Category Archives: Assignment

Class 11.2

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The Dance of Courtly Graces

In Humanities this week you’ve read Book 1 and part of Book 4 from Castiglione’s Courtier. For class today I want to focus on passages that strike you as significant for thinking about Shakespeare’s portrait of court life in Hamlet. Go back through your Humanities reading, and then transcribe a short but significant passage from Castiglione into the comment box below. Then reply to that comment with a 2-¶ writeup. Use the first ¶ to discuss what Castiglione is arguing in that passage, perhaps clarifying its meaning by reference to the issues and concerns in the larger context of that section of the book. Use the second ¶ to discuss how this passage is relevant for Shakespeare’s play.

People not enrolled in Humanities have my permission to do this assignment focusing on JUST the passages I’ve excerpted from Castiglione on the Unit 4 Assignment Page—look down in the comments. But before doing the assignment, see if you can get someone who IS in Coffman Humanities to give you a brief run-down on what Castiglione is up to in The Book of the Courtier.

Finally, as an aid for anyone who doesn’t have the Humanities reader, I’ve scanned a large portion of The Courtier and uploaded it to the CourseDocs site. Note that my upload includes a brief excerpt from Book 2 that is NOT in the Humanities reader. We will discuss this decision in class.

Class 11.1

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Hamlet Takes the Final Exam

Read Hamlet, Acts 4.5-5 (the rest of Act 4 and all of Act 5). (Available online here and here, as well as in the Humanities course book.)

As you read, watch for moments that stand in sharp contrast with earlier events in the play. Highlight your chosen passage and paste it into a comment below. Then reply to that comment with a 2-¶ deepening analysis of your quoted passage. Use the first paragraph to outline the speaker’s rhetorical intent, and the second ¶ to call attention to how the speaker’s words stand in contrast with words or events from earlier in the play. Feel free to briefly quote an earlier line or two in developing this analysis. Be sure to explain what you think the contrast suggests—has a character changed? Has the situation changed?

As you consider what passage to quote for this assignment, take note of what other students have already covered, and try to focus on a passage that no one else has covered. Or, if someone has covered it but you have a different take on the passage, reply to their passage with your (different) account.

Class 10.2

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Looking Inward

Read Hamlet, Acts 3-4.4 (all of Act 3 and Act 4 up through Scene 4). (Available online here and here, as well as in the Humanities course book.) As you read, watch for moments where a character’s words unwittingly reveal something about his or her inward state of mind. Highlight your chosen passage (up to 30 lines long) and paste it into a comment below. Then reply to that comment with a 2-¶ deepening analysis of your quoted passage. Use the first paragraph to outline the speaker’s intent, and the second ¶ to call attention to an insight about the underlying significance of those words.

As you consider what passage to quote for this assignment, take note of what other students have already covered. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s interactions with Hamlet were entirely neglected from our discussion of Act 2 in our last class, so I’d love to see them get some coverage, even if it means drawing from Act 2 for today’s assignment. I’m also eager to see you draw on Hamlet’s scene with his mother after putting on the play, his musing on the tears shed by actors, his thoughts on the furious march of Fortinbras, and his failure to murder the praying Claudius.

For this assignment, it’s even more important that you pick a passage where there’s something interesting going on: a bad fit between what the character trying to argue and what he or she actually believes, or an ironic gap between what the speaker believes and what is actually happening. Passages where characters speak in paradoxes make good leads for the upcoming essay.

Lecture 10

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Danish Prince 101

Read Hamlet, Acts 1-2. (Available online here and here, as well as in the Humanities course book.) As you read, watch for moments where a character speaks with intent to persuade. Highlight a short passage (1-5 lines lone) and paste it into a comment below. Then reply to that comment with a brief, ¶-length discussion of what’s striking in your quoted passage. What’s the speaker’s intent? How does the speaker marshal arguments, evidence, authorities in support of that aim?

As you consider what passage to quote for this assignment, take note of what other students have already covered. While I want to get some coverage of the great ghost scene in Act 1 (not to mention the meeting of the court and the leave-taking of Laertes from his father Polonius), I don’t want you to neglect Act 2, with Hamlet’s feigned madness, his feigning friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the troop of players who arrive at the very end of that act.

But more important is that you pick a passage where there’s something interesting going on: something worthy of note in the way that characters approach the task of persuasion, something paradoxical or otherwise interesting as focus for the upcoming essay. It’s too early to commit—you’re still dating, playing the field as it were—but no sense playing the game without an eye to the future, right?

Class 10.1

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Essay Due

Turn in your essay (1) as an uploaded file in the comments and (2) by adding a new page to your ePortfolio. The full essay isn’t due until midnight, but you must prep a short passage from your essay in time to present it during today’s class. If you don’t have your full essay ready in time for class, add the essay later as a “reply” to the comment where you posted the excerpt.

Essay File Upload
  1. Please use a standard Word format for your essay (.doc or .docx) and rename the file file prior to uploading, using your first and last names: For example, “Brody Brown.docx”
  2. Choose your favorite passage from the essay and paste it into a comment. We’ll be reading these in class, so take time to rehearse!
  3. Use the upload file option to include your essay file in your comment—or add a second comment that includes your essay file as a reply to your first comment.
ePortfolio upkeep
  1. Add a new page to the Rhetoric section of your ePortfolio with the title, “Unit Three: the Rhetoric of Photographs.”
  2. Paste your essay into a Rich Text module on this new page.
  3. You might want to include your photo along with your essay—either as media inserted in the Rich Text module OR as a separate Media module.

Class 9.2

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The Situation Your Essay Addresses

Two of the authors we’ve read for this unit, Charles Cunningham and James Curtis, open with a vivid account of the situation—a historical event and/or photograph—that their essay addresses. This brief narrative works to draw the reader in, and at the same time it sets up a core issue for debate. Curtis tells the story of Lange’s rainy afternoon photo session to signal his interest in the concrete circumstances that led to the creation of “Migrant Mother,” thereby setting up an implicit challenge to those who regard that image as a “timeless and universal symbol” divorced from the political and economic circumstances that led to its creation. For his part, Cunningham tells the story of how Life Magazine editors cropped another of Lange’s photographs, signaling his interest in how media coverage of poverty promoted an ideal of gritty striving, and providing him with a basis for challenging another scholar’s assessment of the same event:

On the last page of a series of articles in its June 21, 1937 issue on the so-called “DustBowl,”Life Magazine ran a full-page, head-and-shoulders photograph of a grizzled man above the caption “Dust Bowl Farmer is New Pioneer”. The farmer, a man who appears to be in his fifties, peers into the camera, a grim, determined look on his weathered face,his thin-lipped mouth a downward crescent that mirrors the curve of his whiskery chin. Credited only to the Resettlement Administration, the precursor to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the image was in fact cropped from a photograph made by Dorothea Lange in California earlier that year. Lange’s original photograph showed three men—Life’s “pioneer,” flanked by two others with their heads lowered, perhaps in worry or discouragement. Assigned to take pictures depicting the need for more government-funded migrant camps in the region, Lange had titled the photograph: “Ex-tenant farmer on relief grant in the Imperial Valley, California.”

Remarking on Life’s manipulation of the meaning of Lange’s photograph, Lawrence Levine argues that it points to an ambivalence in Depression culture itself between a desire to witness both the “despair” and the “dignity” of those impoverished by the economic crisis (33-37). While Levine may be right about ambivalence in the culture, he fails to register what it meant that Life manipulated the photo and its caption so as to rid it of ambiguity. Life’s version of the image excises the insecurity and despair in favor of a paean to the “pioneer” spirit, a move that suggests that despair was not part of the experience of poverty.

Cunningham’s intro goes on for several more ¶s (as is appropriate in a 20-30 page essay), but you can already see how his account of Life Magazine’s decision to crop Lange’s photo serves to engage the reader in thinking about the core issue of his essay (how representations of the poor encode assumptions about what makes some poor people deserving of help, and others undeserving). And you can see how, in the second ¶, Cunningham opens with a summary of another scholar, whose view of the situation serves Cunningham as Counter-Thesis (a species of Preliminary Understanding): a backdrop against which Cunningham asserts his thesis claim.

Write a 2-¶ introduction for your essay. Use the first ¶ to give a vivid account of either your photograph or the circumstances of its creation. Use the second ¶ to voice both a preliminary understanding and a thesis claim. Your account of the situation should, ideally, raise an implicit question about the photo: for example, if you stress the photograph’s impact on X, you are working to engage your reader’s interest in what makes the photo have that impact. That implicit question gets answered twice in the next ¶, first by the essay’s preliminary understanding and then by its thesis.

In writing ¶1, take note that the essay assignment limits your use of sources to the CourseDocs site, and to webpages directly linked from its pages. If you need more information on your photograph than is presently found on the CourseDocs site, make sure you let me know.

Paste your intro into the comment field below, taking care to add an extra return between your ¶s.

Lecture 9

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Photographs in Context, II

Reading Charles Cunningham, “To Watch the Faces of the Poor: Life Magazine and the Mythology of Rural Poverty in the Great Depression,” a 1999 article published in the Journal of Narrative Theory. In preparation for discussion, please respond in writing as follows:

  1. On pp 283-290, Cunningham explores the significance of the pioneer myth for the political debate over what should be done about farmers displaced by the Dust Bowl. Why, according to Cunningham, did mass media images of rural poverty primarily feature poor whites? How does Cunningham summarize the binary distinction he presents between two contrasting views of poor whites?
  2. On pp 290-293, Cunningham shifts to consider the place of African-Americans in the mythology of the American frontier. As you read this section, take another look at Marion Post Wolcott’s photograph, “Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint.” How might Cunningham’s account cause you to reconsider your understanding of the political message of this image?

Class 9.1

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One Photograph, Two Visions

MigrantMother-LangeLooking forward to the essay (due a week from this Wednesday), we need to start thinking about mission: What will your essay argue? What insight will serve as its raison d’être?

Start by sketching out your photograph’s known qualities. What details draw the viewer’s attention? How does the photograph persuade us, and what does it persuade us of? Type this up as a preliminary understanding, pasting that into a comment below.

Then reply to the comment you just created with a second ¶ that presents a deeper insight into the photo’s appeal.

For example, looking at Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” I might start by asserting:

Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” appeals to viewers’ sense of social justice by calling attention to the squalid living conditions of migrant farm laborers in California during the Great Depression. The photograph’s crisp focus renders the children’s ragged clothes in fine detail. Dirt smears the cheek of the sleeping infant, while two other children huddle around their mother—as if for warmth, or to hide their faces in shame. The mother looks into the far distance, and in her worried gaze we read the anxieties of a life lived under a canvas tarp by the roadside.

You’ll note how this preliminary account gets a lot right. It sums up what a thoughtful commentator might say about the photo at first glance, focusing on surface details that have a big impact on the viewer: the ragged clothing, the children’s huddled posture, the canvas tarp, the mother’s anxious expression. But it also leaves out one key aspect: the woman’s beauty, a quality also notable in the baby’s cheeks and the children’s hair. That incongruity, seemingly inconsistent with the preliminary account, creates an opening for a thesis-level understanding:

Yet, in the midst of this squalor, beauty shines through. The mother’s finely chiseled features, the infant’s plump cheeks, the other children’s gold-flecked tousled hair all appeal on an aesthetic level, encouraging the viewer to linger rather than turn away in disgust, as we might from a less lovely image of poverty. The secret to the success of Lange’s image is not its squalor—a common enough quality in FSA photography—but its beauty.

In prep for class Use the comment box to post a preliminary account of your photograph. Then post a deeper understanding as a reply to the comment you just created (look for the “Reply” link at the lower left corner of your first comment).

Class 8.2

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Riffing on a Secondary Source

Sontag’s essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” is filled with big claims about photographs and the roles they play in society. Her writing is evocative but complex, so it requires active and attentive reading to appreciate its insights.

The following exercise aims to help you deepen your understanding of a passage by translating her ideas into your own words and fleshing her argument out with an example of your own choosing.

  1. Choose one of Sontag’s thought-provoking but dense and difficult sentences (or a short passage)—a passage that you find intriguing but perhaps a bit puzzling, ideally a passage with ideas that could potentially be useful to you in your own analysis of a photo. Type out the original sentence, using quotation marks to signal that these are her words, not yours.
  2. Paraphrase the sentence by finding synonyms for all of the key terms. Don’t just go for the gist of the passage (i.e. don’t try to summarize or condense) but instead strive to create a parallel version of Sontag’s original sentence.
  3. Repeat this exercise, using a different set of synonyms and reversing the sentence order as much as possible. (This is more difficult, but it will often result in a cleaner paraphrase.)
  4. Repeat the exercise, but this time simplifying and condensing her idea in summary form. You might head this version up with “In short, …”
  5. Think of a photograph or personal experience that exemplifies Sontag’s point. In a few sentences, describe the photo or experience, making clear how it illustrates Sontag’s argument.
  6. Read back through your three paraphrases, noting which version best conveys Sontag’s meaning. Clarity a plus, simplicity a plus (so long as it doesn’t over-simplify—or so long as the simple version is just the starting point for a fuller explanation).
  7. Write a stand-alone paragraph that introduces Sontag’s idea and explains it by reference to the example you chose in step (5) above. Feel free to incorporate bits from everything you’ve just written. You may use all three of your paraphrases, or just one—experiment and see what works best for you.

Paste the finished ¶ from step (7) into the comment box below. Then, after posting, post the relevant quotation from Sontag as a “Reply” to your comment.

This exercise is adapted from Writing Analytically, by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen.