(200 Points)
During the first week of class, I will ask you to sign up in small groups to become our resident “experts” on a particular term or concept. Using the critical essays in Oncourse and the authoritative texts listed below, your goal is to design and conduct a 20-minute workshop that helps us understand how that term or concept can contribute to our discussion. In a way, you will be teaching us to use this concept or term as a “lens” for interpreting what we are reading for that day, but you will also be empowering us to understand its function in documentary literature in general.
As you can tell, this will require a thorough reading of the texts we are discussing, as well as a solid understanding of the authoritative texts that you use to define and present your concept. Please seek me out for feedback ahead of time if you need it.
Lens Concepts / Dates
Lens Concepts / Dates
- Narrative ethics (3/19) - class discussion
- Audience-construction (3/26) - Maya, Kar Joon
- Agency (3/30) - Katy, Bridget, Yasmina
- Exigence (4/2) - Sarah, Philip
- Pragmatism (4/6) - Jason, Megan, Patrick
- Anti-sentimentalism (4/9) - Mackenzie, Ryan, Abhinav
- Catharsis (4/16) - Emily, Josh, Ali
- Invention (4/23) - Kim, Kelsi, Audrianna
Authoritative Texts
Here is a list of authoritative texts you may use to supplement our Oncourse readings in preparation for your workshop (I will not accept any other sources):
- The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, Third Edition. Eds. Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009.
- The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi. New York: Columbia U P, 1995.
- The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland, 1996.
- A Glossary of Literary Terms. Ninth Edition. M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage, 2009.
- The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms. Ed. T. F. Brogan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 1994.
- Rhetorical Terms and Concepts: A Contemporary Glossary. George Y. Trail. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 2000.
- Web links from our blog, if they are relevant.
Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria
Overall Confidence and Preparation: Although you may be offering us new knowledge that we could not have come up with on our own, you should not just lecture, read PowerPoint slides, or hand-deliver a brief summary of main points while we all simply sit back and relax. Instead, this workshop should combine creativity with rigor; and you should have a sense of how you want us to be challenged and what tools you will use. Be confident about making us participate and be ready to help us think more deeply about what we read.
Workshop / Multimodal Activity: You can expect that we will have read the material for that class day, and you can expect our active participation, since your workshop will help prepare us for a quiz on the concept you present. The burden to participate is with all of us, so you may assign intriguing questions, conduct a role play, utilize break-out groups, give everyone independent writing time, select certain passages to analyze, use the chalkboard, project a visual—the possibilities are numerous. What kind of activity do you think would help us acquire and apply new knowledge? Successful activities are those that engage us in analysis and synthesis of several ideas and allow us a chance to perform.
“Lens” Handout or Definition Sheet: As part of your presentation, you should plan to provide us with some kind of written reference tool. This tool might be an outline of different ways to apply the term as a “lens” to something we read, or it might be an extended definition of the concept with real-life and textual examples, or it might include a series of quoted passages from one of our readings where you think the term is most relevant. This tool should represent your own amalgamation from several sources; you should not simply reproduce a definition from a single glossary or handbook. Please cite all of the sources you use.
Coherence: All of the components of your workshop should work together and not seem disjointed. In other words, the written tool should complement the activity, or vice-versa.
“Works Cited” List: I will ask you to submit a list of all of the sources you use in putting this presentation together, including what you consulted at the library or from our Oncourse readings, in MLA format.
