MODULE 4 WEEKLY ASSESSMENT
Mamie Garvin Fields (1985). Lemon Swamp & Other Places. ISBN 0029105501
Digital copy can be located at https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/
General Requirements for Written Assignments
• All written work will be submitted via Safe Assignment/Assignment submission points available in the modules on Blackboard. Submit assignments as DOC or DOCX files.
• The assessment should be 1 full page, typed in 12-point font, Times New Roman, double-spaced, with 1” margins on all four sides. The top left-hand corner of the first page of every document (not the header and not subsequent pages) should include the student’s name, the assignment, and the date, all single-spaced. There should be two spaces between this introductory material and the start of the assignment. There should be no additional spaces between paragraphs (please change the default on your word processing program, if necessary). All work employing sources should employ MLA citation style (see the information on Blackboard for help). Work that does not conform to this standard or is short of the required page limit will have points deducted.
Prompt:
As noted before, in Lemon Swamp, there is a common impulse to view history, especially one’s personal history, as leading inexorably towards certain “key” moments. We saw this in Ben Robertson’s memoir – though possibly to a lesser degree, as he wrote in vignettes and was writing both a life and the history of a family in a particular place at a particular time. Mamie and Karen Fields, however, draw our attention to the ways in which the many moments of one’s life can be crafted into a single story, with a traditional beginning, middle, and end. And it would seem that, for the authors of Lemon Swamp, figuring out where the end comes was most important.
Now we want to consider a hypothetical concerning structure for Lemon Swamp. Karen Fields’ descriiption of why they chose to end the memoir at that certain point might make one wonder what the effect would have been of ending at a different point in the memoir. We have a particular argument being made by the memoir in its current form – as all written texts, even memoirs, do make arguments. What might have been the argument about the significance of Mamie’s experiences if the memoir were ended at an earlier point? Choose another point at which to end the memoir (and provide brief, necessary quotations and page numbers as support, cited properly both in-text and on the works cited page). What is the argument for choosing this point?
