Any blog posts that you did not complete by their original deadline can be made up for a maximum of 2 points each (instead of 4).

Rules:

• you have to send me an e-mail that alerts me of their presence: send a link to each post, and tell me which assignment it is making up
• you must do this by Wednesday, May 5th, at 5pm

Thanks for the cupcakes and card, guys! Well, more accurately, girls + Michael. Such a trouper, that one!

I look forward to two things:

• your final blog posts on Friday, which (remember) should “note some interesting or intriguing element of the argument they plan to make in their paper”—the idea is to be analytical and not summary/report about it.
• your papers next Friday

Good luck! Remember to have an argument that answers the question “why?” or “so what?” as part of it. “X is Y because of Z” is a good construct, if you’re stuck.

The bulk of today was spent pondering the question “Why Naturalism?” with regards to Chopin’s The Awakening. We discussed the characters and plot in terms of how they were (or were not) affected by the forces of heredity and/or passion. We also talked about the ways in which attempts were made to exercise free will, and how those attempts sometimes (all the time?) didn’t turn out so well for reasons beyond the person’s control. We also talked about the way in which Chopin depicted the setting—was it a “slice of life” or glossed over? And, of course, we talked about nature’s indifference.

As for the 2-3 minute presentations of your final project—this will happen on Thursday—you will just be standing up [no slides or anything of that sort] and narrate:

• The specific argument you are making [note: observations are observations and a report is a report—neither of those are arguments]
• If not clear in your argument, the specific texts you are examining and the genres or time periods you are linking together.
• A description of a few of the secondary sources you’re using and how you are using them (e.g. “I am using Pizer’s “A Note on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as Naturalistic Fiction” to support my reading of [this scene] as [something] as that reading is fundamental to my argument that [some argument]“)

Yes, if you know your topic and project thoroughly, you can do that in 2-3 minutes. Bon courage!

As the last substantive blog assignment of the semester based on the readings (Friday’s blog #14 is based on the presentations on Thursday), this assignment was geared toward continuing to develop connections between the critical conversation circulating throughout the literary world while authors were developing new texts for their readers.

What this sort of question exposes is that genre labels and boundaries are fluid, and that texts can touch upon multiple genres while not wholly residing in any. The natural extension of that comment is that you cannot ascribe any text to any genre just because it was created during a particular period of time. For instance, just because we studied the gothic at the beginning of the class, and it is a tradition out of the c18, doesn’t mean Wilde’s novel isn’t gothic (it is).

Particularly good responses to this prompt included Sara’s and Janel’s.

Also, while only having six items to evaluate this week certainly made my life easier, there are some grades that are, how shall we say, tanking. Try to rally for the final, but some of you have really dug yourselves into quite the hole.

Thought it might be useful for you to see an example “A” essay from a class similar to this—actually, a class exactly like this in terms of scope and expectations, but covering a different time period.

This example essay is from last semester’s English 373 class at Tri-Cities, which I taught. In this example you will see all the hallmarks of a good paper: clear introduction/context, argument, examples, woven quotations, citations, conclusion, works cited. There were 20 students in that 373 class and 10 of them received some flavor of A on their final paper, so this essay was not some sort of anomaly.

You may consider this essay as an example of the type of work you should be doing at this level to achieve an A on the final paper.

As the precious few people in class today learned, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not about ham. However, people were sketchy on what it might be about, besides—at the surface level—things like vanity and the consequences of influence over others (or being influenced by others). Unfortunately, we missed Michael’s fact sheet on Wilde,

We worked with Wilde’s “Preface”—which many people skipped, per usual. People! Seriously, prefaces, epigraphs, etc…they’re important starting points in the study of texts.

Thinking about where this novel was placed in the semester (e.g. what came before it, and what is coming after it) and the blog question for this week, which puts this novel in conversation with folks like Zola and Norris (if not in direct conversation, then the idea that all these things were floating around at the same time). Think about the purpose of art; to some extent that’s what Zola and Norris were talking about, and it’s what Wilde is concerned with here as well. That, and society.

We had three fabulous fact sheets: Norris, Zola, and Crane. I am sure everyone would be happy to give extra copies to anyone not in class—Kristi, at least, would like you all to see her handiwork. She basically made a Frank Norris newsletter (all of the fact sheets were good, but we tease Kristi because, well, you just had to be there). [Oh, right: Norris at Berkeley]

In our (windy, puppy-laden) outdoor classroom on Tuesday, we discussed what Norris was saying about the responsibilities of the novelist, what Zola eventually got to at the end of each of the sections on the experimental novel, then we tried to apply these principles to Crane’s “The Open Boat.” Tried. It was a little sketchy at the beginning. Perhaps it was the wind. Or the puppy (I did not know there was a puppy running around until after the fact).

Then, everyone read an excerpt from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and tried to pick out the areas in which it looked like an experimental novel or where Crane was doing what Norris said he should do. The best part was when everyone talked about what they thought would happen at the end of the story (since you only had a brief excerpt)…you all are so positive! Maggie’s life? Did not end so well.

Blog Post #12, aka the longer proposal and tentative annotated works cited list, is essentially the most important blog post of the semester, as it leads in to the final paper, which is by far the most important assignment of the semester.

As of this moment, I only have a few posts to review (although I have seen two others in email as we have been discussing things). I will comment on each of them individually in the comments area.

Some things I am noticing either in the posts, or in email, or in other comments, is a lack of preparation for doing secondary research—I don’t know if this is overall, or just in your English classes, but it’s definitely an issue, and not one that we can really take up in this class. As I’ve said quite often, there’s a certain expectation of a minimal set of skills regarding writing and research, and we cannot spend time in a 300-level English class going over things you should have learned in your 100-level writing class or intro to literature class.

What I can do is address things after the initial attempts, which is what I’m doing here. But for those of you who didn’t post at all, I can’t help you if I can’t see where you need the help. Yes, a big part of this assignment is you struggling through the material to produce something that you can own—that’s the purpose of a liberal arts education. But these last two blog assignments are designed so that you get help along the way. Without the attempt, we can’t help.

So, on to some important points:

• If you’re not already familiar with the WSU Library’s Subject Resource Guide in Literature, go there now. When you are there, scroll down to the “Electronic Journals” section. There you will find links to the databases you should be using to find secondary scholarly sources appropriate for your research. Specifically, JSTOR and Project Muse are your best bets, and then Academic Search Complete and Electronic Collections Online as backups. You might also search in the MLA Bibliography via the library (don’t use the link on that page, as it’s not actually to that resource), whereupon you will also be able to find books appropriate to your topic.
• But really, you don’t have time to read books. Using a source means you have read and understood the source and what it adds to the conversation and how you will be using it to support your own argument. Unless you started your research a month ago, reading an entire book would not be a very productive use of your time.
• Go for articles—scholarly, peer-reviewed articles of the types you have seen already this semester (see: blog assignment #8). Two or three are likely to play a decent role in support of your argument, with a few more as additional support (or “touchstones” as we are wont to say).
• I have seen or heard several of you say you “can’t find anything on your topic.” Don’t look for something on your topic—look for something in support of your argument. The former would be a literature review or a book report. You want a well-argued paper.

For an excellent, A++, super #1 response to blog post #12, in which you can clearly see appropriate, fully cited and properly annotated sources, see Janel’s post. Seriously excellent.

If you have yet to publish your blog post, you must send me an e-mail to let me know, if you want comments, because otherwise I will not see it until Friday when I review blogs again.

I thought that as a whole you did a bang-up job with the three different questions used to work with the text. These types of questions are exactly the sorts of questions you should be asking (in the research phase) and answering (in the argument phase) as you develop your proposals for your papers. Note they were very specific, and rooted firmly in the text.

You can expect similar connection-oriented questions on Tuesday as we work with Zola, Norris, and Crane, and then with Wilde and Chopin to end the course. A 300-level English class assumes you have a) read the text and b) understand at least the plot so that c) you can begin to work with it critically like you did yesterday. So, do the reading so we can have useful classes.

As you’re revising your blog #11 for blog #12, remember I did say some useful things in the previous post.

Everyone who posted Blog #11 before a few minutes ago has received comments about their paper proposals. Most of them are pretty far from the mark as it concerns the specific assignment (length, scope, type of essay).

The two that are closest (if you want to see what is “really close”) are Janel’s and Kristi’s.

In general, remember that the purpose of this analytical argumentative essay is to produce an argument that you can carry forth from beginning to end in this short number of words and short amount of time, using close reading and a relatively small number of secondary sources to ground your argument. You have to link two general movements or genres,—which does not necessarily literally mean “find the connection between two genres” but instead means something like “find commonalities that you see in texts that cross these general categories and determine why that might be the case”

Of utmost importance is to remember that the compare-and-contrast essay is not the type of paper appropriate for this assignment. There may or may not be elements of comparing and contrasting as part of your analytical essay, but if your plan is to show that X and Y are different (or the same), keep working —that level of observation is the very first rung of the ladder and is not appropriate at this level. if you haven’t received the training in academic writing that delineated the differences between types of essays, I would suggest reading this handout on compare and contrast essays. Of specific importance is the part that says “[this handout] will also explain how you can (and why you should) develop a thesis that goes beyond ‘Thing A and Thing B are similar in many ways but different in others.’” It is possible to develop an argument out of an initial comparative/contrasting observation, but you have to work to get to that point.

For an idea of what the longer proposal and annotated bibliography should look like (besides what it says on the assignment sheets), here are two examples from my other class. I think you can clearly see the arguments being made, the plan for their project, and the way in which they have annotated their sources. Shoot for that.