- Maker: Cailin Rolph
- Genre: Parody Dating Profiles
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5340: Studies in Multimodality and Digital Media
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2023
Description
men I could think of were poets. Thus came the Dating Profile for Classic Poets’ idea.
channeled on this kind of app, and therefore will be used for these poets. I want to stress that I am fully aware this is in no way how these men would actually speak about themselves rather that this kind of dissonance is exactly what I’m aiming for to create this kind of parodistic quality in the profiles.
Reflection
For project one of this course, ‘Paradoy Writing Culture’, I developed two dating profiles for two 19th-century poets. The app I used was intentional, as it included not only biographical information but a space to choose specific prompts about one’s personality. This suited my project in that it enabled me to fully flesh out who I believed these poets would be on a dating app. I chose Edgar Allen Poe and Henry David Thoreau specifically because they both presented themselves as being serious in nature. Both poets seemed easy targets for a ‘parody’ project due to their intense personalities and how seriously they seemed to take themselves, and their work. I initially leaned into the comedic rhetoric, creating responses for the Hinge prompts that seemed to make fun of themselves. While the message of the parody was obvious in this version of my piece, it seemed like a disingenuous response from the poets, as they likely wouldn’t make fun of themselves in this way. The final draft of this project was much more subtle, the responses leaning into irony instead of an overt punchline at the poet’s expense. In the inception of this project, I referenced Craig Stroupe’s “Hacking the cool: The shape of writing culture in the space of new media”, as Stroupe discusses the culture of new media writing and how it has manifested in current writing practices. This piece gave me insight into the community that New media exists within and forced me to consider how these men would’ve interacted with it. I also referenced On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies specifically the third chapter that discusses the walk-through art installation titled Viewmaster. The intentional choice to present their work through a visual medium inspired the medium that I ended up choosing for this project. Alexander and Rhodes advocate for this medium by pointing to the kind of visceral reaction that images can illicit and the power they have to influence.
Alexander, J., & Rhodes, J. (2014). On multimodality: New media in composition studies. Conference on College Composition and Communication of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Stroupe, C. (2007). Hacking the cool: The shape of writing culture in the space of new media. Computers and Composition, 24, 421-442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2007.08.004 Links to an external site.
