I think I am going to start using this old blog of mine from a previous class as the respository for yours and my Robotic, Erotic, Electric ARTkival contributions to our seminar.Yesterday, Wednesday, February 9, 2011 in class (the lecture on René Magritte with the screening of Chris Marker's La Jetée), I was talking about how storytellers use setting to underscore theme--indeed, among modernists like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, setting as theme, or, even, setting mirroring psychology was a way of life (perhaps the best American author in this vein in Edgar Allen Poe, whose poetry and fiction anticipated what would come to be called high Modernism decades later). In class, I focused on Marker's uncanny settings (remember to look up the meaning of "uncanny" and to include a printout of an "uncanny" personal photograph you own, one that speaks to you of the past in moving/unsettling ways in your roboticJOURNAL), suggesting how the use of RUINS in La Jetée, the use of the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, with all its corpse/relics, assisted Marker as he told a story of apocalypse and memory.
In any event here's a story from the horse's mouth about setting and narrative in the work of comics author Mike Mignola you may find useful:
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