Tue. 10/17 Albert Camus, The Rebel, selections (.pdf).
What it says/what it does
An effective way of understanding the structural function in a text is to describe what each paragraph says and does. A ‘what it says’ statement is a summary of the paragraph’s content––the paragraph’s stated or implied topic sentence. A ‘what it does’ statement describes the paragraph’s purpose or function within the essay: for example, ‘Provides evidence for the author’s first main reason,’ ‘Summarizes an opposing view,’ ‘Provides statistical data to support a point,’ or ‘Uses an analogy to clarify the idea in the previous paragraph.’ Using this strategy, produce a reverse-outline of Camus’s “Introduction” to The Rebel.
Thurs. 10/19 Project Proposals (3-minute presentation that introduces the class to research)
Abstract: (required meeting with me during office hours to discuss your intended research)
See Timothy Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing about Film, 9th edition, for additional writing strategies and conventions.
“A rhetorician,” writes Kenneth Burke, “is like one voice in a dialogue. Put several such voices together, with each voicing its own special assertion, let them act upon one another in co-operative competition, and you get a dialectic that, properly developed, can lead to views transcending the limitations of each” (“Rhetoric—Old and New”). To achieve such transcendence, one must (in the words of Joseph Harris), “respond to the work of others in a way that is both generous and assertive” (1). Despite the fact that an abstract is quite brief, about 250 words, it must do almost as much work as the multi-page article that follows it. There are a number of required elements to any successful abstract which must be stylistically combined to create an engaging piece of prose for your intended audience (in this case, an anthology editor). This means providing a bit of background information––what is the ‘gap’ in current Star Wars scholarship that you hope to fill? What is your original argument? What approach will you take in your textual analysis? And what are the implications of your research?