Wrap-up: Sitt Marie Rose and Beginning of Patchwork Girl
As we move into week 11, you should have turned in your paper proposals, have a good start on your research, and be working on outlining and drafting your critical papers. Friday, March 26th we worked set up peer groups-- if you missed this class and do not have a peer group, email the class list and see who is working in your area and ask to join an already established group.
Sometime before Wednesday, March 31st, I would like you to email the class list with your thesis statement and a brief description of the major points your paper will cover. If you do not have a thesis statement by Wednesday, email the list with a desperate cry for help.
- Be sure that you use a subject heading in your mail, like "Goblin Market folks" or "Patchwork Girl Papers." This is especially important as you must scan the mail list and read all of the posts from people working on the text you are working with. You do not have to read the posts about texts you are not working with.
- As you read the posts about paper topics in your area, comment on the ideas, on sources that you have that might be useful, on sources that you need, on supporting quotations from the text that might be helpful to the papers you are reading about. You should offer comments to everybody who mails the list about the text with which you are working. This is a useful prewriting exercise for you as well as important feedback for those whose idead you comment on; save your emails as you may find yourself using idead you develop in them in your papers.
Freewrite Assignments
I want you to use the freewrite for Sitt Marie Rose to help you get comfortable reading and discussing Patchwork Girl. To this end, pick a passage from Sitt Marie Rose that is especially difficult for you to understand. Cite a few lines from this passage at the beginning of the freewrite, and use your freewrite to think through what the passage might mean. For instance, we talked in Wednesday's class about what that complicated passage about love as a violence might mean-- Do something along these lines for your freewrite. Since Adnan's prose uses the condensed and highly imagistic language of poetry, we could easily write several paragraphs expanding the imagery and ideas in any one of her sentences.
I want you to use this freewrite exercise as a way of entering into discussion about Patchwork Girl-- the only way we can read Jackson's text is by taking a fragment and working out, paragraph by paragraph, link by link, what a section of text means and what its relationship to the rest of the text is.
Week 11-- Patchwork Girl
Come to class on Monday, March 29th, with notes and quotes from two or three sections of Patchwork Girl that most compel you. These could be fragments that confuse you, inspire you, move you to emotional extremes... whatever captures you. We will begin our work with Patchwork Girl by discussing how your excerpts are entry points to the narrative. From here, we will go on to consider how we "enter" a non-linear text, how we exit, i.e., "finish" or know that we are "done" with it, and what we can "do" with it. Think hard, feel deeply-- and come prepared to talk about your thinking and feeling!