[Louise Bourgeois]

Rant

Rant: To engage in lengthy, vehement, and intemperate discourse, esp. as a means of expressing outrage or dissatisfaction. [from the Oxford English Dictionary]

In this project, I ask you to articulate a rant that in some way engages the theory we’ve been reading and discussing. Your rant could:
use theory to express something you are otherwise upset about;
be about some theory we’ve read that you really dislike, that outrages, or frustrates you;
do something else that is involved with theory.

To me, a rant is about frustration or anger, and in this assignment I’m asking you to express such feelings either through theory or about theory. Please make your rant at least 1000 words long. As always, I’m more than happy to talk about any possible ideas or rough drafts with you in office hours.

This project will be judged based on how well your rant engages or responds to theory that we’ve read, and how convincing your argument is. A good rant both makes a point and expresses emotion.

These don’t have anything immediately to do with our class topics, but I googled for some examples of rants, and you might think about doing the same if that would be helpful to you:
Gizmodo list from 2011 (which reminded me that I could absolutely, spur-of-the-moment write a solid rant about Apple iPhone OS updates and how much they suck. That rant would be called “Everything Went Downhill After Steve Jobs Died, Even Though We Know He was a Problematic Individual.”)
Slate’s “Lost Art of the Rant” includes this helpful sentence: “A good rant, like this one, expresses a real passion, and it is often a passion that has been enflamed by a feeling of powerlessness.”
McSweeney’s has a series of open letters that might include some rants.