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On this last paper assignment, you can choose to write a standard interpretive argument paper on either Things Fall Apart, Nervous Conditions, or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, or you can write a personal narrative inspired by any of these novels and/or any of the historical traumas their content touches on. If you choose the interpretive argument option, you should bring me a typed paragraph in which you state an interpretive question and a tentative thesis. This should be appended to prep #12 (due November 27—see syllabus).
If you choose the creative option, the assignment is to take the given novel as a kind of “triggering text” for writing your own family history/memoir. This will be a story about your own individual family was affected or shaped or altered by some larger historical event—such as war, civil war, colonization, women’s-rights movements, or interracial (or other type of intercultural) conflict.
If you take this option, the essay must do two things. One, it should be in conversation with the triggering text. It shouldn’t just refer to the novel at the beginning and never mention it again. You should choose a particular passage from the book that resonated with you when you first read it, one that seems to speak most vividly to your personal experience. You should quote that passage and then comment on it, telling why it resonated with you—or you could rewrite the passage, using the author’s style to narrate your own experience. It would make sense to do either of these things in the introduction. But keep the text before you, and before the reader, throughout the whole essay. Keep returning to the text. For example, you could talk about how coming to know more about your own story (see next paragraph) makes you read the triggering text differently, if it does.
Two, the story you tell should be drawn not only from your own memory but from at least one interview with a family member—a parent, grandparent, or any other family member to whom you have more or less ready access. You may carry out the interview as formally or informally as you want, but the material from it should be incorporated into your essay (in other words, don’t just reprint the transcript of the interview). Note how the family member tells the story—the details he or she chooses, the judgments he or she makes or doesn’t make, the things he or she chooses to emphasize. (Are they different from the things you would emphasize?)
Those who have done this option often find it very interesting. One goal of this course is that you would take from it a sense of both how and why stories matter—what their purposes are and also their limitations. One way to gain a personal sense of this is to write your own story.
Grading criteria for the creative option will be, first, that you fulfill both requirements above. Most importantly, you should have a main idea: something new you’ve learned—about yourself as a reader, about your family, or both—from this assignment. As always, the most desired elements will be originality, specific details, and clarity of voice.
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