General guidelines for format and submission
Draft and final essays should be 3-4 pgs each. Essays must be typewritten, double-spaced, spell-checked, and proofread. Use appropriate margins, font, and type size (11 or 12 pt). No extra spaces between paragraphs. At the top of pg 1, give your name, the date, my name, and the class and section number (you can condense this to save room). Give your essay an interesting title and a full, properly formatted works cited list. Do not use separate cover and works cited pages.
Assignment
For this essay, you have two options of which you’ll pick one. Both, however, have to do with the idea of intertextuality—the relationship between the text and something else:
Intertextuality.– The interdependent ways in which texts stand in relation to one another (as well as to the culture at large) to produce meaning.
Option 1. Allusions. The meaning of literary works is often enhanced by allusion to myths, other works of literature, historical events, or other external references.
Allusion.– A brief, often indirect, reference to a person, place, event, or thing, fictional or real (this may be historical, cultural, mythological, literary, political, or personal). An allusion lends the text new meaning by association.
Write an essay using Sinha’s Animal’s People in which you argue for the significance of a connection between one or more allusions and the text itself. Your essay should explain the allusion and offer an original thesis that analyzes how it enhances the work’s meaning.
Option 2. Pop Culture Theories. For this option, you will find an article in a contemporary magazine or newspaper and use it to craft an original theory about Sinha’s Animal’s People. To do this, you might make a list of terms, ideas, and topics you’d be interested in discussing, and then you can use those as search terms to find a useful pop culture article. You’ll then build a connection between the ideas and theories in the article and the text itself.
Ask yourself what’s useful/ interesting/ controversial about the theories you find, and consider how you might apply them—will you agree with them and demonstrate them in the text? Disagree and show how they aren’t true for the text? Expand on them and extend the ideas through the text?
You should:
1. Use articles written in the last three years.
2. Find the contemporary articles first using key terms (e.g., jealousy, friendship, power struggle); then work backwards to make connections to the literary work. Then, and only then, formulate your thesis.
3. Remember: the focus should be on analyzing the text we are discussing in class, so make sure the bulk of your evidence comes from it.
Research
You have a research deadline for this essay. For those writing about allusions, you’ll need to identify which allusion(s) you think you’ll work with and research them—eg if it’s a literary allusion, you should know something about the text, the author, the reference, etc. If it’s a historical allusion, you should know the who/ what/ when/ etc of the reference. For those writing about pop cult, you should identify a topic and bring in the relevant article. For both options, you need to bring your research in hard copy to class.
[The instructions for audience and drafts remain the same. For sources, remember to cite them fully, to be clear about which source you’re citing from since you’ll have more than one, and to look up how to cite internet sources if you use those.]
Teaching Writing at John Jay College 