Sunday, September 18, 2011

For Information: Upcoming Fun in 429

I just e-mailed everyone the link to the prompt for the first assignment, but you can also find it over there in the sidebar, under "Course Information."  If you have questions about this assignment, or wish to clarify any of the instructions, please feel free to respond to this post with your question.  You can e-mail me privately, of course, but others may share your confusion, and questions/responses posted here are available to the class as a whole, even though you don't get blog credit for them.

About the reading for next week: as I explained in class on Thursday, I haven't assigned specific page ranges in Volume II of Pamela.  You should of course read the entirety of Volume II, but it can make that chunk of text more digestible if you think of it in terms of the finding answers to the following two questions:

1.  At what point do you become convinced that the climax of the novel is, in fact, the climax?  How do you know? What convinces you?

2.  According to our 21st century assumptions, the narrative achieves closure at the point where the main narrative conflict (will Pamela give in to Squire B?) gets resolved.  Yet there's still a lot of Pamela left after that point.  Why?  What does the remaining text contribute to the narrative?  How does it overturn your assumptions about how the novel achieves closure?

Don't respond to this post with your answers to those questions!  Just think about them as you finish the novel and prepare to discuss it on Tuesday and Thursday.


DO respond to this post with questions about the writing assignment!
 

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