All posts by Jody R. Rosen

draft, Homework Instructions, Week 7

Responding to our retelling comparisons

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As with the drafts of the retellings, you’ll post your drafts of Part 2, comparisons of the original story and your retelling here and then as homework for Week 7, write comments on at least 2 classmates’ drafts.

For your post:

  • title: the title you’re giving your comparative essay
  • include a link to your retelling draft
  • paste your comparative essay into the post
  • category: choose Week 7 under Homework AND draft under Project #1
  • tags: choose the tag for the story you’re writing about, plus any others you think are appropriate

In the comments you write to your classmates, reflect back to them any or all of the following:

  • what do you understand is the argument made in the comparative essay?
  • what is the thesis statement?
  • does the thesis statement reflect the argument?
  • do you have any suggestions about the examples chosen to support the argument?
  • do you have any suggestions about the organization of the argument?
  • what do you not understand?
  • what is clear and convincing to you?

Remember that in class last week we decided that the final version is due on Wednesday on our site:

  • post your retelling using the category Project #1
  • tag your post with the story you’re working with plus any other tag you find appropriate
  • for the post’s title, use your retelling’s title
  • in the post, write your retelling’s title, then paste in the retelling
  • next, leave two blank lines and then in the same post, add your comparison’s title and paste in your comparison.

I look forward to reading your Project #1 results and gathering all of your hard work into our anthology using a WordPress tool called Anthologize.

Discussion, Midterm Exam

Discussion: Review for the Midterm Exam

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As we think about the midterm exam, which will include both short-answer and long-answer responses, let’s start to put our readings from this semester in conversation with each other. To do this, let’s start to think about interesting points of comparison, and the ways in which each of our readings exemplify the elements of fiction we read about.

In the comments, write about a theme you see connecting two texts–either through a similarity or a difference, and what is significant about that connection. Consider what elements of fiction help make this connection more meaningful. I’ve added an example in a comment below.

In addition to writing your comment, reply to classmates’ comments with ideas about other texts that fit into the connection they’ve explored. This is a great way for us to work through all of the texts we’ve encountered this semester:

Margaret Atwood, “There Was Once” 1992

Gary Parks, “Elements of Fiction”

Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour” 1894

William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” 1930

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Cottagette” 1910

— “The Yellow Wall-Paper” 1899

Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers” 1917

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” 1835

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” 1915

Thomas Wolfe, “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” 1935 (optional)

Announcements

Student Workshop: Avoiding Plagiarism and Citing Sources

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The WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) program presents its second major workshop just for students!

Join us this Tuesday, March 10, for

Avoiding Plagiarism and Citing Sources

When: 1:00-2:15pm, Tuesday March 10, 2015
Where: Atrium Amphitheater

Is rewriting someone else’s ideas in your own words plagiarism? Can you use ideas from class discussion in a paper without citing them? Do you know what plagiarism, citation, and paraphrase really mean? This workshop is designed to help students understand how to use sources correctly, how City Tech defines plagiarism, how best to avoid plagiarism using proper citation and good paraphrasing.

Visit our website: https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/writingacrossthecurriculum

draft, Homework Instructions, Week 6

Responding to our retellings

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Part 1 of Project #1 is due today on our site so that we can give each other feedback. I’ve gotten many questions about when exactly the drafts are due. I had said Monday on our syllabus, and since we need time to read them and comment on at least two classmates’ retellings, please post them by what would be the end of our class time today (if we met on Mondays),  2:15pm.

For your post:

  • title: the title you’re giving your retelling
  • paste your retelling into the post
  • category: choose Week 6 under Homework AND draft under Project #1
  • tags: choose the tag for the story you’re retelling, plus any others you think are appropriate

When you choose the two retellings you want to comment on, address the post’s author to let them know:

  • what shift in narrator did the retelling’s author make?
  • what do you understand are the changes the shift in narrator necessitated?
  • what effect do these changes have on your experience reading the story?
  • anything else you want to recommend?
  • as always, we’re respectful of our classmates, even if we disagree. Please be sure your comments treat your classmates and their work with resepect. Please also understand that when you read comments on your retelling, critiques are intended to help you improve your work, not to personally attack.
  • feel free to reply to the comments with follow-up questions, like you would do in class if you were working together face-to-face.
  • as with homework in general, these comments are due by end-of-day Tuesday.

Please bring a printed copy of your retelling to class on Wednesday. so we can continue this peer review activity and discuss the retelling process.

Discussion

Discussion: “The Metamorphosis” (again)

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We again ran out of time for our discussion on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” which benefitted our discussion of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “The Cottagette” but still leaves us needing to find class time for a face-to-face conversation about what happens if you should unexpectedly wake up as a giant bug.

To that end, I ask that this discussion focus on the burning questions we have about the story–any aspect of it, and any kind of question, whether for clarification or for discussion. Your comment should raise a question and include a passage (probably longer than a line or two) in which you see your issue at play. If someone raises the same question, you cannot simply add it again–instead, reply to them and push the question further. We will address as many as we can in class.

In the meanwhile, and since you have only re-reading to do, I hope your work on Part 1 of Project #1 is coming along. I’ll post instructions for that work in my homework post for the week. More information then.

Week 5

In-class discussion of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “The Cottagette”

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In Women and Economics (1898), Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued against kitchens in homes–and with them, the housework involved–as a way to free women from the domestic sphere:

Take the kitchens out of the houses, and you leave rooms which are open to any form of arrangement and extension; and the occupancy of them does not mean “housekeeping.” In such living, personal character and taste would flower as never before; the home of each individual would be at last a true personal expression; and the union of individuals in marriage would not compel the jumbling together of all the external machinery of their lives,–a process in which much of the delicacy and freshness of love, to say nothing of the power of mutual rest and refreshment, is constantly lost. The sense of lifelong freedom and self-respect and of the peace and permanence of one’s own home will do much to purify and uplift the personal relations of life, and more to strengthen and extend the social relations. The individual will learn to feel himself an integral part of the social structure, in close, direct, permanent connection with the needs and uses of society.

This is especially needed for women, who are generally considered, and who consider themselves, mere fractions of families, and incapable of any wholesome life of their own. The knowledge that peace and comfort may be theirs for life, even if they do not marry,–and may be still theirs for life, even if they do,–will develope a serenity and strength in women most beneficial to them and to the world. It is a glaring proof of the insufficient and irritating character of our existing form of marriage that women must be forced to it by the need of food and clothes, and men by the need of cooks and housekeepers. We are absurdly afraid that, if men or women can meet these needs of life by other means, they will cheerfully renounce the marriage relation. And yet we sing adoringly of the power of love!

In reality, we may hope that the most valuable effect of this change in the basis of living will be the cleansing of love and marriage from this base admixture of pecuniary interest and creature comfort, and that men and women , eternally drawn together by the deepest force in nature, will be able at last to meet on a plane of pure and perfect love. We shame our own ideals, our deepest instincts, our highest knowledge, by this gross assumption that the noblest race on earth will not mate, or, at least, not mate monogamously, unless bought and bribed through the common animal necessities of food and shelter, and chained by law and custom.

What do we think of this?

Week 5

Blogging on “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “The Cottagette”

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Apologies for the lateness of these instructions. Here are a few options for your posts for this week. Choose one:

  • Choose two passages that epitomize the narrator of either of these stories. Explain what you understand about the passage and how it instructs you to read the narrator and her narration.
  • Consider the setting of these stories. Find a passage from each that identifies the setting, and compare how the settings help shape each into the drastically different stories that they are.
  • Using specific quotations from the story to support your claims, compare either or both of these stories in their depiction of marriage with any of the other marriages depicted in our readings this semester. Do you attribute the differences only to characterization and plot, or are there other ways these distinct situations are expressed?
  • Is there something else you’re eager to write about regarding “The Yellow Wall-Paper” or “The Cottagette”? Write it–but be sure to use quotations from the story or stories in your post.

Remember to follow our blogging guidelines, and categorize your post  Week 5 under Homework. Use any tags you find appropriate.

Discussion

Discussion: “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “The Cottagette”

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In class yesterday, we began talking about “Young Goodman Brown” but didn’t really get to “The Metamorphosis” at all. For our discussion this week, I’d like to offer the option that we try what Gavin suggested in class yesterday, that we return to previous discussions, in addition to starting the next discussion here.

To that end, please feel free to contribute something new to the discussion on “The Metamorphosis.”

Next, please contribute to our discussion here about “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and “The Cottagette” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

One topic for discussion is to comment on the kinds of narrators we find in these two short stories. In addition to identifying them using the terminology we have discussed on the site and in class, there is another aspect of the narrator we can think about: is the narrator of either story a reliable narrator or an unreliable narrator?

Another topic for discussion: we might use the words utopia and dystopia to describe these two short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that we read. What do those words mean? Which story is utopian and which is dystopian? Why?

As always, you should spend 75 minutes reading the online discussion and contributing to it. Your work should be in the form of a comment either to the discussion post, or to another comment in the thread.

Homework Instructions, Week 4

Blogging on “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Metamorphosis”

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We have read two very different stories for our in-person class discussion this week: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” For your homework blog post this week, choose one passage you think exemplifies the story, stands out as the moment that defines the story for you. Quote that passage, and then write what you understand it to be saying and what your analysis of it is. You might include questions you have about it, or questions to prompt discussion among your classmates. If you have done any outside research (either to help you understand the story, or to look into the term Kafkaesque, or to look at the images from the graphic novel adaptation of “The Metamorphosis”) that helped you understand the passage, please link to it in your post.

Then read the other posts and click Like for the one or two you would like to talk about in class. I’ll include the most liked posts in our class discussion.

Note: you might click Like for a passage, or for the way the post’s author has written about it. You might not like the passage itself, but it should be one that you want discussed in class–and that you are willing to talk about. You can certainly like your own post.

Discussion

Discussion: “The Metamorphosis”

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My apologies for any confusion, and for my delay in posting. Since our schedule is a bit off, with Wednesday following a Monday schedule, you don’t have a homework post until after this online discussion.

For our discussion this week, let’s think about our experience reading Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” by each focusing our comment through a particular passage. Some possible topics to address here:

How do you deal with the outrageous situation presented in “The Metamorphosis”? Does it help to read “The Metamorphosis” metaphorically? What does metaphorically mean? If “Young Goodman Brown” can be read as an allegory (refer “Elements of Fiction” for a description of allegory and allegorical fiction), can “The Metamorphosis” as well?

When you think of “The Metamorphosis,” can you picture it? Do you have a visual sense of the story? What provides that sense, or what would you need to have that sense if you don’t? After you consider that, you might compare the sense of the visual to other stories we’ve read so far. Or you might compare what you’ve envisioned with this short video featuring images from a graphic-novel adaptation of “The Metamorphosis.”

“The Metamorphosis” is translated from Kafka’s German “Die Verwandlung.” As you read, especially as you pay particular attention to the ways the story is crafted using particular words, consider that the words are the choice of a translator. If you are comfortable writing in another language, try translating your favorite passage from “The Metamorphosis” into that language to share with the class. Or, if you can read German, look online for a copy in German and try to translate a passage into English. What kinds of choices did you need to make to translate that passage? Is there anything that isn’t exactly the same as the version you read? Commenters who can read that language, what do you think about the translation, and would you have made the same choices?

There is a word, kafkaesque, based on Kafka’s writing. What do you guess it would mean, and why, based on reading “The Metamorphosis”? After you guess, look for the definition. Explain using details from “The Metamorphosis” why that’s the definition of the word. (Kafka’s is not the only author to have his name turned into an adjective, but it’s one more widely used outside of an English class. Faulknerian  is also a word, but with a narrower usage).

I look forward to this discussion with you!