales
  • your extra text is the manuscript image immediately below: perhaps just the illumination, perhaps the whole page
    (please don’t read the whole Roman de la Rose and/or its 300+ manuscripts as your extra text, unless this is the only course that you are taking, you are not working, and you are living a life of leisure, the oisiveté depicted)
  • your additional text, artefact, feature, or element is: making one of the four works that follow further below
    (yes, imagine that you made one of them)
  • now think: what might you say in your 500-word commentary? Explanation, analysis, creative process, close reading of your own marvelling, as commentary or storytelling … (don’t write this, just think)

You could start with this 15th-c. CE image as your extra text …

(from a Flemish manuscript of the 13th-c. French Roman de la Rose,
British Library, Harley MS 4425, f. 12v; made in Bruges (now Belgium, a multilingual country whose languages include French) around 1490)

… and end up with any of the following four creative works and a 500-word commentary.

One

Björk, forum “Biodiversité : quelle culture pour quel futur ?” (2024): Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6sPj4j96Bg

Two

Three

Four

Mike Kelley installation “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites” (2024): Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpgKIe82ujk

Selected examples of previous projects from other courses

[I showed examples of poster presentations (and similar) from some previous Romance Studies / Medieval Studies courses’ “festive fair of learning” activities like this course’s anti-exam. I’d removed photos of students, and noted that images were NOT to be shared, distributed, etc. and were for reference only, to give some ideas for projects (and how varied they might be) and their presentation in the final anti-exam:

  • 2009-12, RMST 221
    (In RMST 221 in 2009 and 2010, students did final presentations as a round-table colloquium—like a conference—and students voted on their favourite talks (nominating at least three); I can’t share presentation slides and videos as I can’t edit out the images and voices of the speakers so as to anonymize them. 2012 was a poster session)
  • 2016-18, MDVL 301A and 310D
  • 2019, RMST 221B
    some were associated with the class “Local Public Bestiary”: https://blogs.ubc.ca/rmst221b

(Old example) 2021 RMST 201 Project visualization

In 21W RMST201, the image below (sketch on recycled card) was the basis for project general learning objectives and marking criteria, across final works of all kinds and forms and media, both for me and—in the peer appreciation written part of the final exam—for students. We drew up a first version of these project criteria on the board in class together, this is the tidier post-class version.

For 24W MDVL301-RMST321: change the course texts and topics to our required readings and canvas-module chapters, remove the emphasis on “Romance,” and replace “wonder” with “marvel.”

Where that T/O image comes from, and some bonus extras (that could in turn be potential material for a final project):

* A 13th-c. person writes down a very short 2-line poem or excerpt, and annoyingly this fly-leaf (inserted around the rest of the manuscript) isn’t freely available online, and the library description gives us one of the two lines but not both. That line is by (or quotes) the 1st c. BC-1st c. CE Roman writer Ovid, whose work is very popular in medieval Europe. Much of that is love poetry. Often erotic. Often misogynist. Often misanthropic. Also a continuing hit: the Metamorphoses, a major source for condensed retellings of Greek and Roman myth/religion. (Yes, even the most pre-Christian non-Christian material and shocking poetry are popular in a medieval Christian-ish Europe that’s complicatedly heterodox, including for audiences of religious people like priests and monks and nuns. It’s complicated. If that shocks or intrigues you, come and discuss further, you might be a future medievalist!) Here, his Remedia amoris (“The Cure for Love”) l. 187. So I can’t tell you if what’s in the manuscript is the following couplet (a famous quote) or one line from it and then a new continuation …

Poma dat autumnus, formosa est messibus aestas,
ver. praebet flores, igne levatur hiems.

Context below: how to recover from heartbreak, and heal, and avoid “love-love” and its agony? And how to avoid getting into destructive and self-destructive (false?) love through boredom: seductions, adulterous affairs, games, and what French calls “aventures.” One way could be through agricultural and ecological work, a new balance with nature, and its harmony and cycles. Warning, contains sexual metaphors and metaphorical imagery of violence and sexualised violence. And sarcasm and satire. So it might not be entirely serious advice. But then again, it might be, cunningly disguised as silly advice …

Source (an OK translation, there are many, this one happens to be free and online): http://www.nikolasschiller.com/blog/index.php/archives/2008/04/03/1345