Sunday, December 11, 2005

what could be interpreted as self-titling

i am thinking about academic titles. since i am suppossed to be writing the body of the paper i am trying to figure its title instead or first or in a way to get to what the paper is going to be. but a title is not a thesis or even a real focus or is it? when i search articles i look at titles and open the most interesting (as well as those that seem clearly approproate to my needs)...they may not even be always interesting in a unique or weird sense but in a way of lyric or poetry, or sound or tone or rhythm...the sound of a title, its music: musings on academic specification...see like that, or something like that. i find myself putting thoughts and sentences into title-speak, the sound and rhythm of a title...

i have written some real ones of late. first i started with this:

'the nonfiction of poetry or poetic nonfiction, what are genre boundaries and where do they fall?' a title which may obviously seem rather large and general for a 6-page paper the difficulty of which became apparent after writing the proposal that went along with this...

i did some more reading and modified the title to this:

'unwritten narrative, my life as autobiography' a clearly intruguing and potentially vague title that at least focuses on one particular work...

i have been working toward (notes toward titling) titles for another project, here are some starts:

'silence and sounding poetry: (insert something about anne waldman's sung poem 'dear john cage' and john cage's book silence)
'silence and the sound of poetry: (et al.)'
or
'why sonic poetry? how poetry can be used as a space for sound'

clever, i know...

i even sound-titled my composition course:

'Hypertext Culture: Making Connections, Making Choices' which is certainly not as lyric as some but may still have some ring to it

but alas, i am now working toward the title of the most current project which might include something from the following:

'duree: time and tradition in woolf, benjamin, and eliot'
'tradition: writers doing retrospective creation'
'woolf, benjamin, eliot, and the death of the aura: how the past infects the continued presence of literary tradition'

this last one includes some immediately apparent fallacies of whatever nature and will be seriously diseregarded but i do still like it for not simply its length but the rhythmic qualities that happen in a longer title...

on that note i will title my next move this:

'distracted creative tendencies: the philosophical investigations of titling and the new contemporary move toward the actualization of academic writing'

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