Final Project Presentation Instructions

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Peer Review Part 1 (25 minutes)

Take turns distributing your paper among your peers (keep a copy for yourself). Read your paper out loud (mindfully of groups near you) as your peers follow along. If you’re listening, keep a pen in hand and mark any errors or strong/weak points you want to discuss further as your peer reads.

Once they are done reading, take some time discussing your immediate reactions to the draft: what you really liked, what you didn’t understand, what suggestions you have. Your peer may have specific passages they want help with, so take some time focusing on specific paragraphs as needed. If there are disagreements within the group, call me over so I can help give my 2 cents!

Once you’re done discussing this paper, move on to the next and so on until you’ve read through and discussed all three drafts. The group breakdown is as follows:

Group 1

• Blossom Earle
• Maya Jacob
• George Wong Heyward

Group 2

• Emely Fuentes
• Fabian Navarro
• Marion Yacoob
• Tashier Williams

Group 3

• Latanya Hewitt
• Mahira Raman
• Cameron Smith

Group 4

• Josephine Miller
• Vanessa Mo

Group 5

• Aleema Gafar
• Natalia Galarza
• Destiny McIntyre

Peer Review Part 2 (15-20 minutes)

Please take some time writing down your feedback following the questions in the handout. Please show these to your peer before handing them back to me in case they want to take a picture of the feedback for reviewing later.

If you have a computer with you and want to post these below as a comments, feel free, just make sure you write clearly which review is for which student (e.g. “Reviewing Student X”)

1. What does the paper or project seem to argue, as you understand it? Does the argument clearly align with a specific theory? If you can’t identify the argument, what are some questions you can ask to help your peer devise or finesse their argument? 
2. Do the topic sentences for each paragraph support the thesis statement with a clear, argumentative claim? If so, which is the strongest topic sentence, and why? If not, are there ideas buried in the paragraph that could be moved to the topic sentence spot? | If you’re reviewing an unessay, does the choice of media/style seem appropriate for the argument? Do you understand what the student is designing, and how it aligns with a specific theory?
3. How does the paper or project handle the integration of academic articles as outside sources? What suggestions can you make for how to improve source integration?
4. Does the paper properly introduce quotes with the necessary context, and then analyze how the quote illustrates their argument? Point to one strong or struggling example.
5. Ask 1-2 questions that help push the student’s conclusion further into the “so-what factor” to avoid repeating the intro. E.g. How does X and Y connect in important ways? What are the consequences of what you say in paragraph 2?)
6. If you haven’t already done so above, address the issues your peer requested feedback on.

Housekeeping:

• Looking ahead to the end of term
• Our final project!
• I am a little behind on paper revisions but will update everything in the gradebook this week
• Next week: research and theory chart

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Discussion of Destroyer

• In lieu of a reading quiz, please spend the next 5 minutes drafting a discussion question about the graphic novel, Destroyer

Housekeeping

Next week: I’ll be collecting your self-assessment sheet for a quick check and some feedback on your participation. Please bring your completed copy (up to Week 8). You will fill out Week 9 and return it to me by the end of class.

SA Papers: feedback and assessment will be available some time tomorrow. For now, a note on source incorporation:

Keep in mind that there are many ways to effectively engage with sources, but we always want to avoid simply dropping them on their own, or using too many without giving ourselves space to analyze them in detail. One thing to consider is how to create sentences that address your argument in conversation with the text. Exs:

• Mrs. Mallard’s state of mind was changing so rapidly her conscious mind was not able to engage with it; her appearance denoted this conflict, as she was at once someone with “a certain strength” and “whose lines bespoke repression” (parag. 7).
• As Mrs. Mallard looks out the window, she sees “patches of blue sky,” which represent her mind opening up to newfound freedom (parag. 5).
• The passage of time in “A Very Short Story” compresses the relationship into something more serious than it was. Luz experienced a one-sided relationship as she wrote “many letters that he never got until after the armistice” (parag. 3), and by the time the protagonist receives 15 in a row, he gets to absorb all the emotions she might have already felt and forgotten about.

In general, as you revise your writing, always read it out loud for clarity and double-check that you’re presenting a clear thesis at the start of your paper. Don’t promise that an argument will be made, or that characters will be analyzed — begin with the strongest stance so you have a clear path for the body paragraphs.

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Group-led Discussion!

Theory Time: Unpacking New Historicism

What was the Old Historicism?

Types of evidence when we research cultural contexts and history?

Keywords

• Hegemony
• Subaltern
• Subjectivity
• Positionality
• Cultural Materialism 
• Contextual analysis (the author is back)
• Primary Sources

Last 5 minutes: complete your participation self-assessment

Housekeeping:

Reading Quiz

SA #1 will be returned today. Please pay close attention not just to overall feedback but line-level comments in the document. If you received a “1” revisions are optional but encouraged to maintain the default grade contract (B). Revisions will always be due within 2 weeks of receiving feedback and must use track changes (or “suggesting” on Google Docs). Use the same upload link as before.

SA #2 due Sunday: we’re practicing psychoanalysis theory — more on that later today!

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Discussion Leaders!

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Thesis Statement Practice

For Short Analysis #2 we will continue to focus on Chopin. As a pre-drafting exercise, let’s consider what a good thesis statement does…

• Pick one key term from Chapter 4 and do some free writing on your ideas about how it relates to the narrative.
• Then, re-read your notes and circle some words you think stand out as potential arguments
• Later, you may want to go back to the text to find some examples of lines that you think would support that reading
• Pair up with a peer to compare your exercises and offer each other suggestions. Discuss which ideas may be suitable/strong enough to develop n argument.

Housekeeping

• Reading Quiz #3 and Return of Quizzes 1 and 2
• Many people did not complete the annotations due this week. Set a reminder for yourself if you haven’t already — missing these will have a negative impact on your final grade
  • I occasionally leave comments if I’d like you to dig deeper with your analysis or questions, so do revisit your annotations for occasional feedback!
• Short Analysis #1 feedback: by next Monday

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Reader-Response Theory

Let’s spend a few minutes finding passages from Fish to discuss in detail. What ideas struck you as important, or particularly difficult to grasp?

How does Fish attempt to answer the question in his title?

We might also ask not just “what,” but who…

In page 343 Fish refers to “the unwritten rules of the literary game.” What are those? Are they still the same today as when this was written?

What is the condition for these interpretative rules to change, according to Fish?

Fish and Blake’s The Tiger

The rhetoric of critical argument, as it is usually  conducted in our  journals, de­pends  upon  a  distinction  between interpretations  on  the  one hand  and  the  textual and  contextual facts  that  will  either sup­port  or  disconfirm them  on  the  other; but  as the  example of Blake’s “Tyger” shows,   text,   context,  and   interpretation  all emerge  together

(Fish 340)

As one obvious and indisputable in­terpretation supplants another, it brings with  it a new set of ob­vious  and   indisputable facts.  Of  course  each  new  reading is elaborated in  the  name  of the  poem  itself,  but  the  poem  itself is always a function of the  interpretive  perspective from  which the critic  “discovers” it.

(Fish 341)

 As that  structure emerges (under  the  pressure   of  interrogation)  it  takes  the  form  of  a “reading,” and  insofar as the  procedures which  produced it are recognized   by  the  literary community as something that  some of its members do,  that  reading will have the status  of a compet­ing interpretation. …. Again  the  point is that  while  there are  always mechanisms for ruling out  readings, their source is not  the text  but  the  pres­ently  recognized interpretive strategies  (or  producing) the  text.

What does this mean?

Reader Response overview

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In-Class Exercise: Breaking down Morisson’s Challenge to the Reader

In groups of 3-4, sit together to discuss your perceptions of the text in regards to the following questions:

1. What is left unsaid in this text, and how does it affect interpretation?
   • What did you do to “fill in the blanks” of what was unsaid?
2. Is there an ideal, or implied reader of this text? What is that reader’s potential expectations about literature, race, and American society?
3. Are there ways this text defies analysis and interpretation?
4. How does the point of view (i.e. the narrator) affect or control your understanding? (Dobie 137)
5. Is this text uncomfortable to read or think about? Why/why not?

Please write your answers down in one paper to turn in at the end of class. I’d love to see, in particular, any disagreements you have on your answers to these questions!

Last 5 minutes: Group 1 handout and self-assessment time

Housekeeping

• Reading Quiz (5 minutes)
• CUNY is still doing random testing. Keep an eye on your email!
• Discussion leaders: all names and due dates (note there are two) are listed and color-coded on the schedule. If you didn’t add your name to the sign-up sheet, you’ve been automatically assigned to the last slots available.
• Hypothesis: lots of excellent work already, just don’t forget to cite your sources. Also, if you’re playing the role of Glossary, make sure you not only define the word for us but also explain how it is being used in the text to add meaning.

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Formalism/New Criticism

• Discussion of Chapter 3
• Important passages/difficult ideas?
• Useful keywords?
  • Literary analysis as a kind of science
  • Overview

Poetic Analysis: Marlowe and Ralegh

Emely asks: “Here we have the bride having all the finery as traditionally embedded in many cultures in present day. The description of luxurious attire for the love of his life and solidifying his love with marriage. Why must he prove his love with marriage? Is there no other way to prove his love other than marriage? Perhaps just be a lifelong partner and be the person that she needs throughout the course of her life and not “trap” her with paper and ink. Why must the shoes have buckles with the purest gold when it would be something she’s wearing on her feet? Why could it not be something modest? Since with love all that would be needed is passion and a simple life, shoes to resemble to simple path she would be walking on.”

Emely Fuentes

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and Ivy buds,

With Coral clasps and Amber studs:

Poetic Analysis: Think-Pair-Share

Pull up the poem you brought to share with the class and re-read it. Think about what you think makes it challenging to analyze, especially through a Formalist methodology (3 minutes)

Now, pair up with someone near you and discuss your poems. What kinds of similarities do they bear in terms of form or style? How are they different? Do either of the poems offer a sense of unity, as outlined by the New Critics? (10 minutes)

We will share some of your findings with the class

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First Short Analysis Paper: Pre-Draft Exercise

For your first short paper, you will aim to analyze John Donne’s The Flea as a New Critic. After reading it a couple of times, use the questions on the section on Unity to begin making note of the poem’s structure and style. I will walk around the room if you have questions or need to make sense of difficult words or phrasing.

Before you go: use these last five minutes to complete your participation self-assessment!

Theorizing Literature

Housekeeping

• Reading Quiz (5 minutes)
• Today we’ll go over our weekly online assignment (note your roles) and practice critical engagement with our readings!
• No class next week, but please take the time to read the instructions for Discussion Leaders and signing up to join a group.

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The Art of Annotating Texts

• What are we trying to accomplish when we make marginal notes? What about highlights?
• What strategies did you use for annotating this week’s reading assignments?

• Types of Questions to consider:
  • Structural — about how the text is organized; how the parts speak to the whole
  • Knowledge — understanding basics pacing; narrator/poet; motivation; history
  • Compression — looking for clarification, understanding words, ideas, plot
  • Critical — question the logic of the text, talk back; laugh at its logic; present new ideas
  • Investigative — questions that lead to more questions, probably some research down the line
• Marginal notes are not just for serious inquiry, though; they help you retain information, engage with the reading beyond consuming word jumbles, and actually enjoy your task. As such, you should write anything that may help you remember what you found compelling about this text–in whichever shorthand works for you.
• However, we’ll have some specific goals for our Weekly Annotations…
  

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What is Literature, redux

• is literature bound by rules created by critics? Is literature anything that has an audience?
• Do we need theory to appreciate literature?
• Where do authors’ intentions fit? (some great budding New Critics in the forums!)
• “Readers are what makes literature”

LAUGHING by Dan Rhodes
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My girlfriend died laughing at one of my funny faces. Her friends were kind, and told me I shouldn’t feel guilty; that she would have wanted to die that way. They weren’t there as her musical laughter turned to chokes, grunts and her death rattle. When I stopped grieving I found a beautiful new girl to love. She died laughing at a joke I made about her feet. The next one passed away similarly. My last girlfriend didn’t die. She left me. She said we never had any fun together. That she wanted a man with a sense of humour.

As I picked them up, I found this stuck under the table. #TwitterFiction

From #TwitterFiction (continued…)

From Cooking in the Archives

What does the OED say?

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Discussion: Eliot and Wimsatt & Beardsley

Small group work: in groups of 3-4, write a short summary (about 5 sentences) of the W&B which could feature in an annotated bibliography. You might take some of the questions below into consideration. 

• “We argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes.”

• What prompted the author(s) to write this piece? What were they trying to accomplish?
• What ideas does the text reject? Which ones does it propose in their place?
• Where can we find the central argument of the work — that is, not just where the authors are responding to others’ ideas but actually proposing something new?

• “What is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the general science of psychology.”
• What do the authors have against “aesthetic criticism”? Why do they find this faulty?
• “All this, however, would appear to belong to an art separate from criticism‑to a psychological discipline, a system of self‑development, a yoga, which the young poet perhaps does well to notice, but which is something different from the public art of evaluating poems.”
• What is the contrast the writers pose between terms like “authenticity”; “sincerity”; “fidelity” AND “integrity,” “unity,” and “function”?

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New Criticism (lecture slides)

Resumé

By Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you

Rivers are damp

Acids stain you

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful

Nooses give

Gas smells awful

You might as well live.

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Ben Jonson. — WHY I WRITE NOT OF LOVE.

SOME act of LOVE’S bound to rehearse, I thought to bind him in my verse : Which when he felt, Away, quoth he, Can poets hope to fetter me ? It is enough, they once did get             5 Mars and my mother, in their net : I wear not these my wings in vain. With which he fled me ;  and again, Into my rhymes could ne’er be got By any art :  then wonder not,            10 That since, my numbers are so cold, When Love is fled, and I grow cold.

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Next Week

• Read the Discussion Leader instructions and sign up for a date

In Two Weeks

• Read TiP Chapter 3, “Formalism” 
• Read Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
• Read Ralegh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”
• Bring a poem to class that you think defies traditional close reading

Introductions

Professor: Dr. Silva (she/her)

Students (pronouns; major (grad school aspirations?); what you want from this class; the last text you’ve read; something about yourself)

• Our readings (available at Akemos):
  • Frankenstein (free online)
  • Theory into Practice (due ASAP)
  • Destroyer (you can buy this one in a few weeks)
• ———————————————————–
• Blackboard: use it to upload assignments
• Our Website: use it to keep track of schedule/assignments, see lecture notes, get readings outside our textbook
  • You will need an account to use this site. Check your email!
• Some basics–> get in the habit of using the OED online

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• Hybrid Requirement
• Group-Led Discussions

• Before you leave today: Reading Habits Survey

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Next Week:

• Hypothesis annotation basics
• Weekly Online Assignment instructions
• TiP Chapter 1, “The Relationship of Reading and Writing”
• Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 
• Wimsatt & Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy”

How does Destroyer adapt Shelley’s text to covey its argument?

In 450-500 words, consider one or more ways in which Destroyer employs and modifies themes or recurring tropes from Shelley’s Frankenstein. You can look at the narrative structure, setting, individual characters, or larger themes. Is Shelley’s narrative a productive fit for the story Victor LaValle is trying to tell? Be sure to have a specific thesis statement orienting your analysis and references to specific pages from the graphic novel to support your argument.

Short papers should be formatted according to MLA format and are due to Blackboard by midnight on Sunday (February 19). Please be sure to proofread your work carefully and check its formatting before submitting.

Your response should be original and carefully crafted–you should not consult any external sources for this assignment. Any paper found with materials consulted or paraphrased will be returned ungraded.

How might we analyze the presence and significance of Safie as Other?

After reading through the chapter of Post-Colonialism, write a 450-500 word analysis that considers the role of Safie in Volume II of Frakenstein. What do you make of how Safie is described, how she behaves, and what the other characters (especially the Creature) are meant to learn from her? Is she an interesting Other or a problematic view of non-European characters? Your paper should have a clear thesis and make use of specific textual evidence from both the novel and the TiP chapter when referring to specific concepts or terminology. Papers that use outside evidence without citation will not be accepted. Papers without textual evidence from the novel will also be returned for revision.

Your paper must have a clear thesis and make use of specific textual evidence.

Short papers should be formatted according to MLA format and are due to Blackboard by midnight on Sunday (March 26). Please be sure to proofread your work carefully and check its formatting before submitting.

Your response should be original and carefully crafted–you should not consult any external sources for this assignment. Any paper found with materials consulted or paraphrased will be returned ungraded.