Read Joachim Georg Schmitt’s Ingredients. It can be found here:
https://www.ubu.com/ubu/unpub/Unpub_050_Schmitt.pdf
1. Explain what the ingredients are? Can you figure out what the ingredients go into making? Do not just look at one page. Look over the entire book before answering and cite examples from the text when you make your claim. Please sign up for OpenAI’s Chat GPT, version 4: the link can be found here: https://chat.openai.com/auth/login
You can copy and paste the ingredients and query ChatGPT to give you answers. In other words, ChatGPT will tell you what those ingredients are! It’s faster than looking them up individually.
Are they food items? Are they cosmetics? What exactly? Where does the information that Schmitt used come from? Can you locate precise sources for the “ingredients.” And what does the language tell you about how and where products are produced today? Think about it? Schmitt is German, but is the piece written entirely in German? Why or why not?
Why is it called “Ingredients”? You may have to talk about how products are developed today? Who and how do companies develop products and market them–and how does this relate to the list of ingredients Schmitt has produced?
2. Schmitt has left out the caption or item that corresponds to the ingredients list: in other words, we know what the ingredients are, but we don’t know what the product is. He’s given ingredients to things but not told us what thing the ingredients go into making.
Why would he do that?
Come up with AT LEAST THREE REASONS HE MIGHT HAVE DONE THAT and lay them out A, B, C. EXPLAIN THESE REASONS IN DETAIL.
A.
B.
C.
3. In a normal product, ingredients are listed in order. Explain what the order is. You may have to look this up.
4. The ingredients are laid out on the page in a particular way. Explain how the layout affects our interpretation of the work. Detail what exactly he has done. Talk about left and right justification, placement on the page, everything. Do not leave anything out. You will receive more points, the more things you note.
5. Say something about how we consume products today and relate this to Schmitt’s Ingredients.
6. Say something about the nature of this work. It’s presented on a website as creative work, possibly literature. How is this work different from traditional works of literature like novels or books of poetry? Remember that this is a born digital work. It was not printed as a book and it was written on a computer, largely via copy and pasting. Does this tell you anything about the nature of literature in a digital era? What? Something is clearly different about this work of literature–what is it? Nail it down. List as many things that make this different from traditional works of literature as possible. Talk about what languages are utilized and what that says about either Schmitt or the nature of the ingredients.
7. Ask yourself: is the work creative? If not, why not? Has the idea of creativity been shifted? And wherein exactly, does the creativity lie? What might make this work interesting? What possible things could it make you think about vis a vis your own life and the products you consume?
8. Tell me what genre of writing this is? Is it easy to tell? Think about the possibilities: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, memoir, autobiography, joke. How is the text connected to the author Joachim Schmitt? Try to establish some connection between the ingredients and Schmitt. How is that relationship different from say the author of a novel and his text? YOU MUST Examine EACH of the 6 genres mentioned above and comment on whether the work might or might not fall into each of these categories. List each of the genres and make a brief comment on each.
