1. your critikal essays

Critical Essay (35 pts. or 35% of semester score) This will be an interpretive piece in which you develop your own thesis and then argue for that idea in a literary essay about 5-8 pages.

Your critical essay will be on one of the writers or works we’ve studied. It will be a rigorous, traditional literary essay which uses your choice of critical lens. It will allow you to develop an interesting and original thesis. It will require a little research into other critical work done on the writer in question. This will help to put your thesis and analysis in context, and allow for needed complexity.

2. your open prahjeks

Open Project (35 pts. or 35% of semester score) For this project you are free to explore contemporary writing by women in any medium and in any mode you choose, as long as your finished piece shows conscientious reflection on and detailed engagement with a course-related subject, and as long as it integrates some form of research or critical thinking. You can produce a research paper, do some imaginative writing, create an art work, write a memoir, or experiment with hybrid writing which combines all of the above. The choice is yours. Your individual assignment and the criteria for its evaluation will be established through one-on-one conversations with your instructor.

You are free in this assignment… to produce a text which challenges, bends, or otherwise experiments with the traditional essay form. I.e., develop an "essay" which forgoes or plays with traditional argument structure, which includes visual and audio elements (e.g., a hypertextual, new media web essay), which mixes the scholarly and the personal, or which is polyvocal and collaborative (written together with other class members).

"[W]omen may speak, but their voices are ventriloquated; therefore, women must invent a new language." — Brenda Daly, Authoring a Life Why are we doing this project? We are experimenting a bit with “écriture féminine”— or, at the least, an alternative brand of academic writing. This kind of writing may fuse or explore the intersections between the academic and the domestic, the intellectual and the affective, the public and the personal, the rational and the intuitive. Your journal writing is, to some extent, this kind of writing. For a little heady theorizing about the subject, see:

Drawing on your flash journals… and— why not? —THE FLOOD! for both your critical essay and your open project.

More tips on your open projects

Consider how your subject makes you FEEL. Consider how a literary work might be placed, physically, in an alien context and therefore require a different type of “reading.” Consider what physical, aural, visual, or electronic object might in some way best represent your thinking and feeling about the subject. Consider a response to your subject which doesn’t answer any questions. …or which proposes multiple theses. Consider a project which in some way invites your reader/viewer to see your subject in a new way. Consider a project which “responds in kind” to your subject; which speaks back to a literary work, for instance, in its own language. Consider what sources/resources might help you with your project as it evolves, and let your efforts be informed and enlarged by what others have said/done/written.

your project may come in a box blink require the reader or viewer to actually do something focus on a subject of your own choosing be a collaborative effort with one or more classmates surprise the bejeezus out of your instructor come with a set of unintelligible instructions translated from the Chinese ask to be loved change its mind pee wait, no, it probably shouldn’t actually pee be a simple, old-fashioned written document be a performance be a traditional literary essay be something that will look good in your capstone portfolio be as interesting as the subject it is responding to make your viewer/reader actually feel something

Your Project Must Show some amount of critical thought; that is, it must be informed by ideas, issues, problems, etc. raised in class and/or by other readers and critics. Include a bibliography. Reflect a minimum of 3 weeks of thought and work. Aim to be as interesting as the work or writer or idea it is responding to.

Your Project Will e evaluated for its complexity, insight, intellectual engagement… be evaluated for its complexity, insight, intellectual engagement… and its creativity, innovation, willingness to experiment. and its creativity, innovation, willingness to experiment.

Got it? —