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ASSIGNMENTS.
I’ve designed the writing assignments to help you develop the writing and analytical skills and practices in a form that will make it easier to write.
I want you think of your assignments as blog posts, where you write and post your reflections on the readings. You don’t have to post them (although I think that would be great), and you don’t have to have a blog, but you get to imagine a blog—make up its name, its readers, and its focus (although it should have to do with literature and race/ethnicity. If you can’t come up with the name/focus, you can call it, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Literature and Ethnic America.” You will write to your (imagined) subscribers, talking about the assigned texts in relation to a question or issue raised in the texts. You won’t talk about the class, just begin by saying something like, “Today, I’m going to talk about Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and then jump in. Your post includes two parts. In the first, you describe your blog: What is the purpose of your blog? What is it called? How many readers does it have? Who are they? For your first post, you get to set up the scenario. You make up the details. You will make up those details. You will also describe the purpose or focus of the blog; you can take this in whatever direction you want. The second part will be your post. The post needs to respond to the prompt, and engage with the text or texts. By engage, I mean I want you talk about a specific passage—and your response to it,
your experience. You will identify a passage, and then say something about it; talk about the words. Your job is to contribute to your reader’s understanding of the work, add something that isn’t there (even if that something is your enthusiasm for what the work is doing). This means you can’t just repeat or summarize. You should do two things: 1) convince your blog’s readers of something (even if it’s just that you have something interesting to say); 2) convince me that you’ve read the work, thought about it, and have something interesting to say about it and the topic.
Context for what Post 3 is about
Post 3: Percival Everett’s Erasure was written in 2001, but it’s recently been getting a lot ofattention because of Cord Jefferson’s adaptation, American Fiction. When a book gets adapted toa film, it means a bunch of people—the director, the producers, the studio executives, the actors,the screenwriters—think the book is relevant enough to today that people want to see it. What does Erasure have to say about today?
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Here is a link to the book: https://bookreadfree.com/232376/5753233.amp
