User:Stevenarntson/Literature/assignments


 *  Your grade in this class is divided into quarters: participation, chrestomathy, memorization, and group facilitation. Also required is a self-assessment, completed at the end of the term.

Chrestomathy
Throughout the quarter, you will be developing material to include in your final chrestomathy. A chrestomathy is a selection of “readings” by an author—here, you will be selecting readings from work you have done this quarter, some of which is required, and some of which will be your choice.

Your chrestomathy exists only in theory until you assemble it at the end of the quarter. It will contain your responses to all of the assignments that have been made during the quarter. Some of these assignments will be on lined paper. Some will be typed. Some will be drawings. Some might even be recordings.

Requirements

 * Your chrestomathy will contain six of the below assignments and any other work you decide to include. Other work, including questions you have as you read, lists, notes, exclamations, and frustrations, can improve your grade (although it cannot alone earn you a good one).
 * Each assignment will be at least six hundred words long, and it will be posted to your Wikiversity page. You are at your leisure to complete these assignments in any order, and responding to any readings, during the course of the quarter. Keep in mind that saving this work until the last minute will be a disaster of considerable proportions. Budget your time.

Response
Required. As the quarter moves on, everyone will begin slowly building their Chrestomathy online. You can look at one another's work to see how everyone is doing, and what they're thinking about. Choose one piece by another student, and write a response to it. This response could be constructive criticism, an interpretation, other ideas you have, things you thought about while reading, etc. Please make it well organized and readable. Publish your response on your user page, and on the other students' discussion page.

Style
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” For your stylistic response, pick a reading that you feel has an especially strong, interesting, or otherwise magnetic writing style. Write a piece of your own, mimicking this style. If you read a piece by Hemmingway and are impressed by his spare, precise narration, write a story of your own that reproduces that exactitude. If you read a poem that impresses you with its wit and unusual method of breaking up lines, write your own poem mirroring those attributes.

This creative re-envisioning should be accompanied by a paragraph explaining what, exactly, you were attempting to do.

Compare/Contrast
As we move through the quarter, you will likely begin making connections between disparate pieces of literature. The human mind likes to make connections, and to compare things to one another. How does the story we read this week compare to the poem we read last week? How does the relationship described by this essay relate to the relationship described in this prose poem? This is an analysis paper, which should be coherently organized, focused, clear, and thoughtful.

Other Media
Respond to one or more of our readings with a media other than writing. Draw pictures of characters. Create a storyboard. Create fashion designs for the characters. Draw maps of buildings or places. Create a comic. Write a song.

Ekphrastic
Respond with writing to a piece of art that is not itself writing. Respond to a movie with a poem or to a sculpture with a story.

Sequel/Prequel
Every story and poem is a window upon a world of possibilities. When the story ends, what happens next? What happened before the story began? This response technique is your chance to expand that window by answering one or both of those questions for yourself. When Raymond Carver read John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty_Eight”, written in 1945, he asked the same questions. His answer was the story “The Train” which he completed in 1984 and dedicated to Cheever.

Analysis
This is your chance to expand upon some of the observations we have made in class during discussion. Anything we have discussed in class is fair game. Let your developing opinions and interests be your guide. This analysis paper should be coherently organized, focused, clear, and thoughtful.

Personal
Often when people read literature, it causes them to reflect upon their own lives. Perhaps a story or poem strikes a chord with something that once happened to you, or perhaps it has bearing on something you are going through now. Perhaps a character in a story reminds you of someone you know, or an image in a poem reminds you of something you have seen. This paper is an expansion upon such reflections—how do you see this story interacting with, or impacting your life and the way you live it? What does it remind you of, and why are these reminiscences significant?

Perspective
Many stories have more than one character in them, and so do many poems. For this assignment, pick another character and rewrite the tale from their perspective. What do they think about what's going on? There have been many examples of this sort of effort in literature in recent years, from Gregory MacGuire's Wicked to Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife to Seattle author Nancy Rawles' My Jim.

Transcription
Some literature exists in a form that is not written down--the majority of human history has been passed down from one generation to the next through oral means. For this example, take a story that someone told you, which has never been written out before, and write it out. This could be a story told by a friend family member.

Active Reading
People often read in a passive state. Their attitude is one of “The author needs to carry me along.” Such readers are dead weight, dragging the story down.

Active reading occurs when the reader pulls the story forward by being engaged, interested, passionate, questioning, and by visualizing. Go that extra step or two to make the author’s work come alive. It won’t happen if you don’t help. Because every individual is unique, that means every time a story is read and understood, it becomes a unique combination of the words on the page and the brain of the reader.

Your chrestomathy will be due on week 11, but you will be required to keep it up throughout the quarter. A chrestomathy created entirely the week before it is due will earn a poor grade, because it will lack the thoughtfulness and reflectivity of one that has been updated continuously.

Because I require that you adopt a variety of response techniques, my hope is that ultimately your chrestomathy will emerge as an art object—an interesting fusion of your mind with the minds of all the authors we have looked at this quarter. It will represent your encounters with creative minds different from your own.

Memorization – A Manifesto
Part of being human is possessing a powerful memory. Culturally, memorization predates written language by tens of thousands of years. It is the core necessity for any oral tradition, and because of this, it holds a deep place in the human heart. In a capitalistic society like the one in which we live, countless people want you to remember their own best interests, which they sing to you with songs, slogans, billboards, bottles, and banner ads.

Students sometimes complain about memorization. “Why do I need to memorize this if I know how to look it up?” There is a difference between knowing where something is and having that thing inside you. There is a difference between knowing where to go to buy a Kit Kat bar, and idly humming the Kit Kat theme song as you walk down the street.

Memorization is not a choice. It is your fate. You'll spend your entire life memorizing things whether you want to or not. You are memorizing things right now. As you sit here, you are memorizing the faces of fellow students, the shape and location of this classroom, and the curriculum requirements of this class.

The brain unthinkingly records information. In this sense, you are a machine, a tape player set perpetually to record. The question is, what are you recording? Because what goes in there influences your brain in the same manner your body is influenced by the food you eat. It will make you a better person or a worse one.

Let me propose this comparison: In the same way that eating hamburgers makes you fat, watching sitcoms makes you stupid. Your brain fills with sugar. Therefore, start deciding what you learn. It’s a way of programming yourself, and of filling up on those things you find meaningful and beautiful, rather than letting someone else do it for you. It is a form of resistance.

The Requirement
In this class, every student will memorize at least two pages of poetry or prose. I require this because I think memorization in our society is an underutilized skill that has great potential importance. In your life’s mission to become the kind of person you admire, there is no more powerful way to proceed than to memorize the map.

On week 6 of this quarter, you will inform me what you intend to memorize. It can be something from the text or from elsewhere, but, for the purposes of this assignment, advertising and song lyrics don’t count. I also request that you not dredge up some half-remembered poem from your 6th grade poetry class. Pick something that has meaning to you now.

On week 11 of this quarter, everyone in class will recite what they have memorized, and will also give a short description of why they chose the piece(s) that they did.

Reading Aloud
Our reading aloud this quarter will culminate with your memorized presentations on week 11. However, we will be reading aloud often, all quarter.

One of the best literature classes I took during my undergraduate education involved reading and studying James Joyce’s 800-page masterwork, Ulysses. In this 300-level class, we read much of the book aloud, and today when I look back I find that I have had few encounters with literature that can match the intensity of that experience.

Community
Reading aloud forges a community. It is a performance that takes place live, which ceases to exist the moment it is completed except in the memories of those who were present.

“The deepest Alchemy”
Dada poet Hugo Ball had a good idea: that there is a power in spoken language that exists separately from the meaning of words. Ball conjectured that if someone spoke eloquently, but did not use real words, there would still be real power in what was said. Here's his Karawane.

When we are born, we pick up language naturally. No one has to teach us. Writing and reading, however, must be taught. Language is more native to us than dots on a page, and thus hearing something spoken evokes a deeper and different understanding. Ball called this deep understanding “the deepest alchemy of the word.”

Group-facilitated Discussion
During the quarter, groups will facilitate a class discussion of a piece of writing selected by the group.
 * The week beforehand, the group will develop some discussion questions for its chosen piece, and will provide these to the class, along with copies (digital or physical) of the reading they've chosen.
 * The group will lead the discussion about the piece, trying to encourage participation by as many people as possible.

Participation

 * Attendance, including field trips
 * Participation, including discussion and in-class assignments

Self Assessment
This is due, posted at your user page, on the final week of the quarter.