Formalism Group Project

Quite honestly, I was terribly unexcited about having a group project in this class. Group projects usually involve a bunch of people that don't want to do the work necessary in order to do the final product. However, this class surprised me. After one meeting with Katherine and Anthony, we had a strong outline of what we were going to talk about, and a good organization of how that was going to work. Katherine decided on the George Carlin clip, which introduced the class to defamiliarization. The segue into that was my presentation of Albert Camus' "The Stranger," which has elements of defamiliarization, along with other aspects of formalist analysis. Anthony concluded the presentation with a surprise to katherine and me. We expected him to do a youtube clip, but instead he brought in the millenium edition of Time magazine, introducing a debate about Hitler and Einstein. Luckily, his idea panned out, and the class was able to discuss the binaries of the issue. I was scared for the beginning of his presentation, but I felt satisfied after class when I realized that our hard work had paid off.