Readings for the Objective Final

Above is another landscape by Thomas Cole.  Below are our readings from after the midterm.

Washington Irving's "The Wife" and "Rip Van Winkle"

Catherine Maria Sedgwick's "Cacoethes Scribendi"

Jane Johnson Schoolcraft's "Mishosha"

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" and "Young Goodman Brown"

Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Fall of the House of Usher"

(We also mentioned William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "My Lost Youth" as well as Anne Bradstreet's "A Letter to Her Husband, Absent on Publick Employment.")

Harriet Beecher Stowe's "The Seamstress" and "Trials of a Housekeeper"

Herman Melville's "Bartleby"

Margaret Fuller's "Our City Charities"

Fanny Fern's "Blackwells Island [I-III]"

Henry David Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" and Walden (Where I Lived, What I Lived For and Conclusion)

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself (1, 6, 13) and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Emily Dickinson (TBA)

Annotated Bibliography

 

The picture above is from the House of the Seven Gables, a museum in Salem, MA.  The House of the Seven Gables is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels.

Annotated Bibliography – Due May 12, 2010

 

In this assignment, you will be writing a five to ten item annotated bibliography that includes both primary and secondary sources on a specific topic.   Among these sources may be the literary works we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, or one or more of the web sites I’ve posted here on my blog at Multiply.  Feel free to include a source from a library database or a scholarly journal on-line or a picture or a film.

If you’re not familiar with the annotated bibliography, it is not an argumentative, research paper but an informative, expanded version of the works cited page.  Begin the annotated bibliography with a one-page overview of your topic.  The overview will also include an outline of your research process beginning with your finding a topic and then narrowing it.  Each source is then listed alphabetically, following MLA format; after each single source, you will be summarizing, evaluating, and analyzing it, explaining how it is relevant to your topic.  Strive for two to four paragraphs of summary/analysis per source.  Check the highlighted entry on sample annotated bibliographies at my blog.  I have also posted sample annotated bibliographies on a variety of topics at WebCT.

Choose a topic that is related to your earlier papers, your presentation, or the midterm.  If you are expanding your first paper on Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative, you may want to go back to see if other individuals wrote slave narratives.   You might also want to look at what others have said about Douglass and his work.  Or you may want to choose a topic from the second half of the semester. You may even want to choose a topic that is more about American culture or a film set during our time period.  Did you know that Kevin Willmott made a film imagining what the United States would have been like if the South had won the Civil War?

As you look for sources, consider the ways that research can augment and even challenge your own thinking about a work.  Use all of the library research techniques you’ve learned in high school and from your composition class—searching Web Voyage and library databases as well as Google, using note cards or other means for taking notes and avoiding plagiarism, summarizing and paraphrasing sources as well as quoting them, using quotation marks to indicate quotes, and, of course, using MLA appropriately.  Citation is an open-book quiz.  I do not expect you to have memorized MLA, but I do expect you to use a handbook to check your citation.

I encourage you to meet with a college librarian, a Writing Center tutor, or me if you are not sure how to approach this project or if you have not done this type of assignment before.  Plagiarism involves copying another person’s writing or reading a book review or abstract and then writing a bibliographic entry on the original source.  Consulting with a librarian on research strategies is not plagiarism. 

Grading

An A project will be outstanding on all or most levels: choice of topic and sources; focus of topic; close, critical reading of texts; summary; relevance of evaluation; analysis; and grammar/mechanics (including MLA).  (I have listed each level in order of importance; however, errors in the last area will affect your grade.)  It may be on a topic we have been emphasizing all semester.  In that case, it will show me new insights derived from your close, critical reading of primary and secondary sources.  Alternately, this paper may be on a reading that has been assigned but not discussed in class.  This option may not produce an easier “A,” as I will be looking at your ability to research a topic without the opportunity to discuss it in class.

A B project will be effective on all or most levels:  choice of topic and sources; focus of topic; close, critical reading of texts; summary; relevance of evaluation; analysis; and grammar/mechanics (including MLA).  (I have listed each level in order of importance; however, errors in the last area will affect your grade.)  It may be on a topic we’ve discussed in class or a reading that I’ve assigned but not discussed in class.

A C project will be adequate on all or most levels:  choice of topic and sources; focus of topic; close, critical reading of texts; summary; relevance of evaluation; analysis; and grammar/mechanics (including MLA).  (I have listed each level in order of importance; however, errors in the last area will affect your grade.)  It may be on a topic we’ve discussed in class or a reading that I’ve assigned but not discussed in class.  Note that a C is not failing, simply “average.” 

A D project will contain significant problems on one or more levels:  choice of topic and sources; focus of topic; number of sources; close, critical reading of texts; summary; relevance of evaluation; analysis; and grammar/mechanics (including MLA).   

A failing (F) project will be inadequate on one or more levels:  choice of topic and sources; focus of topic; number of sources; close, critical reading of texts; summary; relevance of evaluation; analysis; and grammar/mechanics (including MLA).

Below is a picture of one of Brook Farm's main buildings, The Hive.  I'm guessing that this picture is from the early 20th century.  For more information about Brook Farm, see this site:

 

http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/brookfarm.html

 

Final Prompts for EN 211

 

Below are the prompts for the take home part of the midterm.  Choose only one prompt.  The essay will be due on Monday, May 10. Note that you may choose to write about works that we have not discussed in class.

1.  What does the term American literature mean to you?  Discuss the contributions of up to four of our readings to your understanding of American literature.  Include at least two from after midterms (Irving, Hawthorne, et al).  Feel free to consider works from different genres as well as those from both Colonial America and the United States of America.  Consider canonical literature (works by Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, & Dickinson) as well as more marginal works (readings by Fanny Fern, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, et al).  What role does realism play?  What role does non-fiction play?  You may also consider works we did not discuss in class.  What does each work have in common with the others?  How does each work trouble or complicate your understanding of American literature?  Who is the audience for each of the works you talk about?

2.  What role do women play in American literature before 1865?  Consider women as characters, audiences, and authors in up to four different works.  At least two of these works must be from after the midterm.  Discuss the impact of True Womanhood on the way that women are portrayed and that women portray their world and appeal to their audiences.  Note that women are both canonical writers (Dickinson, Bradstreet), semi-canonical (Beecher Stowe, Fuller), and more marginal (Sedgwick, Fern). Also, note that men like Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman were published anonymously and that some semi-canonical or marginal authors like Fanny Fern were popular in their day.  Recognize that your viewpoint will be grounded in your historical perspective as a 21st century American, a time when more and more college graduates are women.

3.  How does American literature before 1865 depict work and the worker?  What role does race, gender, and class play?  Does it matter whether the worker is slave or free?  Or whether the worker is male or female?  What role does realism play?  What role does audience play?  Feel free to discuss both fiction and non-fiction.  You may discuss up to four works. Up to two may be from the first half of the semester.

 

4.  What role does race play in American literature before 1865?  Consider not only African-American and/or Native American authors and their writing but also African-American and/or Native American characters and audiences as well as European-Americans as a race.  Also, consider how race impacts important themes in American literature such as freedom and individualism.  Be sure to discuss the upcoming Civil War, slavery, and their impact on the nation and its literature.  Discuss up to four works from the semester so far.  Of these four works, two must be from after the midterm. 


5.  What role does genre play in American literature before 1865?  Consider the genres that you have read in other literature classes (especially at the college & AP level) and those that we are reading this semester. Discuss the impact of gender, class, race, and historical period.  Note that we have talked about some British authors (John Donne, George Herbert, Aphra Behn, Katherine Phillips, etc.) as well.  Refer to up to four works.  (The British works are above and beyond your four works to discuss.)  At least two works must be from after the midterm.

6.  What role do landscape and geography play in American literature before 1865?  Consider differences in genre, historical period, gender, race, and class among authors and their works.  Consider how attitudes towards nature have changed from Bradstreet and Rowlandson's time to Whitman and Thoreau's as Puritanism recedes into the past.  If you have studied later American literature and/or read the work of nature writers such as Terry Tempest Williams or Barry Lopez, feel free to bring their insights into your discussion.  You may also bring in insights from your reading of British writers, especially the Romantics.


Good luck!  I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say.