Poetics

Throughout the creation of this assemblage I relied upon many of the strategies and methods that I discovered this year in the reading of our novels. In Jazz, Toni Morrison often describes the feeling newcomers experience when they move to the city. I used a quote from her along with attempting to produce the same affect in order to parallel my character’s journey to America. Also from Morrison, I mentioned the character’s family many times in order to ground the person in the real world and create ties to her homeland. Both of these methods helped to produce a certain feeling of awe bound by one’s personal responsibilities. One technique I used from Ceremony is the idea of cultural narratives and references. Many times I used German phrases or words to evoke a sense of cultural familiarity, just as Silk used the “myths” and “stories” to proved genuine touches of Laguna culture to Ceremony. I used this technique because I felt that in order to properly express a German women’s emotion you would have to think in her own language. The Crying of Lot 49 offered to me ideas of using male and female relationships as a defining factor in many people’s lives. Using this idea I attempted to fashion a story, like most of the war brides, of a women who meets a man who changes her life entirely, just as Pierce changed Oedipa’s. These techniques I feel created a spokes of a wheel type network where all of the information and images connected at the center of by the story of a war bride and Annaliese specifically. Also the idea that a female can be so overcome and determined by her male companion is the underlying idea that transfers from The Crying of Lot 49 to my project. In Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, letter writing acts as a connection between time and space, and people who are separated by major distances. I used this technique in my project to connect my war bride to my American soldier, hoping to produce the same affect of inherent connections despite explicit separations.

This assemblage contains memories, images, songs, literature, history and all other aspects that go into one’s life and human experience. Through the combination of these I hoped to create something that rejects the modes of belief and reason and simply aims to express an experience, a life.