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For your
second Thematic Essay, that includes any assigned author and work that
For your
second Thematic Essay, that includes any assigned author and work that
we’ve encountered between Week’s 7 & 8 and Week 13 (ie. Choose one assigned
author and work from among the following:
Robinson Jeffers, Loren Eiseley, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Eliot
Porter, Douglas Peacock, Wendell Berry, Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko,
William Cronon, Alice Walker, Gary Snyder, or Janisse Ray).
In reading
your chosen author, I’d like each of you to produce two additional sources that
help to shed further light on the importance and/or lasting influence on any of
the authors we’ve read from the above list(s).
You may consult a field of book and/or web sources, but consider any
studies which present useful information about
· The author’s
biography
· The historical context
for the work—what prompted it and how it was received.
· The work’s
continuing influence into contemporary times—who still reads this work, and
(why) is it still read?
· The author and/or
work’s connections to any other authors and works on our semester’s reading
list.
The goal is to supply additional
information about the author, the time and place, and the significance of the
work. What shaped the work’s creation,
and what shaped the work/author’s legacy?
If asked to boil this assignment down to a single sentence, it would be
something like “this information allows readers to understand the author and
the work in greater detail because…” So
a sentence like that should appear in the paper’s early stages, and you should
take pains to develop this idea with quotes you’ve gathered in research.
Ultimately,
I’d like to see if you can provide additional context for understanding one of
our readings. Put simply, you should try
to provide some sort of context for the work you’re considering. You should try to explain what the work does, what it shows, what it is, or
what it has become in light of some
biographical, critical, or historical context that you’ve provided.
This report
should be between two and three typed, double spaced pages (1” margins, 12
point font). You should quote and cite
your sources according to proper MLA protocols, and should take care to include
a Works Cited page that lists your sources.
This isn’t a writing class per se, but we can devote some time to
quoting and citing protocols as needed.
A word about sources: do take steps
to use and document your sources responsibly.
Many websites provide useful contextual information, and you should
start with these. But the better
material might come from an amazon.com search to get access to
printed/published works, or perhaps a search on GoogleScholar. Likewise, going to the library’s homepage and
researching a work on the MLA bibliography
or the Liteature Criticism Online or
Literature Resource Center (Under “M” and “L,” respectively, in the “Databases
A to Z link”) might prove fruitful as well.
And you should remember, from English 1020, the reliable Lexis Nexis,
OneFile, and Academic Search Primer databases under the “Articles””popular databases” links on the
library’s homepage. There are plenty of
resources to research each work and author, so do spend some time to find the
most interesting sources that amplify your understanding of a given work.
For your second
Thematic Essay, your topic should be any one assigned readings
by authors the following list: Robinson Jeffers, Loren Eiseley,
Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Eliot Porter, Douglas Peacock, Wendell Berry,
Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Cronon, Alice Walker, Gary
Snyder, or Janisse Ray.
This report should
be between two and three typed, double spaced pages (1” margins, 12 point
font).
You should quote
and cite your sources according to proper MLA protocols, and should take
care to include a Works Cited page that lists your sources.
Please submit your
essay as a Word document, so I can grade using Word’s “Markup” and “Add
Comment” functions.
The two key words for this assignment: “focus”
and “context.” And the key question you should ask yourself:
Is my topic sufficiently focused and am I supplying sufficient context for
it?
The goal is to supply additional information about
the author, the time and place, and the significance of the work.
What shaped the work’s creation, and what shaped the work/author’s
legacy?
If asked to boil this assignment down to a single
sentence, it would be something like ”this information allows readers to
understand the author and the work in greater detail because…” So a
sentence something like that (not necessarily verbatim, but clearly
expressing the point) should appear in the paper’s early stages, and you
should take steps to develop this idea with quotes you’ve gathered in
research.
Ultimately, I’d like to see if you can provide
additional context for understanding one of our authors and his/her
readings. Put simply, you should try to provide some sort of context
for the author work you’re considering: “what events or experiences
explain why this author wrote this work?”
You might try to explain what the work does, what it
shows, what it is, or what it has become in light of some biographical,
critical, or historical context that you’ve provided.
Here are some potential pitfalls to avoid:
The biggest sins are to oversimplify and merely summarize. These errors can take some different forms. So please take care to avoid making the following lapses. Please don’t…
…assume that you’re simply rehashing the author’s biography: summarizing events from rachelcarson.com or edwardabbey.com. Resources like these should be considered as starting points, and an oversimplified essay seldom shows evidence of going beyond any introductory research.
…assume that you’re simply summarizing a text or argument: “In “Down the River,” a chapter in his book Desert Solitaire, Abbey goes to live in the Utah Desert for a year and he writes about his experiences there.”
…assume that you can overgeneralize about a single experience in light of an author’s full life’s work: Rachel Carson lived near a glue factory as a kid so it makes sense that she wrote Silent Spring.
…oversimplify the relevance of a work in light of current events: instead of saying that “Down the River” or Silent Spring are visionary works that have meaning in contemporary times, instead explain (with supporting quotes) how they have meaning for today’s readers in light of specific problems.
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