Topic Brainstorm - Final Project
Choose one short story or novel excerpt. Write a piece in which you explore the following:
- In what ways could this story be considered an artifact of history?
- What does this story teach us about history?
- How does a story teach us about a time or place differently than a history book?
Think about a theme you see running through your life (failure is the best lesson, love is eternal, etc). Choose a reading that you think also discusses this theme (even if it reaches different conclusions about it). Explore connections between how the theme plays out in your life, and how the theme gets played out in the reading.
This option, which requires us to relate a theme of a reading to our own life has plenty of potential. I'd argue, that relating a literary piece to your life brings about an easy assess point into personal complexity. This opening allows for a deeper analysis into your own consciousness as well as the mind state of the author. All of these project options allow for a point of greater understanding and growth, but this option allows an overt reason for reflection and potential personal growth. Exploring connected themes of literature and personal experience honestly sounds like a blast and is certainly an option I'm eyeing.
You’ve been appointed the student member of a college committee to revise the core curriculum. The committee has decided to require that all students enrolled at LMC must take this course, and you have been asked to nominate 4 to 5 fiction selections (from the selections we have read this semester) that will be required reading for the course. You are, in other words, creating the anthology.
Think carefully about what constitutes the kind of literature that college students should be reading. Then, nominate the 4 to 5 selections from among those we have read this semester. Your essay should have a clear central idea which suggests how you have made your choices. Your paragraphs should open with topic sentences giving the title and author and genre of each of your selections, and these paragraphs should be developed with your specific justification of each of your choices (why you have chosen these selections). You may take into account the following issues (use whichever ones help you):
- To what extent will your choices be made on aesthetic grounds? What are your criteria for excellence in fiction? Have you considered how your own cultural background and past reading affect what you consider aesthetic grounds?
- Will your choices span centuries? Or will you choose only contemporary fiction from the last 40 or 50 years? What will you expect the stories to demonstrate about the times in which they are written?
- Will your choices represent a range of writers (male and female, black, white, Hispanic, Native American, straight, gay, American, British, Russian, French, Irish, Greek, Norwegian, and so forth)? Why or why not?
- Are themes or thematic connections important to you? Should all selections center around a single thematic construct, such as “the move from innocence to experience”?
- Are social issues important to you? Should the fiction selections reflect a variety of social issues: racism, homosexuality, poverty, sexism, alcoholism, and so forth?
- Is the list you’ve been given sufficient? Are there choices you’d like to make that aren’t included on our syllabus?
The final option can be viewed as the most daunting, yet also the most exciting. As a final project, it may be the perfect way to cap off the semester and all of the readings. As an individual who would like to teach at one point, hypothetically creating the curriculum of reading for a semester sounds awesome. I'd weigh all of the options and aim for a diverse palette. Obviously, going for diversity can sound pretty vague, but honing on shifting perspective throughout the centuries regarding women, race, sexual preference etc would be a focus. This prompt requires finite attention that would make us weigh every decision and their purpose. This option is a front runner, and I feel like I can bring a wide spectrum when trying to encompass such a variety of topics into a singular set of 5 readings.
Hey Ceasar,
ReplyDeleteThis post was really good I appreciate how you copied and pasted the topics first of all before I get into the other parts of this brainstorm that are more interesting. In doing that you made reading this very clear which is a necessity in my eyes as a reader because I don't want to read anything not organized or that makes sense and your brainstorm was neither and actually was very interesting in the way you made the brainstorming general so you could use it with basically any of the readings you have chosen by now. Although that just was done very well and I know that the action plan next for you must be a breeze because you have skeleton of what your whole project could about in you're early stages of a brainstorm. So I just admire how you made future work with this project easier just because you made a great effort in your brainstorm.
Hi Ceasar! First off, you have a really well thought out and organized set of ideas for your brainstorm. I really like how you clearly organized these topic choices because it made it easier to read and understand. On your first topic choice, I completely agree that historical context is key for every reading. I think this would be a good topic choice to do especially because of how important it is. On your second choice, I completely agree that relating to your life is an easy way to access a deeper analysis into yours and the author's mind and consciousness. This would be a really good topic to choose because of what you said. On your third choice, I think it would be a really good topic to choose especially because you want to teach at one point and find it the most exciting. Overall, you have a good idea of what you want to do and any topic you choose out of these would be a good one.
ReplyDeleteHey Ceasar. I'm impressed by the fact that you're considering the project topic about being appointed a student member of the college committee. Daunting indeed. If you do end up tackling that monster of a prompt I'm definitely going to be reading your project once it's done. That prompt does more than enough to structure your project for you, so meeting the page length shouldn't be a problem. The first and second options are less ambitious, but I'm almost certain they would be less stressful. The first project seems like something you could manage judging from your interest in it and your observations of everyone else's analyses. The second project option is something I wanted to do but I don't really know what experiences from my own life I would tie into the project. If you have a good as to what experiences from your life you could relate to one of the stories we've read throughout the semester, then I think this project idea would be both easy and fun.
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