Overview of Assigned Writing

In this course students will be practicing literary criticism from a variety of angles. One way is via blogging, here. And on this blog they will develop and post -- before moving into writing proper literary criticism -- a personal literary essay. After all, we need to find some interest and energy from within our personal experiences with the literary. The, about every other week, students will write literary criticism at increasing length and sophistication, starting with Literary Analysis I (a close reading); then Literary Analysis II (requiring a critical approach beyond formalism; then Literary Analysis III (requiring scholarly sources pertaining to the literary work(s) in question. All of that will lead up to the big one, their culmination assignment for the semester, an 8-10 page Research Paper worthy of presenting at an academic conference.