Tag Archives: asynchronous

asynchronous activity for 11/5

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As usual, we will be async today and meet again on Monday with Jennifer Newman, where you’ll learn about finding sources for your research questions that you’ll generate prior to class.

Today, you’ll watch a 15 minute lecture on Rankine and choose one of three writing prompts (below). As usual, you’ll post your response to the blog.

Here’s a link to Dropbox:

Rankine-CITIZEN1+2.mp4

Shared with Dropbox

And for those who would like captions, here’s the same thing on YouTube:

Rankine CITIZEN1+2

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You have a choice of writing prompts this time. Please choose one of the following and respond in 500-1000 words on the blog. As always, make sure to include direct references to the text (quotation or paraphrase) and have a clear argument.
  1. Choose an image or two to read and talk about how still images and videos interact with the printed text. How does the image “illustrate” the text? How might the text be read, conversely, as a “caption” of the image? More broadly, why do you think Rankine puts such emphasis on the visual in a book that labels itself as a “lyric,” a mode usually associated with words and sounds only?
  2. Discuss Rankine’s use of grammatical person (i.e., the “I/we” of the first person, the “you” of the second, and the “he/she/they” of the third). Choose a passage from the text and give a “close reading” of Rankine’s use of pronouns: what’s unusual or unexpected about her use of “person”? Why does she use the pronouns she uses? Who or what seem to be the “antecedents” the pronoun/s point to?
  3. What links can you make with other texts from the course (and you may mention anything from Emerson, Hurston, and Fanon up to our readings of Ellison and Morrison)? Are there direct allusions to anything we read? Are there particular authors/moments that seem especially relevant to Rankine’s narrative?

Thursday’s assignment (asynchronous class day)

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For Thursday, you will read an article on Ellison’s novel, now that you’ve finished Invisible Man. Thus begins our real work of the semester, which is to go “under the hood” and figure out how criticism works. Here, we’ll read an excellent example of literary critical scholarship, one that chooses a very specific and “weird” angle on the text and applies a particular methodology to explore it.

In order to best analyze not just Blair’s argument, but the enterprise of literary criticism in general, we’re going to read the article together. We will do this via the hypothes.is annotation tool, a free and open tool (i.e., it costs nothing and it doesn’t profit from you in any way). Sign up via this link: log in if you have an account already; click the LOG IN link and then a) log in if you have an account or b) click SIGN UP if you don’t and follow the prompts:

Now you should be able to click the arrow on the upper right-hand corner of the Blair article page, pop out the sidebar with the hypothes.is tools, and log in:

From there, you can highlight text to create new annotations, make general comments using “page annotations,” and (most important) respond to others’ annotations. I say “most important” because I’ve posed questions and made comments throughout the article that I’d like you to respond to. Note that you will be part of an ENGL 252 private group, so your comments will be viewable only by members of the class.

I don’t have a set number of comments each student should make, but I do want to see evidence of every single student spending time with the article and my questions on it.

Questions? Feel free to ask me via email.