Monthly Archives: March 2016

Literary Arts Festival (& Mary Gaitskill Reading): Extra Credit

City Tech’s 35th Annual Literary Arts Festival is being held between 5:30 – 7:30 pm on Thursday, March 24 in the Voorhees Theater (186 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201).  As the Festival’s OpenLab page denotes, the event will include readings from students, faculty, and writer Mary Gaitskill (best known to most of us as the author of “The Other Place”).

I will offer extra credit (a letter grade bump on your lowest response paper…a D becomes a C, a C becomes a B and so forth) to anyone who attends and writes a coherent, thoughtful response paper that addresses the following points:

  1. Summary of the entire event (beyond what I could learn from a playbill/lineup)
  2. Critique of the evening
  3. Short musing on the weirdest part of the Festival (something that surprised you, made you pause, had you laughing/grimacing, etc.)

Extra credit response papers should be emailed to me by 3PM on Sunday, March 27.

 

Response Paper 4: State Your Claim

As discussed in class today, to prepare for response paper 4, during our Wednesday class we will engage in a debate relevant to the following two claims:

a) A fiction writer does not need to have personally experienced a topic in order to write authentically about it.

b) A fiction writer does need to have personally experienced a topic in order to write authentically about it.

If you know which claim you are going to prove in your paper, please comment to this post indicating as such by 5:15 PM on Tuesday, March 15 and I will do my best to assign you to a debate team accordingly.

Publication Information for Bolaño’s “Beach”

To assist you in preparing a Works Cited page for response paper 3, below please find the publication information for “Beach” — you’ll need to format it according to MLA standards for your Works Cited:

  • author:  Roberto Bolaño
  • short story title:  “Beach”
  • published in: Between Parenthesis, 2011, New Directions Publishing (NYC)