Final Presentation Report
Your final essay, like the previous “report on a difficult poem” assignment, should be based on your work for the group presentation, and has three elements. You can separate them with lines, or try to integrate; probably 1 should be the longest, then 2, then 3.
1. Analysis
You’ve had some experience now with writing detailed observations and analysis of texts, and I’ll expect these to play some role in your report. This report is also an opportunity to incorporate insights developed in class into a more organized form of argument, or to be more expansive about things you didn’t have the chance to talk about in the presentation. It is up to you how you balance between overview (“Dylan as an artist”) and close analysis of text (“the closing lines of OCD”); but think carefully about the most compelling mix, and make sure that your claims and observations about the specifics of the works you discuss are carefully linked to lines/moments that can serve as evidence and give some precision and focus to what you say. (Quote the text; reference video clips with minute:second; make sure to provide the particular AV material you’re referencing). Put the reading, question-asking, and synthesizing skills you developed to work on this material that you picked out.
2. So what?
This time, you don’t need to offer an account of the group’s process, although feel free to add any observations that occur in the context of talking about the material; what I’d like to ask instead is that you give a sense of why this group of works attracted your group’s attention, and merited the attention of the class. I’m not asking for a defense of aesthetic value (“these poems are as good as Shakespeare’s/ should be on the syllabus of every literature class/etc.”) but rather for your take on what we learn about when we learn about this work.
3. Your work.
You’ll have a chance in subject evaluations to rate the class and say (anonymously) what did and didn’t work—this feedback is almost always useful, and always read, at least by me. Here, though, let’s get celebratory: what would you give yourself credit for learning over the course of this semester? What was the thing you understood that you would be most excited to teach or pass on to someone else?
5–6 pp., 1500–1800 words.
