Week 2

Tuesday, January 16

• Read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, pp. 3-98. Post your first weekly reading response to your blog. Be sure to tag it as "Weekly Reading Response" when you select the category. Here are some questions to get you going. You don't have to respond to any of these in particular. They are meant to be generative:

1. What role does expectation play in the act of seeing? In judging and evaluating? Acting?
2. What exactly are "expectations"?
3. How are expectations related to predictions? Prophecy?
4. What do these questions have to do with Blink? With visual rhetoric?
5. What do prediction and expectation have to do with rhetoric? Persuasion? The strategic "bending of the will"?

Thursday, January 18

• Read, Walker Percy, "The Loss of the Creature" (PDF format; 125K). Blog response idea: Describe one incident when your expectations clouded your perception and experience of something you saw. What role does memory play in the perceptual process?
• Read the excerpt from Don DeLillo's White Noise, "The Most Photographed Barn in America" (PDF format)
  
  See also this FlickR image and discussion of “The Most Photographed Barn in America”