Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Welcome to ENG 4340 for Spring 2013
If you are looking at this blog, you're probably registered for English 4340 for Spring 2013. You don’t need to do too much now--this space will become more important as we kick off the semester--but since you've found it, feel free to browse the syllabus and schedule for the term. Both of them are linked from the "Pages" block at the top right of this page.
Final Project
The full description for this one is still under construction.
Roughly, your fourth assignment is to submit a substantial final project of your own design dealing with a particular Faulkner text, topic, or problem. This will likely develop from the work you've done in your annotated bibliography.
Important due dates:
Roughly, your fourth assignment is to submit a substantial final project of your own design dealing with a particular Faulkner text, topic, or problem. This will likely develop from the work you've done in your annotated bibliography.
Important due dates:
- Proposal, due 3/8
- Status update memo, due 4/12
- Final project, due 4/29
This should be of 4000-level scope (can you define and make a case for that?), and can be published in a medium of your choice (a long paper? a series of short texts? a multimodal text? video? podcast? webtext? something else I can't even imagine?)
You'll need to incorporate both a primary reading of Faulkner and secondary research as you prepare this; we'll talk about ideas in class meetings.
Annotated Bibliography
Your third major assignment (due 3/29) is an annotated bibliography; individuals will contribute at least 10 annotations for scholarly secondary sources.
The beauty and horror of Faulkner is that there is so damned much scholarship about his work. You could complete the phrase "Faulkner and _______" with just about anything related to literary study, enter it into a database search engine, and retrieve enough hits to keep you busy for a month. For this assignment, which will feed into other writing projects you'll complete this semester, I'd like you to choose a topic area or formulate a research question that you're interested in and prepare an annotated bibliography that addresses it.
An annotated bibliography is a very specific genre of academic research writing that combines the traditional list of sources with concise paragraphs called annotations: short, densely-packed summative and evaluative statements about each source. Annotated bibliographies are not collections of loosely-related information; instead, they attempt to address a specific research question or topic in order to learn about a topic and formulate a claim about it. Scholars often create these for themselves as an early phase of their research projects; sometimes these are even prepared formally and published. A good annotated bibliography demonstrates your research knowledge of the subject and plays a role in your assessment of the scholarly conversation on a particular topic as you prepare to write about it yourself. Trying to write a good annotation forces you to read arguments more carefully and critically, will help you see connections among separate works, and will help you gauge the importance, strengths, and weaknesses of existing work on a topic.
As you will see in examples, an annotated bibliography consists of a series of entries, each corresponding to a single work you have selected for inclusion. In short bibliographies like the one you will prepare, entries are arranged alphabetically by the last names of the authors, just like a normal Works Cited. Long annotated bibliographies (25+ entries) are frequently classified by relevant subtopic first.
Each entry consists of two parts:
- A full bibliographic citation
- A paragraph that describes the work's content and (if possible) evaluates the work's significance
There are two basic rhetorical moves in an annotation:
- Descriptive: Briefly summarize the main argument or point of the source. What is the main argument? What important topics are covered? If someone asked what this source is about, what would you say? Rather than incorporating quotations, this genre relies heavily on summary and paraphrase.
- Evaluative: Make a judgment of the worth of that source. Possible questions to answer: Is it a useful source? How does it fit into your research? How does it help you shape your argument? How can you use it in your research project? You don't have to answer each of these, but they can help you get started.
Stylistically, a good annotation features concise and direct statement, active voice, and highly specific exposition. We’ll spend some time looking at sample annotated bibliographies and reviewing some of the more obscure details of MLA research documentation as necessary.
Requirements:
- Prepare 10 annotations for this assignment.
- Each annotation should be at least 100 but no longer than 300 words.
- At least four of your sources must be scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles.
Your bibliography must be prepared according to current MLA guidelines for manuscript format and documentation.
As we'll discuss elsewhere, this will be prepared and organized collaboratively, in Google Docs. The final bibliography is due Friday, 3/29.
Narrative
Your second writing assignment (due Friday, 2/29) is a narrative written in the voice of and from the point of view of a character from either The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying.
Faulkner's methods of narration can present an array of problems for readers. His narrators are multiple, say different things about different people and events, speak in very different (sometimes confusing) ways, and operate at varying levels of reliability at different moments in his stories.
You know, like real life.
As a modernist artist working out (some might even saying perfecting) the influence of Joyce, Faulkner fiddles with voice, showing how narrators control our perception of events in the story, how alternate points of view can enhance our understanding of those events, and how the reader or hearer of a story actively participates in the work of meaning-making.
As he noted in one interview about Absalom, Absalom!, a novel where getting the "right" view of Thomas Sutpen is the primary activity of Quentin and the other characters:
Choose a character from either As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury whose voice Faulkner does not include in the narration or who does not narrate a particular event, and add a scene to the novel, writing it from that character's point of view.
The voice you narrate in must be consistent with the character if the person speaks in the novel, or be believably that person's if he or she does not. Think through how a character would view a particular set of events and model, or create, that person's voice.
Some ideas (there are tons of options):
Faulkner's methods of narration can present an array of problems for readers. His narrators are multiple, say different things about different people and events, speak in very different (sometimes confusing) ways, and operate at varying levels of reliability at different moments in his stories.
You know, like real life.
As a modernist artist working out (some might even saying perfecting) the influence of Joyce, Faulkner fiddles with voice, showing how narrators control our perception of events in the story, how alternate points of view can enhance our understanding of those events, and how the reader or hearer of a story actively participates in the work of meaning-making.
As he noted in one interview about Absalom, Absalom!, a novel where getting the "right" view of Thomas Sutpen is the primary activity of Quentin and the other characters:
Q: "does any one of the people [in AA] have the right view, or is it more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them right?"For those of us who favor linear revelation of detail and omniscient or objective presentations of thought and action, Faulkner's brilliantly complex, shifting narrative technique can be confusing--even, for some of us, downright infuriating. Either way, his narrative technique is something we've got to grapple with as we study Faulkner; in order to do so, this assignment asks you to try it out for yourself.
F: "That's it exactly. I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase o fit. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact. So these are true as far as Miss Rosa and as Quentin saw it. Quentin's father saw what he believed was truth, that was all he saw. […] It was, as you say, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. But the truth, I would like to think, comes out, that when the reader has read all these thirteen different ways of looking at the blackbird, the reader has his own fourteenth image of that blackbird, which I would like to think is the truth."
Choose a character from either As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury whose voice Faulkner does not include in the narration or who does not narrate a particular event, and add a scene to the novel, writing it from that character's point of view.
The voice you narrate in must be consistent with the character if the person speaks in the novel, or be believably that person's if he or she does not. Think through how a character would view a particular set of events and model, or create, that person's voice.
Some ideas (there are tons of options):
- Caddy
- Luster looking for his quarter
- Darl's first session with a psychiatrist in Jackson, just after the events of AILD
- The new Mrs. Bundren
- Addie
- Addie's coffin (?!)
This does not need to be double-spaced; design your manuscript as you see fit, with readability and a particular aesthetic in mind.
This assignment is due Friday, 2/29. Turn your paper in to me via your campus e-mail account.
This assignment is due Friday, 2/29. Turn your paper in to me via your campus e-mail account.
Critical Analysis
Your first writing assignment is a fairly standard literary analysis paper; something to get us warmed up early in the semester.
Write a brief 5+ page critical analysis of a Faulkner text and topic of your choice. That it should be a well-organized, thoroughly-developed, appropriately titled, and thesis-driven argument for a particular understanding of the work in question should go without saying. Papers should be finely edited prose of the highest quality, and should be prepared in MLA manuscript format, including a Works Cited.
I am always happy to talk ideas, drafts, and other problems as they come up. If you can't meet me in person, a Skype session is great, too.
This assignment is due Friday, 2/8. Turn your paper in to me via your campus e-mail account.
Write a brief 5+ page critical analysis of a Faulkner text and topic of your choice. That it should be a well-organized, thoroughly-developed, appropriately titled, and thesis-driven argument for a particular understanding of the work in question should go without saying. Papers should be finely edited prose of the highest quality, and should be prepared in MLA manuscript format, including a Works Cited.
I am always happy to talk ideas, drafts, and other problems as they come up. If you can't meet me in person, a Skype session is great, too.
This assignment is due Friday, 2/8. Turn your paper in to me via your campus e-mail account.
Blog Posts
Low-stakes analytical, reflective, and responsive writing is going to be an important part of your learning experience this semester. In order to help you grapple with course texts and concepts, you will participate in writing for our course blog.
Beginning the first week of class, each week you will prepare a short, thoughtful, informal response to the readings or topics we’ve discussed and post it to our class blog. Sometimes these will be prompted; others will be open, exploratory responses to whatever you’d like to write about that has to do with Faulkner. Your goal is to grapple with and explain to yourself and others in the class the texts and problems we’ve dealt with that week. Include a question at the end of each post that you'd like to see someone else respond to—either in another post or in class meetings.
For full credit on this assignment, you’ll need to write one response for each week of the course: that’s fifteen responses; except in rare cases, these should be no shorter than 300 words. These may be posted before or after we discuss a particular text, but each week’s response is due no later than 5:00 pm on Friday. You’ll also need to respond to at least two of your peers’ posts within a week. As with most things, I am open to collaboration and experimentation.
Beginning the first week of class, each week you will prepare a short, thoughtful, informal response to the readings or topics we’ve discussed and post it to our class blog. Sometimes these will be prompted; others will be open, exploratory responses to whatever you’d like to write about that has to do with Faulkner. Your goal is to grapple with and explain to yourself and others in the class the texts and problems we’ve dealt with that week. Include a question at the end of each post that you'd like to see someone else respond to—either in another post or in class meetings.
For full credit on this assignment, you’ll need to write one response for each week of the course: that’s fifteen responses; except in rare cases, these should be no shorter than 300 words. These may be posted before or after we discuss a particular text, but each week’s response is due no later than 5:00 pm on Friday. You’ll also need to respond to at least two of your peers’ posts within a week. As with most things, I am open to collaboration and experimentation.
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