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Body Blazon Syllabus
Meghan@localinfinities.com
Room 214, Science Building
Office hours Thursdays 5:30 & 9:30 (before & after class)
Week 1 – Introduction: The Body Blazon
Performance: physical theater warm-up,
exercises & the entrance
Lecture: historical context of anatomy and the body
blazon genre
Writing exercise:
- write a body blazon about your
hand, incorporating your name into the poem
- write a body blazon about the 5,000
year old romance, making a comparison between bones and love
Reading assignment: Metaphors We Live By, chapters
1-9
Links: Gunther
Van Hagen's Anatomy lesson
Week 2 – Cancelled
room change, class cancelled
Assignment: Read Metaphors We Live By, chapters 1-9
Email the poems you wrote in class to Meghan@localinfinities.com
Week 3 – Metaphors We Live
By
Lecture: define and analyze metaphor
Writing exercise: write a body blazon about a specific
incidence of physical pain incorporating new understanding of metaphor
Performance: physical metaphor exercises
Assignment: email your poems to Meghan@localinfinities.com
Week 4 - Body Blazons and Counter
Blazons
Lecture: suggestions for making metaphors
Discussion: analize body blazons,
counter blazons & anti-blazons
Writing exercise:
- write a body blazon about your best feature comparing a physical body
part and an abstract quality
- write a counter blazon about the same body part
Assignment: rework blazon & counter blazon and
email to Meghan@localinfinities.com
Performance: physical metaphor
Break - No Class on March 15th Due to Spring
Break
Week 5 – Post Humanist Body
Blazon
Discussion: approach to the body blazon in light of
modern science
Writing Exercise: the post humanist body blazon
Assignment: research articles on The
Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future website.
Week 6 - Physical Theater
Week 7 - Writing & Rehearsal
Week 8 - Poetry Slam
Course
BODY BLAZONS: poetry in performance
Course Description:
Participants in this course will explore the Body Blazon
genre of poetry. Each student will write an original body blazon, create
a performance piece through Physical Theater technique and present the
Blazon to their peers as part of the Poetry Slam. Throughout the course
we will examine the role metaphor plays in creating meaning.
Background:
Body Blazons, popular poems praising a particular part of the body, emerged
during the enlightenment when the practice of public anatomical dissection
revealed the mysteries of the human interior for the first time. Metaphors
within the poems created relationships between new observations of body
parts and theories of how they function. For example, in one poem the
heart is compared to the sun because “it is the center of all.”
This reflects an acceptance of a recent paradigm shift from an Earth-centric
to Sun-centric universe and therefore elevates the status of the heart
among all the organs. However, an entailment for this metaphor created
the idea that the heart was the source of heat for the body, which had
long lasting medical implications. In the present era of medical research,
what comparisons are being made? What metaphors are emerging? What are
the entailments? How do we cling to old metaphors in spite of new information
and how is our current world view changing? These questions will be explored
through the practice of Physical Theater, a performance style that communicates
through gesture and image on the level of poetry rather than prose.
Instructor: Meghan
Strell
Guest Artist: Larry
Underwood
Schedule: February 15 to April
12.
Thursdays from 6:00-9:30 pm
Note: due to spring break there will be no class no 3/15.
Office Hours: 5:30-6:00 and 9:30 to 10:00
on class days.
Books: Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson.
Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
1980.