Thanks to the students who showed up to the final conference.
For all others, I'm turning in grades at 9 am tomorrow. If there are any issues, email me ASAP.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Blog 5
Discuss what you think the novel Kindred means, and discuss an important scene that you think illustrates your point.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Blogging the Peer Review
Critical Thinking: making readers care
The place to "reach" when you answer the question, "who cares?," or "why does this matter," doesn't mean you have to scale up to the level of big culture, big history, or make connections to the present moment if you're working from a text in the past. Sometimes the most interesting thing to say about the old world isn't the contrast with the new world - your world, our world. It's just making the old world complicated, and showing all the moments where we run up against those complications.
Stereotypes about the past are boring - this is at least half the reason to stay away from them. In the past all white people this, in the past all black people were that, in the past women couldn't...we can go on and on. There were rules in the past, but there were also exceptions. And more importantly, when we read novels and talk about characters, their identities, and their struggles, we get to see the complicated the world of their stories. It's really quite effective to simply make connections between one scene of a novel and another, and to say how they're connected -- by what ideas? By what themes? By what actions? And then we discuss those connections with suggestive language -- we can imagine that...this scene is suggestive because...on the one hand this, on the other hand that...complicating things is the name of the day.
It's also sometimes more powerful to hint at things than say them outright. Perhaps Rufus felt both blah and blink at the same time...and we can see in his character a conflict between chune and lune, a contradiction between his desire for boom and his knowledge of bam.
This language of perhaps, this language of contradiction, this suggestiveness, this feeling out for the risk of truth rather than simply naming a truth...this is sort of the "voice" of an English paper. You're there to link the character to what you know about history, but what do you know? It's easier to ground your idea of that world by studying the world as its depicted in the novel. We've seen with If He Hollers Let Him Go and Kindred, for example, that the world of racial relations is one beset by intimate violence, volatile emotions, and limits to what it's possible to know, but also by recognizable faces, candid moments, fleeting moments of love, tenderness, anger, and casual prejudice. It's complex - it's a world. Staying with the conflicts, the contradictions, makes for more interesting writing. This is the realm of interpretation - making something about something else. Everything both is what it is, and what it isn't. How you write around and through and beside the ways that things "are" and "are not" is the game of the discipline - as if everything, in its evolutions and revolutions, was always becoming different, while retaining some part of its original core. Your job is to make the messiness of the stories simpler to understand while retaining their complexity...and your job is to take simple stories and make them complex by finding how the "ideas" coming from and through them can challenge us, by showing how they challenged the characters.
At the least, all these characters are experiencing things that should be familiar: family, feelings, friendships, and crises of self-knowledge. To think critically is to talk about these things; to think critically about them means that you can reveal the complexity of the characters and events in the novel. To just stay within the story is as creative and vital as your ability to link the world of the novel to the rich textures of history that stand outside the novel.
To connect things, never rely on a 1=1 model. Rely on a 2+2=5 model - that is, the symbol also exceeds any "one" meaning. A character's motivation and behavior cannot be reduced down to "one" thing. When you explain something, or connect an event, action, or scene to another event, action, or scene, you should always say what's consistent and what's inconsistent about it -- how they work together and how they don't...and what we learn from the semblance, and from the incongruity.
The place to "reach" when you answer the question, "who cares?," or "why does this matter," doesn't mean you have to scale up to the level of big culture, big history, or make connections to the present moment if you're working from a text in the past. Sometimes the most interesting thing to say about the old world isn't the contrast with the new world - your world, our world. It's just making the old world complicated, and showing all the moments where we run up against those complications.
Stereotypes about the past are boring - this is at least half the reason to stay away from them. In the past all white people this, in the past all black people were that, in the past women couldn't...we can go on and on. There were rules in the past, but there were also exceptions. And more importantly, when we read novels and talk about characters, their identities, and their struggles, we get to see the complicated the world of their stories. It's really quite effective to simply make connections between one scene of a novel and another, and to say how they're connected -- by what ideas? By what themes? By what actions? And then we discuss those connections with suggestive language -- we can imagine that...this scene is suggestive because...on the one hand this, on the other hand that...complicating things is the name of the day.
It's also sometimes more powerful to hint at things than say them outright. Perhaps Rufus felt both blah and blink at the same time...and we can see in his character a conflict between chune and lune, a contradiction between his desire for boom and his knowledge of bam.
This language of perhaps, this language of contradiction, this suggestiveness, this feeling out for the risk of truth rather than simply naming a truth...this is sort of the "voice" of an English paper. You're there to link the character to what you know about history, but what do you know? It's easier to ground your idea of that world by studying the world as its depicted in the novel. We've seen with If He Hollers Let Him Go and Kindred, for example, that the world of racial relations is one beset by intimate violence, volatile emotions, and limits to what it's possible to know, but also by recognizable faces, candid moments, fleeting moments of love, tenderness, anger, and casual prejudice. It's complex - it's a world. Staying with the conflicts, the contradictions, makes for more interesting writing. This is the realm of interpretation - making something about something else. Everything both is what it is, and what it isn't. How you write around and through and beside the ways that things "are" and "are not" is the game of the discipline - as if everything, in its evolutions and revolutions, was always becoming different, while retaining some part of its original core. Your job is to make the messiness of the stories simpler to understand while retaining their complexity...and your job is to take simple stories and make them complex by finding how the "ideas" coming from and through them can challenge us, by showing how they challenged the characters.
At the least, all these characters are experiencing things that should be familiar: family, feelings, friendships, and crises of self-knowledge. To think critically is to talk about these things; to think critically about them means that you can reveal the complexity of the characters and events in the novel. To just stay within the story is as creative and vital as your ability to link the world of the novel to the rich textures of history that stand outside the novel.
To connect things, never rely on a 1=1 model. Rely on a 2+2=5 model - that is, the symbol also exceeds any "one" meaning. A character's motivation and behavior cannot be reduced down to "one" thing. When you explain something, or connect an event, action, or scene to another event, action, or scene, you should always say what's consistent and what's inconsistent about it -- how they work together and how they don't...and what we learn from the semblance, and from the incongruity.
Peer Review: Assignment Two
Responses must be specific in order to count.
Attach written suggestions from your peers to your final drafts for full peer review credit.
1. Thesis/intro: Contains a central assertion that places a central idea at the forefront of the essay (30%); strong opening scene; plot summary
2. Structure: Essay organized around topic sentences; each paragraph provides context; essay explains direct quotations (30%)
3. Evidence: Essay successfully places direct quotes into each body paragraph; essay cites those quotes correctly according to MLA guidelines; essay contains a bibliography (20%)
4. Critical Thinking: Essay interprets quotes in original ways that go beyond class discussion; essay connects main ideas to other texts or moments in text; essay utilizes keywords and defines them (20%)
Attach written suggestions from your peers to your final drafts for full peer review credit.
1. Thesis/intro: Contains a central assertion that places a central idea at the forefront of the essay (30%); strong opening scene; plot summary
2. Structure: Essay organized around topic sentences; each paragraph provides context; essay explains direct quotations (30%)
3. Evidence: Essay successfully places direct quotes into each body paragraph; essay cites those quotes correctly according to MLA guidelines; essay contains a bibliography (20%)
4. Critical Thinking: Essay interprets quotes in original ways that go beyond class discussion; essay connects main ideas to other texts or moments in text; essay utilizes keywords and defines them (20%)
Quiz #9
How should we as readers understand the world of slavery? What have we learned from Dana? How would you characterize her relationship to Rufus?
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Extra Credit
The following steps will earn you "points" that count toward your final grade. Completing each step will earn you a certain number of points. These points will directly increase the final percentage of your final grade. Each one is worth at least one "10" on a quiz.
1. Review the comments that were made on your blog. Review the blog. Revise the blog according to the suggestions or according to what you believe is the most "excellent" your blog could be in relationship to the assignment. ONE POINT.
2. Email the professor and ask to leave thoughtful, 125-word comments on someone else's blogs. You will do this for two blogs by two different students you've never commented upon before. ONE and a HALF POINTS.
3. Blog: If He Hollers. Read the short article linked HERE. Summarize it and assess whether or not you think it's original, persuasive, and/or interesting, and explain the criteria for how you arrived at how your perspective assessment. ONE POINT.
Each of these steps will together you 3.5 points on your final grade. This would push an 85 to an 88.5, or a B to a B+.
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