Digital Commons Network^™

Revising Your Rough Draft, Craig Williamson, Raima Evan

Teaching & Learning Commons Digital Resources

This document provides a check-list for things one should keep in mind when revising and polishing a paper. It addresses fine-tuning the thesis, examining transitions between paragraphs, and commenting on textual evidence, among other topics.

Outlines And Rough Drafts: Arguments And Evidence, Craig Williamson, Raima Evan

Teaching & Learning Commons Digital Resources

This document provides an overview of the paper-writing process: reading and taking notes, developing an outline, shaping individual paragraphs, and crafting a conclusion.

Common Errors, Craig Williamson, Raima Evan

Teaching & Learning Commons Digital Resources

This document addresses common errors and provides examples of how one would correct them. Topics discussed include ambiguous language, clichés, crutch words,comma splices, and dangling modifiers, among others.

Manuscript Form, Craig Williamson, Raima Evan

Teaching & Learning Commons Digital Resources

This document discusses appropriate titles for papers, margins, double-spacing, and pagination, among other topics. It stresses the importance of proofreading and the use of citations to avoid plagiarism.

Thesis, Craig Williamson, Raima Evan

Teaching & Learning Commons Digital Resources

This document discusses what makes a good thesis. It stresses that a thesis must be specific, concise, and provocative.

Words Matter: Crafting And Critiquing Rhetorically Effective Styles (Engl 002w) Syllabus, Natalie Mera Ford

Aydelotte Curricular Grants

What does it mean to write an awkward or a clear sentence? Who determines what counts as appropriate or "good" writing, and how are such notions of standardized English currently being challenged? Can a scholarly voice be an authentic personal voice, too? In this course, we will examine the grammatical building blocks of written style while scrutinizing larger cultural concerns about the effectiveness of distinct styles. While recognizing famous tenets of style in creative writing, we will primarily focus on stylistic features of academic, civic, and professional discourse. We will learn grammatical terminology and apply it in analyzing and evaluating …

Structural Analysis And Assessment Of Scholarly Style, Natalie Mera Ford

Aydelotte Curricular Grants

Does academia encourage an effective academic writing style? Do writers across the disciplines communicate in ways that uphold the values and purposes of liberal arts education? Has the turn in higher ed and scholarship to more public-facing audiences affected how scholars try to reach readers? What stylistic adjustments or improvements would you like to see in the texts you read—and are asked to write—in college? This project asks you to delve into these questions, among others, in relation to a sample of scholarly writing of your choice. Your goal is to analyze and assess how grammatical structures, both in individual …

Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism And The University, Andy Hines

Staff Scholarship

This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in …

Othello And The Political Theology Of Jealousy, Eric B. Song

English Literature Faculty Works

This essay revisits Othello’s jealousy to detail the politico-theological significance of this dramatic affect. In the Hebrew Bible, jealousy maintains a covenant between God and a holy nation. When Pauline teaching defines marriage as an index of Christ’s love, this redefinition promises to replace exclusivity with a supposedly universal truth. Yet jealousy persists to reveal a clash between individual realities and corporate truths. Jealousy performs this by underscoring the fictive nature of the identification of a husband with Christ. Before The Winter’s Tale relates the problems of jealousy to a hereditary monarchy, Othello locates them within a republic. The Venetian …

Diasporic Longings, Bakirathi Mani

English Literature Faculty Works

Using diaspora as a framework for reading Asian American literature expands the geographical and temporal contours of what it means to be Asian American. Although late-twentieth-century US popular culture was marked by multicultural ideologies of American citizenship, “diaspora” captures another way of thinking about Asian Americans: as immigrants who are subject to multiple projects of nationalism, and who embody diverse forms of citizenship. Whereas writers like Bharati Mukherjee reproduce dominant ideologies of US exceptionalism and multicultural citizenship, for writers such as Meena Alexander, the production of diasporic locality ripples across generations, as she ties together South Asia with North America, …

African American Celebrity Auto/Biographies, Anthony S. Foy

English Literature Faculty Works

Anthony Foy’s chapter asks how do we approach the overdetermined narrative of the African American celebrity as a modern variant of African American autobiography, rather than simply dismissing it for its lack or artistry, activism, or authenticity? Foy observes that (1) the Black celebrity narrative recounts the emergence, circulation, reception, and transformation of the star’s image while also registering the synedcochic function of the star’s racialized body; (2) it features the sites, activities, practices, and products of consumer culture in order to ratify the star’s status as exemplary consumer and alluring commodity; and (3) it commodifies authenticity by promising to …

Contending Discourses Of Black Autobiography: Respectability, Authenticity, And Masculinity, Anthony S. Foy

English Literature Faculty Works

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced …

Slow Metadata, Rachel Sagner Buurma, J. Shaw

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Teaching Archive: A New History For Literary Study, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered …

Soul-Error, Philip M. Weinstein

English Literature Faculty Works

Freud, in his essay on The Uncanny, explores a spatial confusion: a state of mind in which one sees "out there" something palpably shaped from "in here." Freud's most striking vignette in the essay rehearses how, some years earlier, he found himself wandering through an unknown Italian village, looking for the train station. He perused his map, made the appropriate right and left turns--and found himself in the red-light district. Here, Weinstein returns repeatedly to the traffic that unpredictably occurs between us ("in here") and the world ("out there"). Because we are endowed with stunningly intricate minds, we move through …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad", Amelia Tomei , '19, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to college and university students. Learning Goals. Students will: understand how the narrator guides reader's interpretation of the story; understand how to read dialogue and how it contributes to characterization; explore the complexity of the themes present in the story and the characters Whitehead has created; understand how to annotate key references to things outside of the text and apply these back to the main text. Necessary Preparation: The teacher should have familiarized him or herself with Whitehead's The Underground Railroad before the first lesson. It is also important that the …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Keyan Shayegan , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to college and university students. After completing the lesson plan, students should have an enhanced understanding of the following learning goals: the similarities between different types of internal and external migration, and the effects migration has on individuals and their senses of identity; why nativism is so prevalent, the negative impact it has on humanity, and how it can be overcome by shared experiences between people; how authorities such as governments and mass media corporations use technology to deter immigration, via both force and influencing the public, in ways that dehumanize immigrants; how …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", Ruby Guerrero , '22, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this novel to high school grades 11-12, community college, and/or college and university students. This lesson is planned for three weeks and three times a week, but I recommend that teachers revise these plans as needed in order for the lesson to fit their class schedules. Learning Goals: students will be able to identify stereotypes of migrants and refuse to accept these as proper understandings of people; students will be able to reclaim their identities using the novel as a basis for this outcome; students will learn to identify the different types of narration, how …

Black Culture In A "Post-Soul" Era (Engl 068) Syllabus, Anthony S. Foy

Digital Humanities Curricular Development

Generations of African American writers, artists, and intellectuals have emerged since the 1960s to reconsider the meaning of Blackness in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements that preceded them. Supported by historical and critical studies, we examine how Black novelists, playwrights, and poets in the ‘post-soul’ era have dealt with a complex of shifting, but interconnected, concerns, including the imperatives of racial representation in a society increasingly driven by mass consumption and global media, the contentious discourses of sexual politics, and the polarization of classes within Black America. For this version of the course, the major …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Ralph Waldo Emerson’S “The Poet”, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan, including discussion questions, for teaching Emerson's essay "The Poet" (1844).

Victorianists And Their Reading, Rachel Sagner Buurma, L. Heffernan

English Literature Faculty Works

This chapter investigates how the most recent batch of new literary-critical interpretive methods takes inspiration from Victorian readers and reading. We consider the institutional context in which recent method debates have unfolded before turning to survey new methods, including distant reading, surface reading, curatorial reading, reparative reading, referential reading, literal reading, and affective reading. We show that these apparently very different interventions in literary scholarship’s method all have in common their attraction to the nineteenth century not just as an object of study but as an inspiration for method. And these nineteenth-century-inspired methods also seek to reconfigure the boundaries of …

"Black Panther:" Some Thoughts On Anti-Colonialism, Feminism, Xhosa, And Black Pixels In The Film (With An Aside On Ava Duvernay’S "A Wrinkle In Time"), Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Menippean Satire In The Digital Era: Gary Shteyngart’S "Super Sad True Love Story", Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Howard Weinbrot argues that Menippean satire tends to be produced in eras of "broken or fragile national, cultural, religious, political or generally intellectual values" (7). It protests cultural decadence and decline by incorporating contradiction into its form, using "at least two other genres, languages, cultures, or changes of voice to oppose a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy" (6). Although it may feature memorable characters, the Menippean mode primarily targets diseased and dangerous ideas or habits. It is encyclopedic in range and ambition, absorbing and parodying different discourses and genres while constructing a narrative via debates, fantasies, annotations (either …

Burning The Breadboard: A New Approach To "The Optimist’S Daughter", Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

This paper takes several angles of approach towards more deeply understanding central tensions in The Optimist’s Daughter. Goaded by Fay, the novel’s heroine struggles between her need to control and defend a past she feels is under attack and her intimation that her family’s life and values can’t truly be honored by such methods. The narrator also tells us that Laurel seeks to be “pardoned and freed” (OD 179)—but why, and from what? Welty’s text explicitly connects the possibility of pardon with Laurel forgiving her parents. How might we understand this tie between forgiving others and being pardoned oneself? Key …

Byron's Ambivalent Modernity: Touring And Forced Migration In "Don Juan", Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Epigraphs, Rachel Sagner Buurma

English Literature Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Hannah Cowley, "A Day In Turkey; Or, The Russian Slaves" (1791), Betsy Bolton

English Literature Faculty Works

Perhaps one of the most intriguing documents of women’s place in the theatre in the 1790s, Hannah Cowley’s A Day in Turkey uses Eastern despotism to explore women’s relation to the French Revolution and to the public sphere. A complex blend of proto-feminist critique, orientalist voyeurism, and Francophobic homophobia, Cowley manipulates the stock material of the late eighteenth-century theatre to generate a fantasy of feminine directorial power. In the play’s most remarkable scene, Cowley’s alter ego manipulates the political and sexual plots of the comedy from the isolation of the seraglio, thereby providing a model not only for women’s political …

Lesson Plan For Teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald's "An Alcoholic Case", Samantha Martin , '21, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A lesson plan for teaching this story to high school or college and university students. Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Samantha Martin, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2018.

Lesson Plan For Teaching Four Stories Featuring Multi/Mixed Identities, Sierra Sweeney , '21, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Sierra Sweeney, with feedback from Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2018.

Fiction as a genre is well known for its ability to discuss a wide range of topics in a way that is both entertaining and empathetic. But while fictional pieces, especially the short story, are famous for creating narratives that help readers understand experiences unlike their own and characters unlike themselves, I would argue that fiction can also serve as a medium of self- reflection. As someone who identifies as multi-ethnic …

Lesson Plan For Teaching Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", Lauren Hee Won Chung , '20, Peter Schmidt

English Literature Faculty Works

A teacher's aid for introducing this deservedly famous story to students, including teaching some basic principles of good reading and interpretation. With a special focus on high school teachers, but applicable to many kinds of classrooms, including community colleges, liberal arts colleges and universities, etc. Developed by a Swarthmore College student, Lauren Hee Won Chung, in consultation with Professor Peter Schmidt, as a final assignment in English 71D, "The Short Story in the U.S.," fall 2018.