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Writing 1133 (Fall 2019)

Due Dates:

1 page rough draft of Artifact Vignette (Monday, Sept. 23rd)

2-3 page Final Draft of Artifact Vignette (Wednesday, Sept. 25th)

What is a Vignette? Vignettes are short, impressionistic scenes that focus on one moment or give a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, an artifact or a setting. The vignette is not strictly linked in with a sequential plot development but establishes meaning through loose symbolic or linguistic connection to other vignettes or scenes. Vignettes are the literary equivalent of a snapshot, often incomplete or fragmentary. The use of vignettes is suited to writing in which theme, image, emotion and character are more important than narrative.

Why a Vignette into a Narrative?

The point of the vignette is to learn how to speak emotion or to provide impactful sensory impressions. The best stories (including autoethnographies) evoke emotion in powerful ways. Sometimes it is best to get out of the narrative plot structure and to start with a snapshot so the story unfolds organically rather than contrived. In this sense, we will start with an artifact (photo, art work, video, recipe, object, etc…), you will create a snapshot of this artifact through the vignette, and then infuse narrative elements with historical, social, political, secondary research to eventually build your autoethnography. The artifact will start the story but where it takes you may be unexpected.

While writing your artifacts story think about how objects made and used by people can be interpreted as telling us something about the people themselves: where they lived, how they made a living, and so forth. Think about the ‘life history’ of the object itself. Who made this thing? How was it made? Then what happened? Has the purpose shifted over time? The artifact can create threads of continuity and connection among the many different people who make, use, or somehow ‘touch’ the life of the object. Ask yourself these questions:

· Who made this thing? What is it made of? Where was it made? How many people made it? (Think about how many tasks had to be done to make this one thing…) How long did it take? If the thing is a container, did the same person/people make the contents, too? What did the makers have to have, to make this object? (What kinds of materials, what kinds of technologies, how much space?)

· Who used this thing? How many different people have used it, in its lifetime? Was it used by the same person who made it? If not, how did it travel from place to place?

· How many different places has this thing ‘lived’? Did it change as it moved, or did it stay the same? Did the people who owned the object move, or did the object ‘move’, leaving one set of people for another?

· How did the thing get thrown away? Did it get broken? Was it because it was empty? Did it get lost?

· Where is the object now? How is it getting to ‘tell its story’?

What I’ll Be Looking For (i.e. How You’ll Be Graded)

1. How the artifact guides the greater story arch

1. How the artifact connects to the subculture you have chosen

1. How well you take your audience into consideration.

1. The strong use of figurative language and rhetorical devices such as ethos, logos, and pathos.