Talk:Signet Ring

[Alex]'s comments Spring 2010:

B- This dossier is solid and shows a lot of promise. In general I would say that you need to weed out the Wikipedia-style language and the descriptive material. A bit of this is fine, but our goal in this course is to leave that type of writing alone, and focus on the readings and using the critical techniques. In essence I'm looking for a more critical approach in your dossier. For example, you should stake a position and try to defend it. You start the dossier nicely with a reference to the remediation of Babylonian cylindrical seal. I like how you spoke of the redness of the wax in terms of a skeuomorph. That's great, but can you take the idea further? You also described how it is an expression in the wax of the authority of the wearer, and that the seal acts as memory of contact. These are interesting points that you could develop further. The section on externalization was also interesting: the two layers of removability ("from the owner to the ring and from the ring to the wax") makes it mobile and efficient. A self outside the self? A fracture of the self? You mentioned that the ring was a dioptric lens--I don't quite follow, how? In general I'd like to see a lot more focus on deploying concepts from the reading and from the critical approaches that we've covered in class. As far as I can see there is not a single mention of the readings at all in this dossier. That's something you should focus on for the next dossier. Good work on this first assignment.