Midterm Paper Revision

Hi everyone. Just a reminder that the final revision of the midterm paper is due tomorrow in class. Be sure to attach the graded first version of the paper that we handed back to you--especially the typed comments you received. If possible try to staple this all together. You can detach the 10-on-1's and paraphrases at this point. I've pasted below a reminder of the format:
"Unless otherwise specified, all non-digital assignments must be handed in typed, printed, and stapled, and must include your name, the date, the course title, and an assignment title on the cover page. Papers must be formatted in black Times 12 font, double spaced, one-sided, with 1” top and bottom margins and 1.25” left and right margins. Please use a header or footer with page numbers and your last name since sometimes pages become detached. "

Also, here is some last minute advice about introductions and conclusions. They are always the last things to be sorted out!

Good luck, and don't be afraid to really rewrite instead of just 'editing' or 'revising'--we will be more forgiving of a major, yet imperfect, effort than of minor manicuring. In other words, if you just left things the same for this time around you would not get the same grade: we expect your writing and thinking to be more polished, or, if this is not the case, that it is because you reconsidered your argument and wrote an almost new paper.


FEEDBACK on Midterm Paper:
Introductions and Conclusions

Your introduction should introduce a problem or question. It should not try to contextualize the paper’s theme within broad categories like all of history or ‘mankind,’ but should instead articulate a modest and realistic scope for its exploration. The introduction does not need to present or summarize the essay’s entire argument, and it should not present a list of what will be discussed in the paper. It should present something as an interesting question, or a problem worth thinking about, and set the stage to begin this thinking. The conclusion should return to the problem or question raised in the introduction in such a way that it is clear the essay has ‘ended up’ somewhere different from where it began; it should not repeat the introduction, but reconsider the question or problem in a more nuanced way than was possible before the detailed readings that the paper offered. But, the conclusion should not claim to ‘wrap up’ everything or solve everything or offer the total and final truth about anything. It should not add new, large claims or expand to broad concerns such as the nature of art, society, the human mind, etc. It could, however, add a slightly changed emphasis to some argument or claim you have made, raising a small question or admitting that something could be seen otherwise or perhaps developed further. It may help to imagine that your paper is one chapter in the middle of a book you are writing: even though this one ‘chapter’ could stand on its own as ‘complete,’ and could appear in an anthology all alone and make sense, this ‘chapter’ feels like it begins by picking up an existing set of concerns (rather than starting from scratch) and feels like it ends by opening up avenues for thinking that would only be addressed in the next chapter.



Good introductions from your papers (modified):

From 1925 to 1931, Alfred Stieglitz photographed clouds. He accumulated a collection of these photographs, giving each image the title “Equivalent” despite the fact that each represented a different scene captured at a different time. What equates these photographs may be their collective attempt to freeze the movement of a cloud, always in flux, into the instantaneous form of an image. With this photographic representation of movement, Stieglitz continues the exploration begun by early motion photographers Edweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Anton Bragalia.


Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalent (1930) captures both the temporality and timelessness of clouds. As a single photograph, it conveys motion and stillness, intention and contingency. It both reproduces reality and creates something new. As one in a series of cloud photographs all titled Equivalent, it is just part of a larger project that initiates a new kind of photography, departing from a tradition that includes the chronophotography Edweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, and the photodynamism of Anton Bragaglia. As a composition in both time and space, Stieglitz’s project bridges the gap between poetry and painting that Lessing explored in Laocoon. And, with a subject matter peculiarly between form and movement, this photography of clouds seems to embody and challenge Henri Bergson’s opposition between the creative flux of duration and the “snapshot” views with which we capture and represent it.


Around the turn of the twentieth century, instantaneous photography seemed to offer new possibilities for representing time and motion. Anticipating the invention of cinema, Edweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey developed techniques of chronophotography, attempting to inscribe the trace of movement within a rapid series of photographic images. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, however, Alfred Stieglitz explored a different kind of serial photography, producing a body of work with a different representation of time. Photographing clouds over a span of about ten years, he created a uniquely delayed series collected under the general title “Equivalent.” While each photograph captures only one particular instant, the relationship between these photographs and the moments that they instantiate suggest that photography can represent multiple and complex temporalities.