Krantz
English 3720
Journals, Presentations, Papers
Description

READING JOURNALS
For the first half of the course your classmates and I will suggest questions to be asked of the text. Your reading journal will be a response to the questions supported by specific passages from the story. The passages should not be quoted in full but may be summarized. Then give page numbers where the passages occur.
As you read, of course, you ought to mark your texts, not only underscoring key passages but indicating in the book's margins why those passages are key or at least what they contain (for example, "typical style," or "plot twist").
In your later journals record those comments by page number and amplify them. The process of writing as one reads often leads to promising stray thoughts that one doesn't want to forget but doesn't want to stop reading to pursue. These stray thoughts should also go in the reading journal. This could be material for your first journal each week.
At least as important as the stray thoughts are the thoughts that arise after the reading is complete and one has had a chance to digest the work a bit, both by reflection and by looking back through it and through one's marginal notes. At that point, you ought to write down your observations about anything in the story that seems interesting (for example, style, characterization, setting, plot, moral, and so on) indicating whether those observations feel conclusive or provisional. If provisional, you ought to try to frame questions that might test those observations. And if you then find answers, they should be added too. If you have not yet done so, at that point you should also indicate pages on which important passages may be found, be they important for framing or answering the questions in the entry or simply important as examples of something that you find striking. Each such page reference should be accompanied by a few words indicating your idea of the passage's importance. These ideas, like all ideas in the reading journals, should be thought of as susceptible to revision as discussion, further reflection, and further reading suggest new understandings of individual texts and of fiction in general.

GROUP PRESENTATIONS
I will model a presentation on The Hobbit. I will talk a bit about Tolkien; about the audience and purpose of the text, about what to look for in the plot structure, setting, characters, narrator, any instances of special literary techniques like foreshadowing, symbolism, irony. I will point out fantasy elements and say a bit on Tolkien's sources and inspiration. At least some of these elements should be included in your report. You can decide in the group who will do which ones. Note that doing the presentation will require that you read the text before the class does.
You will form groups of 2-4 with each group responsible for introducing a text and its author and for connecting it to works already discussed. Your report will be done with your partners, but each of you must hand me a 3x5 index card with an outline of the material for which you were responsible and a bibliography of outside sources if you consulted them. Because of the nature of the books we are reading, in many cases you will probably not be able to find outside sources about the work itself. Still, you might be able to find material about the topics you address (eg. The nature of the hero, the role of women in modern fantasy, anxieties that produce our need to read or watch fantasy). You will be graded on the material you present, the coherence of your outline card, and how well you present your material.
If you find that someone cannot arrange for whatever reasons to work with you, you may "fire" the person from your group. That person must then find a group that will accept him or her. There must be, however, at least two people on a work, so losing a member of the group does not mean you may abandon the work.

PAPERS:
You are responsible for writing 12 pages of literary argument for some of the works we have discussed. You have the option of choosing among the following, depending on your strength in writing and your comfort in discussing literature:
1. Six 2-page papers due every two weeks on Friday beginning on Sept. 14 and ending on November 30 (since we won't meet November 23rd). (I will create guides for the early ones.)
2. One 2-page paper and two 5-page papers, the first due on September 14, the second on October 12 and the third on November 30.
3. One 2-page paper due on Sept. 14 and a 10-page paper due on November 30.
This long paper may concern one work alone, that work and other works from the course, and even that work and (given permission of the instructor) other works not in the course. This paper may examine literary history, textual analysis, genre theory, or any other literay matter. You will design a very brief paper proposal (1 page at most and due on November 1) listing your name, likely focal work(s), its area of intellectual concern, and a set of questions to be explored and/or a set of hypotheses to be tested.
Note: You may be tempted to do the long paper because it isn't due until late in the semester. While I am eager to have you like this course, I must warn you that I am demanding as a reader of papers. Long papers are exponentially more difficult to write than shorter ones (2 pages x 6 = 12--a straightforward calculation; but 2 to the 6th power is 64! The difficulty rating of the longer paper compared to the short papers).

There will be a class workshop for the final paper in all of the categories above. A draft version should be distributed to each member of the class according to the date set up to do so. The signed, class-annotated copies of those drafts should be returned to their writers on the next class day. On the basis of seminar discussion, colleague annotation, and further reflection and research, individuals may well want to revise their papers. Final versions of these papers are due according to dates on the syllabus. The final versions should have the signed topic proposal sheet and one commented-on rough draft attached. One copy of each of these final drafts is sufficient.