Assignments
"Dying Is an Art . . ."
English 386 B: Literary Responses to Death and Dying
Winter 2007, M 6:00-8:50PM, 2147 AuSable Hall
In Class Activities
1. Practice Annotation
In order to prepare for the annotated bibliography component of the Group
Project, you have read a journal article interpreting
John Berryman's The Dream Songs and written a summary paragraph on
that article. Today, you will share you annotations with your group. Break
into your Berryman criticism groups, which are the same as your group project, and complete the following tasks.
- Share your individual annotations and then collectively compose an annotation
that your entire group thinks best summarizes the journal article. Your group
will present this annotation to the class.
- Select the sentence of the article that best summarizes the critic's interpretation.
- Pick a poem, perhaps but not necessarily mentioned by your article, that your group would like the class to discuss.
- Construct a timeline for your Group Project: divide the labor and set deadlines.
Your group will give this timeline to me.
2. J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling
spectator . . . (14, author’s ellipsis)
- The Book
- Influence: How do William
S. Burroughs' cut-ups from
novels like Naked
Lunch and Surrealist paintings
like those of Max
Ernst's The
Robing of the Bride (39) and Salvador
Dali's The
Persistence of Memory (22) influence Ballard's fragmentary
and nightmarish landscapes?
- Structure: What is the purpose and effect of
collecting fragmentary paragraphs, so-called "condensed novels" into
short stories? How does the form of the book follow and/or generate
its thematic content?
- The illustrations and photographs: How do the pornographic/anatomical
cross-section illustrations by Phoebe Goeckner interact with the short
stories and add to their theme of media perversion? How do the photographs
by Ana Barrado illustrate the issue of geometric, conceptual sexuality?
- Character: Do a character sketch of Travis.
- What is the purpose
of the atrocity exhibition?
- Is he a doctor or patient?
- What is the relationship
between his inner world and reality, i.e., what in this book is real
and what is in his head?
- Why does his name change? In Chapter 1 it's
Travis, in 2 it's Talbot, then Traven in 3, Tallis in 4, Trabert in 5,
Talbert in 6, unnamed in 7, Travers in 8, and so forth.
- Who are Kline,
Coma, and Xero?
- Why are helicopters always chasing him?
- Describe his
relationship with his wife Margaret, Dr Nathan, Catherine Austin, Captain Webster, Koester.
- Why does he want to murder Karen Novotny and assassinate JFK
. . . again?
- Media: How do film, television, news, celebrities, and billboards affect
Travis's psyche?
- What does Travis becoming lost in a maze of fragmenting celebrity billboards symbolize?
- How do not only our individual but also our collective unconscious
reconcile everyday images of war (Vietnam then or Iraq II now) with celebrity deaths
(Marilyn Monroe then or Anna Nicole Smith now) and commercials (then and now)? How does Travis's
mind respond?
- 'These advertisements constitute an explicit portrait of yourself,
a contour map of your own body, an obscene newsreel of yourself during
intercourse.' He rapped the magazines with his gold cigarette case. 'These
images are fragments in a terminal moraine left behind by your passage
through consciousness.' (47)
- The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory.
A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds,
much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless
flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where the presidential
campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistiguishable from
the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the
level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen,
a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child
is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged
emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency
scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the
unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking
dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered
wido, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour
of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very
different meanings. (89)
- Conceptual Geometry and Sexuality: Why does Ballard consider sex
to be abstract, geometric, and conceptual?
- Does Ballard consider conceptual sexuality a positive (a purified equation
of intersubjectivity) or a negative (a sacrifice of real corporeal identity)?
- He looked down at her naked body, with its unique geometry of touch
and feeling, as exposed now as the amorphous faces of the test subject,
codes of insoluble nightmares. (43)
- In the planes of her body, in the contours of her breasts and thighs,
he seemed to mimetize all his dreams and obsessions. (45)
- 'There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory
is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from
it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing.
Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization
divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the
positive merits of the sexual perversions. Talbert's library of cheap
photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few
taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality.' (54)
- Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the
perversions that we can make contact with each other at all. (70)
- Car Crashes and Polymorphous Perversity: According to Freud, what
is polymorphous perversity contra genital sexuality? Describe the status
of the automobile in America's sexual psyche.
- Why do car crashes, particularly celebrity crashes like James Dean's
and Jayne Mansfield's arouse Ballard's characters? How is this similar
to the "Sexual stimulation by newsreel atrocity films" (93)?
- Is the conflation of car crashes and sexuality a redemptive regression
or evidence of a further deterioration of our disastrous cultural pathology?
- His warped sexuality, of which she had been aware since his arrival at
the first semester, had something of the same quality as these maimed vehicles.
(24)
- In fact, it is hard to tell whether the positions are those of Miss Novotny
in intercourse or as an auto-crash fatality—to a large extent the
difference is now meaningless. (27)
- The Death of Affect: Why/How does are culture of media violence
and sexuality destroy our real emotions?
- What does the Vietnam War (as well as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki; the Congo; the Cape Kennedy Apollo disaster; the deaths of Marilyn
Monroe, James Dean, and Jayne Mansfield; the assassinations of Malcolm X, JFK, and Robert Kennedy) do to Travers's psyche?
- Does Travers's real or schizophrenic violence redeem or further destroy
his affect?
- Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts
of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term 'the death of affect.'
Consider all our most real and tender pleasures—in the excitements
of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed
of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our perversions, in voyeurism
and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies
as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children
have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own
pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.
The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations.
Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology
is the conceptual system of sex. (75)
- Given that we can only make contact with each other through the new alphabet
of sensation and violence, the death of a child or, on a larger scale,
the war in Vietnam, should be regarded as for the public good. (77)
- Sexual stimulation by newsreel atrocity films. (93)
- Sexual intercourse can no longer be regarded as a personal and isolated
activity, but is seen to be a vector in a public complex involving automobile
styling, politics and mass communications. The Vietnam war has offered
a focus for a wide range of polymorphic sexual impulses, and also a means
by which the United States has re-established a positive psychosexual relationship
with the external world. (94)
- The Kennedy Assassination
- How do the Kennedy Assassination and the Zapruder film affect Talbot's psyche? How does it
affect the culture?
- How will assassinating the already dead Kennedy make sense? What did
not make sense for Talbot the first time?
- How did our cultural pathology kill Kennedy?
- Kennedy’s assassination presides over The Atrocity
Exhibition, and
in many ways the book is directly inspired by his death, and represents
a desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy, with its huge hidden
agenda. The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented
a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep
into the popular psyche that have not yet closed. (34)
- Nathan would call it the ability to accept the phenomenology of the universe,
or the fact of your own consciousness. This is Traven’s hell. You
can see he’s trying to build bridges between things—this
Kennedy business, for example. He wants to kill Kennedy again, but in a
way that makes sense. (36)
- Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one question still remains
unanswered: who loaded the starting gun? (109)
Selected Reading
While you should read all the poetry of Berryman,
Bell, Celan, and Rilke, here are the ones
that we will probably focus on in class.
John Berryman, The Dream Songs
[Note: Read 384 first, then 1, 10,
21, and so on]
1 Huffy Henry / 3
10 There were strange gatherings /
12
21 Some good people / 23
29 There sat down, once / 33
34 My mother has your shotgun / 38
36 The high ones die / 40
40 I'm scared a lonely / 44
45 He stared at ruin / 49
53 He lay in the middle of the world
/ 60
74 Henry hates the world / 81
76 Henry's Confession / 83
77 Seedy Henry / 84
92 Room 231: the forth week /
109
121 Grief is fatiguing. / 138
127 Again, his friend's death / 144
129 Thing as a sheet / 146
130 When I saw my friend / 147
131 Come touch me baby / 148
136 While his wife earned / 153
143 —That's enough of that /
160
144 My orderly tender / 161
145 Also I love him: / 162
146 These lovely motions of the air
/ 165
147 Henry's mind grew blacker / 166
149 This world is gradually / 168
151 Bitter & bleary / 170
153 I'm cross with god / 172
156 I give in. /175
172 Your face broods from my table
/ 191
181 The Translator—II /
200
191 The autumn breeze / 210
196 I see now all these deaths / 215
212 With no relief to public action
/ 232
235 Tears Henry shed / 254
241 Father being the loneliest word
/ 260
259 Does then our rivalry / 278
266 Dinch me, dark God
268 Henry, absent on parade / 287
291 Cold & golden / 313
298 Henry in transition / 320
324 An Elegy for W. C. W., the lovely
man / 346
325 Control it now / 347
327 Freud was some wrong about dreams
/ 349
331 This is the third. / 353
341 The Dialogue, et. 51 / 363
344 Herbert Park, Dublin /
366
355 Slattery's, in Ballsbridge /
377
359 In sleep, of a heart attack / 381
362 And now I meet you / 384
365 Henry, a foreigner / 387
370 Henry saw / 392
372 O yes I wish her well. / 394
380 From the French Hospital in
New York, 901 / 402
384 The marker slants / 406
Marvin Bell, The Book of the Dead Man
#1 / About the Dead Man
#3 / About the
Beginnings of the Dead Man
#5 / About the Dead Man and Pain
#10
/ About the Dead Man and His Poetry
#14 / About the Dead Man and Government
#17
/ About the Dead Man and Dreams
#18 / The Dead Man's Advice
#23 / About
the Dead Man and His Masks
#27 / About the Dead Man
and The Book of the Dead Man
#33 / About the Dead Man and a Parallel
Universe
Marvin Bell, Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2
#34 / About the Dead Man, Ashes and
Dust / 3
#35 / About the Dead Man and Childhood
/ 5
#36 / Drinking Glass, Pencil and Comb
/ 7
#42 / About the Dead Man's Not Telling
/ 19
#43 / About the Dead Man and Desire
/ 21
#48 / About the Dead Man and Diminishment
/ 31
#49 / About the Dead Man and the Elusive
/ 34
#51 / About the Dead Man and Taxidermy
/ 37
#52 / About the Dead Man's Contrition
/ 39
#62 / About the Dead Man Apart / 58
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
The Duino Elegies / 151
from The Sonnets to Orpheus / 227
Paul Celan, The Selected Poems and Prose
Preface / xix
Early Poems (1940-1943)
The Dead Man / 3
Darkness / 5
Nocturne / 7
[Winter] / 9
Nearness of Graves / 11
The Lonely One / 13
Black Flakes / 15
Poppy and Memory (1952)
Praise of Distance / 25
Late and Deep / 27
Corona / 29
Deathfugue / 31
[So you
are turned — a Someone]
/ 43
Landscape / 47
From Threshold
to Threshold (1955)
By Twos / 55
Assisi / 59
In Front of a Candle / 61
Nocturne Pursed / 69
Whichever Stone You Lift / 71
Speak You Too / 77
Speech-Grille (1959)
An Eye, Open / 117
The No-One's-Rose (1963)
[The word
about going-to-the-depths] / 137
[Mute autumn smells] / 153
Psalm / 157
[What happened?] / 187
The Syllable Pain / 201
Breathturn (1967)
[The numbers] / 229
[To stand] / 237
[I know you] / 245
[No more sand art] / 251
[Ash-Aureole] / 261
[What's written] / 263
[Where?] / 265
Threadsuns (1968)
[The trace of a bite] / 287
[You were] / 297
[Dew] / 299
Light-Compulsion (1970)
[Wan-voiced] / 319
[Do not work ahead] / 325
Snow-Part (1971)
[Illegible] / 333
[To night's order] / 339
Homestead of Time (1976)
[The heat] / 357
[The Shofar place] / 361
[Nothingness] / 371
Uncollected Poems
[Pour the wasteland] / 387
[Don't write yourself] / 389
Prose
Speech on the Occassion of Receiving
the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen / 395
The Meridian:
Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Georg Büchner Prize / 401
Criticism
To prepare for the group presentation, we first learned literary
methods at GVSU. Next, we'll practice annotating a scholarly article,
available online.
First, read and take notes on the assigned article (below), paying
particular attention to the questions it poses of Berryman's book of poetry,
the issues it sees in the poetry, and the interpretive conclusions it makes.
Then, write a 75-100 word annotation of the article that
- identifies the issue or question that the article is investigating,
- defines the article's thesis or main idea relevant to your work of literature
(feel free to quote as well), and
- explains how the article helps your understanding of the work.
Bring your written annotation to class so we can work with them.
| Article |
Students |
| Christensen, "John Berryman: Overview" |
All |
| Foster, "The
Dream Songs: Overview" |
All |
| Wikipedia, "John
Berryman" |
All |
Barbera, "Shape
and Flow in the Dream Songs"
|
Becky Krol
Amanda Leal
Elizabeth Whitley
|
Hefferman, "John
Berryman: The Poetics of Martyrdom"
|
Megan Bowen
Gary Nye
Edward Jados
|
Phillips, "Balling
the Muse" |
Chris Carver
Brandon Hubbard
Erin Jannenga
Tiffani Wietfeldt |
Cervo,
"Camus' The Plague" |
All |
Barnsley, "The
White Hotel" |
All |
Vanderwerken, "Pilgrim's Dilemma: Slaughterhouse-Five" |
All |
| Contemporary
Literary Criticism, "J. G. Ballard" |
All |
| Wikipedia, The Atrocity Exhibition |
All |
| Foster,
"J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Senses: Perversion and the Failure of
Authority" |
Each student should read 2 of the 4 articles. |
| Franklin,
"What Are We to Make of J. G. Ballard's Apocalypse?" |
| Platzner, "The
Metaphoric Vision of J. G. Ballard" |
| Pringle, "The Fourfold Symbolism of J. G. Ballard" |
Reading Journal
Use the reading journal to determine key ideas, make tentative
interpretations, raise questions, and prepare for class discussion. Do not
summarize the plot; do engage the core issues of the text. The reading journal
does not
have to make a clear academic argument, but it should be coherent. Your key
task in the reading journal is to cut to the quick of the text's core conflicts
as you see them.
- The journal will be assessed based on its active engagement
with and response to the primary texts.
- The final reading journal must contain eight entries of at least
500 words each. Feel free to turn in a couple of entries in the first couple
of weeks for feedback.
- You are expected to share one journal entry with the class (see
the sign up sheet below).
| Week |
Date |
Reading |
Student |
| Week 1 |
|
|
|
| Week 2 |
M, 1-15 |
Tolstoy |
Gary Nye |
| DeLillo |
Chris Carver |
| Week 3 |
M, 1-22 |
Berryman |
|
| Week 4 |
M, 1-29 |
Bell |
|
| Week 5 |
|
|
|
Week 6 |
M, 2-12 |
Blanchot or Rilke |
Amanda Leal |
| Week 7 |
M, 2-17 |
Blanchot or Rilke |
|
| Week 8 |
M, 2-26 |
Blanchot |
|
| Week 9 |
|
|
|
| Week 10 |
M, 3-12 |
Blanchot or Celan |
Becky Krol |
| Week 11 |
M, 3-19 |
Camus |
|
| Week 12 |
M, 3-26 |
Thomas |
Tiffani Wietfeldt |
| Week 13 |
|
|
|
| Week 14 |
M, 4-9 |
Vonnegut |
Edward Jados |
| Week 15 |
M, 4-16 |
Ballard |
Megan Bowen |
| Finals |
|
|
|
Group Presentation
The three goals of the presentation is for students to pose tentative readings
of the text, conduct research, and lead
class discussion; therefore, groups of two or three will write a two page
preliminary analysis of the work that elucidates core conflicts, discusses
key issues, and introduces general themes, an annotated
bibliography summarizing scholarly criticism of the work, and discussion and
debate questions. They will also deliver this material in a class presentation.
The written and presentation components must be uploaded to Blackboard Discussion
Board on the day your presentation is due (all in one file please). Note that
Blackboard Group Pages affords group discussion board, collaboration (chat),
email, and file exchange.
-
Plan of Action
- Approximately four weeks before the presentation, groups must create,
post in their Blackboard Group File Exchange, and give me a plan of action
that provides a timeline of meetings, individual group member responsibilities,
and due dates. Individual group members must participate
in the group (attend meetings, keep up with email) and complete their
individual assignments in a timely manner.
-
Written Component
- Preliminary Analysis: Write two pages of tentative interpretation
which examines the text's core conflicts and as well as the main idea
or theme of the work as your group sees it.
- Annotated Bibliography
- Summary of Findings: In a paragraph or two, summarize
the various ways critics are interpreting and debating the text.
- Secondary Sources
- number and type of sources
- 3 sources per group member
- 1 scholarly journal article
- 1 book chapter from a monograph or compilation
- do not use biographies, encyclopedias, magazines,
newspapers, or primary texts
- arrangement and citation format of sources: arrange
sources alphabetically and format them according to MLA
style
- annotations: summarize and evaluate the source in
75-100 words by
- identifying the issue or question that the source is
investigating,
- defining the source’s thesis or main idea relevant
to your work of literature, and
- explaining how the source helps your understanding of
the work.
- Discussion Questions: Pose questions that you would like the
class to investigate and debate.
- Format: Turn in the written portion of your project in Word
format to Blackboard > Discussion Board. Although you should follow
MLA citation style, you may deviate from MLA paper format because neither
the annotated bibliography nor group analysis engender a formal paper
proper.
- Oral Component
- The 15-20 minute presentation should discuss the group's preliminary
analysis, annotated bibliography, the most illuminating article and
also pose question for class discussion.
- Groups
may divide the written portion however they wish, but all group
members must be responsible for speaking in some part of the presentation.
- Feel
free to use Powerpoint or whatever aides our room has to guide your
presentation.
Note: The week before the presentation, the group is expected
to provide the class with copies of the scholarly journal article
or book chapter that they found most useful and illuminating.
| Week |
Date |
Reading |
Students |
Week 6 |
M, 2-12 |
Rilke, The Duino Elegies |
|
| Week 8 |
M, 2-26 |
Blanchot |
|
| Week 10 |
M, 3-12 |
Celan |
|
| Week 11 |
M, 3-19 |
Camus, The Plague |
Megan Bowen |
| Gary Nye |
| Edward Jados |
| Week 12 |
M, 3-26 |
Thomas, The White Hotel |
Becky Krol |
| Amanda Leal |
| Week 14 |
M, 4-9 |
Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five |
Chris Carver |
iffani Wietfeldt |
Paper 1
The first part of our course is devoted to the relationship between death
and creativity, artistry, purpose. Kafka's hunger artist, in nullifying
himself, pushes himself beyond the limits of life; DeLillo's
body artist merges mediation, mimicry, and mourning; Tolstoy's
Ivan Ilych confronts It (the abyss), though perhaps (not) too late to
make a difference in his "most simple and most ordinary and thereby most
terrible"
life; Berryman's dreamsongs flail with creative melancholia and generative
loss; and Bell's dead man detaches and disconnects from the world even as he
radically cuts back into it. The first paper is designed to allow you to explore
a specific issue
related to the general topic of art through death in one particular text.
Examine a key idea, theme, issue, conflict, symbol, or motif from a text discussed
in class; if doing poetry, feel free to either tackle a recurring image or
issue across many poems or closely read a poem or two. The point is to write
an essay that digs into a particular topic with the kind of rigor that was
not afforded by class discussion. Take our class
discussion on a specific issue as a starting point, and use your paper to conclude
the analysis, to fully realize and work through the interpretive implications
of the idea. On the one hand, this paper is testing to make sure you understand
the general issue of the course so far while requiring you to delve into a
particular issue, on the other hand.
- Length: 4-5 pages
- Your paper will be penalized one-third of a letter grade if it
does not end at least halfway down on the fourth page while implementing
MLA style of 12 pt Times New Roman font, double-spacing, and 1" margins.
If it does not end at least halfway down on the third page, it will
be penalized two-thirds of a letter grade.
- MLA Style
- One-third of a letter grade will be deducted for problems in each of
the following three MLA style categories: 1) heading, running header,
and title; 2) margins, font, and line-spacing, and 3) quoting and citing.
Before you turn in a formal paper, make sure your work follows MLA style
by referring to my FAQ
on papers and using the checklist on the MLA
style handout. I will be happy to look over your MLA style in
office hours or if you email me a draft the day before the formal
paper is due.
- Format
- Hard Copy: If you wish to turn in your paper as a print out, you must
do so by the beginning of the class on the due date.
- Electronic: If you do not submit a paper copy to me in class, you must
submit an accessible electronic copy to me in Blackboard > Assignments >
Paper 1 by 11:59PM on the due date, otherwise your paper will be considered
late until you submit it to Blackboard and a late penalty will be applied
to your paper grade. I do not accept print copies of late papers, and
I do not grade papers that are submitted more than four days late.
- Due Date
- Grade
- You will be assessed on your understanding of the text, your ability
to analytically interpret the text, and your thesis.
Paper 2
While the first paper from the first section of our course asked you to analyze
the relationship between death and creativity, the second paper from the second
unit of our course asks you to read a poem or two by either Rainer Maria
Rilke's elegaical and Orphic poetry or Paul Celan's Holocaust poetry
through the lens of an essay or idea by writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot.
Like the first paper, examine a key idea, theme, issue, conflict, symbol, or
motif from a poem or set of closely related poems; this
time from the philosophical perspective posed by Maurice Blanchot. The twofold
purpose of the paper is to compose an essay that digs into a particular
poem or set of poems with the kind of rigor that was not afforded by class
discussion and with Maurice Blanchot's critical worldview in mind.
- Length: 5-7 pages
- Your paper will be penalized one-third of a letter grade if it does not
end at least halfway down on the fourth page while implementing MLA style
of 12 pt Times New Roman font, double-spacing, and 1" margins. If
it does not end at least halfway down on the third page, it will be penalized
two-thirds of a letter grade.
- MLA Style
- One-third of a letter grade will be deducted for problems in each
of the following three MLA style categories: 1) heading, running header,
and title; 2) margins, font, and line-spacing, and 3) quoting and citing.
Before you turn in a formal paper, make sure your work follows MLA
style by referring to my FAQ on papers and
using the checklist on the MLA style
handout. I will be happy to look over your MLA style in office
hours or if you email me a draft the day before the formal paper is
due.
- Format
- Hard Copy: If you wish to turn in your paper as a print out, you
must do so by the beginning of the class on the due date.
- Electronic: If you do not submit a paper copy to me in class, you
must submit an accessible electronic copy to me in Blackboard > Assignments >
Paper 1 by 11:59PM on the due date, otherwise your paper will be considered
late until you submit it to Blackboard and a late penalty will be applied
to your paper grade. I do not accept print copies of late papers, and
I do not grade papers that are submitted more than four days late.
- Due Date
- Grade
- You will be assessed on your understanding of the two authors, your ability
to analytically interpret the poetry, your application of Blanchot, and
your thesis.
Paper 3
While the first paper from the first section of our course asked you to analyze
the relationship between death and creativity and the second paper compelled you to apply Blanchot's philosophy to Rilke or Celan's poetry, the final paper is a research paper that compels you to analyze and research a text and topic related to the subject matter of this death and dying course. Although I encourage you to choose an author/text not covered in class (a novel, short story, poetry, film, television show), you may write on an author/text covered in class but one that you did not use in your other two formal papers. Your research paper must incorporate 3-5 sources of literary criticism (books, book chapters, journal articles).
- Length: 7-9 pages
- Your paper will be penalized one-third of a letter grade if it does not
end at least halfway down on the seventh page while implementing MLA style
of 12 pt Times New Roman font, double-spacing, and 1" margins. If
it does not end at least halfway down on the sixth page, it will be penalized
two-thirds of a letter grade, and so forth.
- MLA Style
- One-third of a letter grade will be deducted for problems in each
of the following three MLA style categories: 1) heading, running header,
and title; 2) margins, font, and line-spacing, and 3) quoting and citing.
Before you turn in a formal paper, make sure your work follows MLA
style by referring to my FAQ on papers and
using the checklist on the MLA style
handout. I will be happy to look over your MLA style in office
hours or if you email me a draft the day before the formal paper is
due.
- Format
- Hard Copy: If you wish to turn in your paper as a print out, you
must submit it to my mailbox in 123 Lake Huron Hall by 5:00 PM.
- Electronic: If you do not submit a paper copy to me in class, you
must submit an accessible electronic copy to me in Blackboard > Assignments >
Paper 1 by 11:59PM on the due date, otherwise your paper will be considered
late until you submit it to Blackboard and a late penalty will be applied
to your paper grade. I do not accept print copies of late papers, and
I do not grade final papers that are submitted more than two days late.
- Due Date
- Grades, Comments, and Paper Return:
- You will be assessed on your analytical understanding of the author/topic as well as your incorporation of research.
- You can access your final grade in the course via
the Registrar after Thursday, May 3.
- If you want comments, please ask for them. If you do request comments and submitted your paper through Blackboard,
you can access your graded paper in Blackboard >My
Grades > Paper
3 after Thursday, May 3. If you want comments and submitted your paper as a print out, I will email comments by April 30.