This will be our weekly writing "space." I've pasted below the schema for the blog assignments, and I hope this will be a useful venue for generating thoughts, laying out ideas, and sharpening our attention to the works we will be reading. In engaging with the readings, remember to1) work through the articles first on their terms - by understanding how they are thinking through their key terms and their chosen objects of study. It is easy to critique any essay for what it does not do - but that exercise often does not actually engage in what the essay is doing.
2) practice evidence-based argumentation. Draw out particular points using your textual evidence.
3) engage the readings and each other's analyses respectfully and critically: disagreement often leads to sharper understanding and clarification, or perhaps more complex angles to consider.
ENL 200 Assignments Schema
Fall 2016
Professor Mark Jerng
The larger goal of doing weekly blog posts is for you to write a little bit each week; to get into the habit of always writing. This is one of the main habits you will need to cultivate in grad school and in academic careers in general.
The main task of each blog post is to write 750-1000 word considered, thoughtful responses that take one main form:
-critically engaging the readings in order to explicate your understanding of their key terms, their arguments and the implications of their arguments, how they approach whatever topic they are discussing, and/or your critiques (places where you agree or disagree; places where you were confused; places where the internal logic of the essays do or do not hold; odd moments in the readings)
Later in the quarter, I want these blog posts to be potentially useful for your writing and developing of ideas in your other courses. So one option will be to put the scholarship we are reading and a primary work in dialogue. Here you should identify and explain particular aspects of the scholarship (key concepts; implications; problems) and put it in dialogue with the primary work. Do not think of one explaining the other (i.e. Junot Diaz’s novel exemplifies Foucault’s notion of discourse); instead, allow the texts to argue, contest, debate, and inform each other. Again, with these blog posts, my hope is that you will choose a primary work that you may be working on for some other graduate seminar. By writing on or about this primary work, the idea is that you will be doing work that is ultimately helpful for you to do the writing assignment in your other graduate seminar.
You will also be asked to comment on your fellow students’ blog posts. Think of the blog comments as a complement to the collaborative work we will do in our class discussion. Of course, you are free to comment on more than two posts, but please do comment when indicated below on at least two posts of your choice each week.
*The questions attached to these blog post descriptions are not meant to be ones that you answer in test-like fashion. They are meant more as broad prompts to get you thinking in a direction for your own thoughts. All blog posts (except for the first!) should be posted on the Friday before our seminar meets:
Week One: This is the only blog post that is due after our class meeting. Please post by Wednesday, September 28th a blog post engaging one or more of the week one readings on the topic: what does it mean to close-read? What can close-reading do that distant reading does not do and vice-versa?
Week Two: Please post by Friday, September 30th a blog post engaging one or more of the week two readings that discusses the methods and implications of “surface reading” and “symptomatic reading.” What is the difference? What are the methods of each and what are the implications of doing one or the other? Also make TWO comments on other students’ blog posts.
Week Three: Please post by Friday, October 7th a blog post engaging one or more of the week three essays on the relationship between reading and politics. Describe some of the different approaches being taken - one via “pure literary terms” and another via a “new historicism” and another via “comparativism” - all with the goal of bringing literature into relation with politics, ethics, or the “real.”
Week Four: Please post by Friday, October 14th. Write a blog post engaging the topic of form and formalism. One suggestion would be to do a close reading of how the language of form gets used in one of the readings. What is the relationship between form and some other of the key terms used by these writers (essay; strategic; symmetry; aesthetic)? Also make TWO comments on other students’ blog posts.
Week Five: Please post by Friday, October 21st. COLLABORATIVE POST! With a partner (or two), write a blog response engaging one or more of the week four readings on how they address the knowledge practices of historicism. How does form engage the question of historicism and vice-versa?
Week Six: Please post by Friday, October 28th. Choose one article, essay or chapter that you are reading for any one of your graduate seminars and outline it, giving both the structure of how its argument is presented and the function of each paragraph/section.
Week Seven: Please post by Nov 4th. COLLABORATIVE POST! With a partner (or two), write a post that thinks through what discourse is and/or the role of discourse within the specific contexts thatt the author talks about (style for Bakhtin; race for Spillers; torture and pain for Scott; the production of knowledge in anthropology for Derrida).
Week Eight: Please post by Nov 11th. Either explicate an idea, term, or argument from any of the readings from week eight or prior weeks and put it into conversation with your primary work. Make use of close reading/analysis of your primary texts. Or discuss how the essays use different categories in addition to or substituting for “subject” in order to explicate questions of race, gender, diaspora, or colonial difference.
Week Nine: Please post by Nov 18th. Either Explicate an idea, term, or argument from any of the readings from week nine or prior weeks and put it into conversation with your primary work. Make use of close reading/analysis of your primary texts. Or discuss one or more of the essays on their own terms.
Week Ten: Please post by Nov 28th. Choose one article we are reading for today and explicate its definition of ONE example of a given discipline or institution. How does or does not your primary text relate to such a discipline or institution – even better, how might it resist it?
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