Course Requirements

Informal Writing Since ENC 1102 is a writing class, we will ask you to write daily. This writing is informal, in the sense that it can take the form of journal entries. However, it does have to be serious: we will expect you to spend more than a few minutes on this writing, and we will expect that your writing shows that you are thinking critically about the subject matter. The primary audience for this writing is yourself: your daily responses should be a kind of conversation that you have with the material; they should give you the space to think through some of the issues raised in the novel and in your research. A secondary audience for the writing is the class: what you write will determine to a great extent what gets said in the class and will ultimately influence the experience of each member of the class. In that sense, your writing is definitely a collaborative effort: together we will look at our experiences with Jazz in order to enrich our understanding of the text and the Jazz age. You will be responsible for one (1) informal writing for each class period; they will be collected at the end of the term. Occasionally, specific topics will be supplied for you to address, but more often you will be left up to your own interests within the course topic. Formal Writing In addition to creating what goes on in class, your daily writing should also prepare you to write two formal essays. Ideally, these two formal essays should grow out of an insight or set of insights that you first recorded in your daily written responses. In the first essay, we will ask that you to bring this piece of literature into a “conversation” with another cultural “text.” In this essay, you will describe what Jazz does by comparing it to another text. This other text could be another piece of literature, a poem, a television show, a movie, a song that addresses the Jazz age. The possibilities are limitless. You will be required to compare these two texts by using the language we have developed for describing literature: for example, do these two texts employ similar narrative techniques, similar sets of themes, similar metaphors? Where do these texts differ? Where are they similar? This essay should be 5-7 typed pages in length and should be organized around a main idea (thesis). This main idea should be a claim that reflects your understanding of the common or different work that the two texts are doing. Your essay should offer specific evidence in the form of quotations from the novel and detailed descriptions of the other text to support this main claim. The audience for this essay will be your peers, though we encourage you to think of other possible audiences. In what forum might you consider publishing this sort of essay? This essay will be due on Thursday, May 27. In order to establish a background for this assignment, we will periodically bring in cultural “texts” (such as poems, movies, or music) for us to discuss. The second formal essay will be a collaborative writing project that will lead to the production of a class web site. The second essay will follow the format of the first, except that you will be working in small groups to decide what cultural text you will put into conversation with Jazz. Each group will be responsible for submitting a co-authored paper. This assignment is meant for you to work creatively with other class members in order to take full advantage of multimedia-based resources: the WWW, music, interchange transcripts, interviews, etc.—any texts that you can find to augment the subject matter. Since some of you may be experiencing the interface of literature and technology for the first time, it is often more dynamic and educational to work with your peers on such a project, for your peers will offer a social context in which you can talk about and work through the assignment. In short, you will learn from each other (with direction from us) how to negotiate research and writing via technology. This essay will be due on Thursday, June 10. In addition, your group will be responsible for presenting your project to the rest of class. In your presentation, you will discuss the process of your group’s research as well as your paper's subject matter. The last week of class will be devoted to showing off our projects and putting them together into a web site. We will circulate a presentation schedule at a later date. Class Participation Regular class attendance and active participation in classroom discussion and the class interchanges are required. Some assignments will occasionally count for participation: peer editing, the viewing of a film, and like activities. Additional assistance can be obtained from the instructors during office hours or by appointment. Various forms of electronic discourse will be utilized by the class. Participation in the class chat, MUD and MOO meetings, and Daedelus interchanges will be required. Specific assignments dealing with each of these activities will be prompted by the instructors, usually in class.

© 1999 by Gerald R. Lucas Made with Macintosh 16 May 1999 The Jazz Age | Home | Teaching | Links | Literature | Projects | Info