Prompt:  Explore your creative side! Practice modeling one of our writers. Modeling is a powerful tool for developing your own distinctive voice, as well as the best way to learn specific writing techniques (e.g. a particular sentence structure or rhythm you admire, tricks with diction, figurative language, or form, etc). 

This is your opportunity to learn from a master craftsman!  Model your writing style, imagery, themes and tone on one of the writers we’ve read so far. As always, decide whether you want to stretch your analytical or creative voice, or something in between, and choose the author to model yourself after accordingly (our theorists and critics are fair game). 

After carefully reading your model author and analyzing their choices, create a brief scene in essay, fiction, or poetry form. For your subject matter, pursue what has interested you most in our readings so far.

Whatever author you choose, to get credit for this assignment you MUST take the modeling requirement seriously.  When we read your post, we should know just from your language (syntax, diction, etc.) or form which writer you’re channeling.  Do NOT tell us, though—part of the fun will be guessing, via comments and in class, the source of each short piece.

Target audience: your classmates

No restrictions on word limit this week!

This week, your post will serve as prewriting for Essay 2, asking you to practice argumentation by applying a critical perspective to a new text.  Here’s the prompt:

Do the critical approaches we’ve studied so far provide insight into contemporary culture as well as literary texts?

And here are the specifics:
1) In your post, share a very brief, contemporary text:  an image, short film clip, newspaper headline, notice of an event, etcetera. Be sure to choose a text that can be analyzed from one or more of the critical approaches we’ve discussed so far.

2) Add a concise (200 word max) analysis of the text.  Your analysis must use close reading skills (e.g. focus very specifically on your text); it must also draw explicitly on the insights of one of the critical perspectives we’ve studied so far this semester. At the end of your analysis, comment on what this perspective allowed you to see–or, conversely, what it prevented you from discussing.

3) Take the prompt seriously (e.g. don’t choose an advertisement that does not include images of gender, apply a feminist film studies perspective, and then conclude that “the gaze” is a useless critical concept). But also feel free to analyze the weaknesses of the critical method you chose.
Possible perspectives:
Humanist
Formalist (close reading of text only)
Structuralist  (e.g. apply Propp to identify the plot moves that underly anime, etc.)
Feminist, gender, and queer studies
Psychoanalysis

Open week again, with a twist: this time, find and post to your blog any artwork inspired by fairy tales (you may interpret “artwork” as loosely as you like: drawing, painting, photograph, song, film clip . . . anything you consider artistic. You are also very welcome to create and post your own art).

Add your own brief (300 word max) commentary on the piece you chose.  Frame your comments by connecting this art to our course in some way: texts, critical perspectives, discussions, whatever catches your imagination. The body of the post can focus on whatever you like: analysis of the art, synthesis of intriguing context, your personal interpretation of the piece, your reason for choosing it . . . anything at all.

Somewhere in your post, practice citation skills by giving the necessary information on the artwork (artist, medium, date, and citation/source for the image).

Goals:

• Practice adding media to a WordPress post.
• Practice citation of non-textual sources.
• Be creative and have fun!