Week 4 intro

Gentles,

Another week is down, and we've turned the corner, with less than two weeks remaining in the class. In this email I'll preview the week ahead, and let you know about your first papers.

Work this week

This coming week is a light one. We'll begin on Monday with an introduction to Existentialism, an important philosophical movement in the 20th century that called into question some of the central philosophical concerns of the Western world, turning them upside down. Tuesday and Wednesday give you two short stories that illustrate some of the central tenets of Existentialism. Borowski presents the problem of creating meaning for yourself within the context of the Holocaust, and Marquez tells a story imbued with magical realism that explores what you could do if you had no regard for what society thought of you. Thursday brings another short story that, although it affirms the centrality of religion in some peoples' lives, comes from extending Existential thought to its logical conclusions. Mahfouz knows that if we're free to choose what gives our life meaning, we can choose to believe in something that we can never know is true or not. On Friday we move to a couple of poems by Derek Walcott, who both fights for and celebrates the character and culture of indigenous peoples, with his particular works focused on the Caribbean.

You've got just one writing assignment due this week, your primary post to the third discussion forum.

All of this means that next week, the final week of the class, will be a bit more packed, with your secondary discussion posts, your second paper, and your second exam for the class, all rolled into just four days. So you might want to get a jump on that paper this week.

Your first and second papers

I am trying hard to get your papers back to you on Monday or Tuesday. I ended up writing far more on them than I had hoped, so it's taking me a long time. I'll make four general comments on your first papers, which I'll couch in terms of advice for your second papers:

1)
In your second paper, please make sure you understand the prompt. Several of you did not read the prompt closely enough for your first paper, specifically the note under the list of opposing cultural forces. Let me reiterate it here:

NOTE: The list above is made up of pairs of opposites. Each pair IS NOT a cultural value. Rather, what a particular culture values falls somewhere along the line connecting those opposites. So, for instance, a culture could demonstrate gender equality, but if it did so, it would not also enforce rigid gender roles.

So being and doing is not a cultural value. Nor is individualism and collectivism, or any of the other pairs on the list.

If you're going to discuss those forces listed in the prompt in your second paper, make sure you choose just one from each pair, not both.

2)
If you're going to choose another cultural value you see in the text you're writing on, make sure you say what that value is, not just what you see in the text. For instance, Voltaire saw that Europeans of his time were trying to live together in a rational way (it was the Enlightenment, so that makes sense), but they also tried to reconcile that idea of living rationally with their old religious beliefs, which led to hypocrisy, abuse, and institutional power structures that existed only to maintain their own power.

So you could say that one of the values of European culture in the Enlightenment was the continuation of traditions, whether they made sense or not. 

If those traditions seemed to contradict what people could actually know about the world, they just ignored those inconsistencies in order to keep their traditional religious world view. There are several examples of this in Candide (the street preacher, the death of Martin, the political intrigues of the Jesuits, etc.).

3)
For your second paper, make sure you select examples from the text that actually address the values you want to discuss. Many of you had little or no connections between the plot points you presented in your first papers and the values that you were supposed to be writing about.

4)
This is a college-level English class. You should have minimal errors in grammar, mechanics, and usage. Many of you exhibited a substantial number of writing errors in your first papers. The only way to fix those is to give yourself enough time to revise, edit, and proofread your papers before you turn them in. I've been teaching English at the college level since 1981, so I know a first draft when I see one. 

Ideally, you want to present an argument that is airtight, uses examples from the text to prove its points, and will convince a reader to agree with you. But when I'm reading your papers, every time I have to stop and wonder what you really mean in a particular sentence, or try to figure out how a passage from the text is connected to what you say you're talking about, you're taking me away from your argument. If your writing isn't clear enough for a reader to understand what you're trying to say, you've got little hope of convincing that reader that your argument makes sense.

You're in college; that means you're smart enough to understand how the language, and writing, works. You should know how to write in complete sentences, know the difference between to, two, and too, and know that prepositions aren't just interchangeable with each other. So when I see these errors I think you're just rushed, and just haven't given the assignment the time you need to succeed in it.
 
 
 OK, enough preaching about writing. I'll be in touch again soon.
 
 Dr. P