English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Stop whatever it is that you're doing and read Borges' Labyrinths. The short stories and essays of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, along with Italian author Italo Calvino, are fabulous thought experiments. Similar to Deleuze, only without the inferference of the whole academic industry and its conventions (pretensions). Borges likes to think about corruptions of abstraction/language and the ways in which time (cause and effect) can be disrupted or otherwise experienced. Calvino likes to challenge perspective and its ways of creating the normative in sometimes radical and sometime less ways. In T-Zero, he posits that the building of skyscrapers and the tilation of land is the return of the earth to it's cystalized form, prior to the tragic day when the moon leaked onto it. Or that we are all stilll floating around in the primordial ocean (our blood) only now it flows within rather than without. It may not seem academically vigorous when you read it, but trust me, it helps to create new connections between scholarly topics.