Author Archives: Paul Fess

Newsletter Week 11

Hi all, 

As I was grading the last blog post assignment, I noticed many of you are behind in the work for Benito Cereno. This has been a trying semester, and it has likely gotten more challenging for you as the coronavirus numbers creep up and New York has faced and continues to face more cancelations and closures, most notably the closure of public schools.

You can finish the course despite these challenges, and as we enter the end of the semester, I want to make the workload lighter to help you do this. 

In the final weeks of the semester, I would like you to focus on three areas:

  1. Finishing any incomplete work.
  2. Revising one of your papers (either the one on poetry or the one on Benito Cereno) for a better grade.
  3. Writing the final paper. This assignment has been drastically shortened (to 500 words) and gives you the choice between writing about A Raisin in the Sun or reflecting on the annotations you’ve already done for the poems and Benito Cereno. This means that if you are behind and struggling to begin A Raisin in the Sun you do not have to read it. It also means you don’t have to do blog post #7. If you do that assignment it will be factored into your grade as bonus points. 

Finally, I would like to schedule a meeting with each of you individually. Please go to this Google Doc and sign up for one 15-minute time slot. (If you cannot find a time to fit your schedule please email me and we can work something out.)

 

Paper 3

Paper 3

For this paper you should choose one of the topics below and write a 500-word essay with a central thesis. 

Prompts (Choose one):

  1. The play A Raisin in the Sun is often talked about for the ways it represents intersections of social class and race. One large part of this discussion involves the American dream, a concept that is loosely imagined as the desire for every American to attain middle class status, which is itself a vague category that signifies different things to different groups of people. If you choose this prompt, I would like you to detail your interpretation of how A Raisin in the Sun represents the American dream. How does Lorraine Hansberry depict social mobility? How does this depiction represent the crossroads of race and social class? And, how does this depiction of the American dream resonate with today? Don’t feel like you need to answer all or any of these questions. They are meant to get you thinking.Be sure to include a thesis statement in your first paragraph that states your central point and use textual examples throughout to make this point.  
  2. This semester we have used two social annotation platforms: hypothes.is and Manifold. Using these platforms, you have annotated several poems and a digitized copy of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. In doing these activities you have hopefully gained a better sense of yourselves as readers. For this prompt, I would like you to reflect on the annotations you made. Do you notice any trends in what kinds of questions you had about the texts? Do you notice any trends in the kinds of observations you had about the texts? Do you notice any changes to the ways you read throughout the semester? Did the chapters from Jonathan Culler’s book influence your reading over the semester? Don’t feel like you need to answer all or any of these questions. They are meant to get you thinking.Be sure to include a thesis statement in your first paragraph that states your central point and use textual examples throughout to make this point.  

Format:

  • Typed, double-spaced

Due Date:

  • Friday, December 11th
  • Turn it in to Blackboard under “Paper 3: A Raisin in the Sun/Annotation Assignment”

Newsletter Week 10

Hi all, 

Many of you have likely heard that cases of the virus are growing rapidly and people are discussing various kinds of closures including the possibility that the school system will close again. I know that many of you are greatly impacted by these measures because they affect your jobs and your family members. 

I want you to know that I am here to work with you. We are very close to the end of the semester, and I would really hate to see you not complete the course because of new coronavirus measures. Please let me know if there is any way I can help if you are struggling. We should be heartened that there has been progress made with vaccines, and I would love it if you emerged from this crisis well on your way to completing your degree despite the challenges we’ve been presented with this year. 

Please contact me if you need to catch up on assignments or if you are confused about the upcoming work. I’ve also scaled back the reading a bit to help with the work load. 

Don’t forget to review the second paper assignment.

Completed Work

  • Read:  Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, Part 3
  • Respond: Blog post #6
  • Annotate Benito Cereno: By the end of the story new things about each of the novella’s main characters are revealed. Find two places where we begin to see characters in a new light and explain the change that you see.

Upcoming Work

 

Newsletter Week 9

Hi all,

We are now in the last third of what has been a semester of very hard work coupled with juggling new challenges we couldn’t have imagined facing a year ago. I hope you have had a chance to catch your breath a bit last week before the final push. 

General Announcements & Events

  • I have finished grading the essays. Please let me know if you’d like to revise yours for a better grade. 
  • I would like to hold a discussion session this week regarding Benito Cereno. This is completely voluntary, and I will record it. Here are the meeting times:
    • Section 0881: Wednesday, Nov. 11th @ 1:00PM
    • Section 0883: Thursday, Nov. 12th @ 1:00PM
  • I have also posted the assignment for Paper 2

Upcoming Work

  • Read: Finish Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, Part 3
  • Respond: Blog post #6
  • Annotate Benito Cereno: By the end of the story new things about each of the novella’s main characters are revealed. Find two places where we begin to see characters in a new light and explain the change that you see.

Paper 2

Prompt

For this assignment, I would like you to write a 1200-word essay with a thesis that makes a claim about the depiction of race in Benito Cereno. 

Scholars have long concerned themselves with this novella’s representation of the problem of racial slavery. H. Bruce Franklin, for example, argues that Melville creates a character in Amassa Delano who, like the founding fathers, “fails to see the disparity between his ‘republican impartiality’ and his racist, hierarchical behavior.” Similarly, Caroline Karcher writes that Benito Cereno is a response to the “menacing gains racism was making” in the name of what constituted science and genealogy during the 1800s.  C.L.R. James is even more expansive when he writes that in the story Melville, “itemized every single belief cherished by an advanced civilization […] about a backward people and then one by one showed that they were not merely false but were the direct cause of [Captain Delano’s] own blindness and stupidity.” 

I’m interested to know what you think. Does the novella give us an antiracist representation of enslavement that opposes the slave trade? Or does it paint enslaved Africans in a negative light? What about whiteness? Are we on Amassa Delano’s side or should we be suspicious of his assumptions about what he perceives while on board the San Dominick? 

Format:

Typed, double-spaced, 1200 words

Due:

11/29 by midnight

Blog Post #6

Benito Cereno is often cited as a powerful statement on enslavement in the U.S. Now that you have finished the novella, what are your thoughts about how Herman Melville depicted this practice? Does the novella depict enslavement in a negative or a positive light? Who do we sympathize with at the conclusion of the story? What should we make of Delano’s blindness? 

Week 7 Newsletter

Hi all,

I have started grading your papers, and you should be seeing your grades in Blackboard soon. You can find a video that shows you how to check your feedback in Blackboard in the tutorial videos section of the site. You do have the opportunity to revise your paper, but this is not required. Keep in mind that the course syllabus​ contains a revision policy. Please follow these steps if you would like to revise your paper.

General Announcements and Events

  • Registration for Fall II and Spring I is open!
  • You will find information about an upcoming film event on the Events & Opportunities section of the site. Writing about this event could be a possible opportunity to earn bonus points. Contact me if you’re interested.
  • There are also other job and event opportunities you may be interested in

Completed Work

Upcoming Work