Blog Prompts

Blog 8

Book of Delights

Critical Prompt: Rossy Gay’s near-daily reflections on joy lack a clear sense of plot and narrative direction. Indeed, one gets a sense that even Gay doesn’t know how any given “delight” will begin or end when he puts the pen to paper. And yet these essays form a coherent whole. This is due, in part, to the thematic connections that bind these essays: meditations on greetings and gestures, on embodiment and physicality, or on the ways in which joy exists precisely because there is a deep shared sadness and tragedy in the world as well. Focus on one of these thematic linkages and explore the ways in which Ross adds depth to these everyday musings. Be sure to invoke relevant concepts from Reading Autobiography, and quote and engage specific moments in Gay’s essays as well.

Creative: Try your hand (literally, if you’d like–using pen and paper, and then transcribing) at Ross Gay’s method of documenting delight. Enter your essay with an idea, and see where it takes you. Let your mind and language wanter. When you complete the essay, offer a brief reflection that invokes ideas from Reading Autobiography and describes what it is about Gay’s work that inspired you to find some time for delighting.

Blog 7

Punch Me Up to the Gods

Critical Prompt: Broom has described his composition method is weaving braids upon braids upon braids. The braided narrative–where two or more distinct scenes or timelines are narrated in alternating chapters, sections, or paragraphs–allow the author to create a web of echoes and associations that the reader must work to make sense of. Sometimes these braids are quite obvious, as with the bus-ride inter-chapters, or the way some sections clearly shift back and forth between two perspectives. Other braiding techniques are more subtle–the way that the mom’s voice and the 12-year-old Brian are “braided” into the narrative at two key moments, or the way themes of shame or scenes of crying / not crying, or moments of literal “reflection” in various windows and mirroring surface are woven throughout in a way that resonates and connects disparate parts of the narrative. Please analyze very closely one such braided element, quoting from and offering deeper, more sustained readings of how this strategy works in the narrative. Please also draw on and quote from at least one relevant key concept from Reading Autobiography to help deepen and direct your analysis.

Creative Prompt: Broom has described his composition method is weaving braids upon braids upon braids. The braided narrative–where two or more distinct scenes or timelines are narrated in alternating chapters, sections, or paragraphs–allow the author to create a web of echoes and associations that the reader must work to make sense of. In your creative post, adapt this method in your own brief, 6+ paragraph braided narrative that relates two distinct moments in your own life. After your formal experiment, take a step back and analyze what you’ve accomplished, note how it relates to or was inspired by Broom’s own method, and draw on Reading Autobiography to elucidate some of your strategies.

 

Blog 6

Fact of a Body

Critical Prompt: Reading Smith and Watson, we come to understand the power of narrative as a filter for how we understand experience, for how we recall and convey memory, for how we structure our past and imagine our future. This power can be both good and bad, productive and damaging. How does Marzano-Lesnevich wrestle with this dual power of narrative at key points in their memoir? That is, how do stories filter, shade, and distort reality in both minor and more momentous ways? How does the nature of the relationality of narratives–the existence of many, competing stories and individuals behind them–shape the author’s experience and inform their approach to writing the memoir? And do you think the narrative she crafts provides a sense of healing and closure, or help them gain a sense of agency–of narrative control? You don’t need to address each of these questions–just the one(s) that seem most compelling to you. Please apply or reference, as always, a concept or idea (and, of course, a quote!) from Reading Autobiography that illuminates your response.

Creative Prompt: Marzano-Lesnevich’s narrative style is tied to concrete materials from the past: an astounding archive of public and private records, images, videos. In this way, their approach might seem the opposite of Machado, who invented, rather than unearthed, multiple frames of reference to process her abuse. For your creative post, I want you to explore this idea of narrative as a negotiation between archival fact, memory, and invention. What document might you chose? An image? A report card from 2nd grade? An old yearbook photo of a friend? A picture of your parents before they were born? Try to tell a story around that object in the same way that Marzano-Lesnevich does–working forward and backward in time, speculating, documenting, imagining. As always, write a brief critical follow-up (1-2 paragraphs, referring to and quoting from RA and noting any specific inspiration from Marzano-Lesnevich) describing your intentions and analyzing the results.

Blog 5

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

Critical Prompt: In a New York Times review of LLTFG, the author writes that “This is a vast, arresting story. It’s a story of loving addicts. Of a queer sexual awakening. Of inhabiting a female body in America. Of biracial identity. Of obsessive, envy-fueled friendships. Of assault. It’s a eulogy and a love song. It’s about girls and the women they become.” What aspect of LLTGF resonates most strongly with you, and what does Madden do on the level of craft and art that makes a given theme resonate so strongly? You can focus on a single section, or a series of thematically linked moments, as you explore this question about what moves you and–more importantly–how Madden moves you. Please apply or reference, as always, a concept or idea (and, of course, a quote!) from Reading Autobiography that illuminates your response.

Creative Prompt:

Here, it makes sense to return to a creative prompt that I originally gave during week 1. Madden, in her essay “Against Catharsis,” refuses to let her audience be a merely passive consumer of her text–or worse, a voyeuristic presence witnessing the readers pain. Instead, she gives us a throttling image less to heal herself than to invite us to return to and re-imagine our own pasts. “Art is a superpower,” Madden writes, “that allows creator and consumer to be in dialogue regardless of circumstance or logistics or miles, a shared experience, a third plane found when two people meet when seeing one another through the page.” To be more direct, she wants us to “remember [our] own moments as a child on the other side of the glass.” She gives us a memory that, she writes, “is not longe mine. It’s yours.” It’s a stunning reversal, and a strong call or engagement and what the authors of Reading Autobiography would call “relationality.” In your creative post, please take Madden up on her invitation and narrate a moment–using whatever pattern of emplotment or voice you’d like–from your life as a child on the other side of the glass. Please interpret Madden’s scene broadly, as she does: this won’t be a moment of your narrated “I” banging on a car window, of course; it is any moment where any barrier–physical or emotional, vast or minute, real or imagined–led to an indelible memory that you could never shake.

Blog 4

In the Dream House–Choose either the critical or research-based prompt

Critical Prompt: In her New Yorker review of “In the Dream House,” Katy Waldman writes that the critical memoir centers on Machado’s horrifying and abusing relationship. “Yet,” she writes, “the arc of this ordeal, although it forms the book’s skeleton, is not Machado’s true subject. Instead, In the Dream House is primarily about the quandary of constructing In the Dream House. It is a quandary both because the telling is painful and because Machado, who has no language for this telling, must invent one.

And what she produces is an experimental engagement with what Smith and Watson would call “patterns of emplotment” and “structuring modes of self-inquiry.” In short, the way Machado handles genre, time, space, and narration comes to predominate, leading to experiments in voice and narrative orientation, scholarly asides, childhood memories, a multiplication of genres and settings, and more or less self-conscious reflections on the act of constructing a memoir in the first place. The book, in other words, is pretty meta.

In class, we have focused on analyzing how individual sections work, largely on their own. For this more extended reflection, try to identify a broader strategy or tendency that you can use as a framework to make a broader claim about what you take to be the success or failure–or somewhere in between–of her work. Use relevant concepts from Reading Autobiography to help unlock what’s happening (at least 1 presented in more detail), and engage 2-3 sections from Dream House as you piece together you argumentative story from Machado’s fragments.

Creative Prompt: Recast or reflect upon a moment or idea from your past that adapts some of the highly intentional experiments with form and genre we witness throughout In the Dream House. Then, write a brief critical follow-up (1-2 paragraphs, referring to and quoting from RA and noting any specific inspiration from Machado) describing your intentions and analyzing the results.

 

Blog 3

The Undocumented Americans–Choose either the critical or research-based prompt

Critical prompt: Smith and Watson, in the toolkit section on Embodiment, ask “what’s the relationship between the material body of a narrating “I” and the body politic? How is the body represented as a site of sensuality and emotion? As a site of knowledge and knowledge production As a site of labor, disease and disability?” These questions are highly relevant in Villavicencio’s work–both as she describes her own health issues, and those of her broader community. Drawing on Smith and Watson’s overview of embodiment in both the toolkit and Chapter 2, focus on a moment or series of moments in The Undocumented Americans that captures the importance of embodiment. You can focus on personal health or public health, mental or physical disability, or other ways in which bodies become central to her narrative.

Research-based prompt: In class, we discussed how Villavicencio’s strategy is distinct from standard immigrant narratives due to both her focus on the undocumented, and on her intense and intimate concentration on the lives of individuals that she encounters. Only rarely does she provide broader statistical support or evidence to frame her stories, and that seemed like a deliberate choice on her part. Now that we have encountered the stories in her book, I’d like to give you the opportunity present some research to the class on the issue of undocumented immigrants in the US that helps us place these stories in a broader context related to health care, public health, politics, and perceptions of undocumented immigrants, and so forth. For your post, locate a peer-reviewed article using the CofC library databases on an issue that you’d like to learn more about. Summarize the article and connect it back to Villavicencio’s work in the Undocumented Americans. You might choose something related to one of the episodes in Villavicencio’s book, or you might choose something related to your own chosen discipline / major.

Creative Prompt: 

How does Villavicencio’s work challenge, reinforce, or expand your personal views and understanding of immigration? If you are an immigrant or child of an immigrant, you might share an account of how you find yourself relating the stories from Villavicencio’s work to individuals in your own lives? If you feel more like part of the non-immigrant audience whom Villavicencio often challenges and critiques, how did you feel or register this challenge personally? The goal here is to relate to Villavicencio’s work not through theoretical engagement or close reading, but by narrating or reflecting upon some aspect of your own life or the lives of those around you. Please tie your reflections back to relevant concepts from Reading Autobiography as well.

Blog 2

Educated–Choose either the creative or the critical prompt (650 – 800 words–Due Sunday at 5pm)

Critical Prompt: In our daily reflective engagements, we have engaged Educated piece-by-piece, focusing on a key passage here, and applying a useful concept from Reading Autobiography there. For your blog post (see requirements on length, etc., under “Policies”), you will offer a more sustained reflection on Education–tying together multiple, related moments together that cohere around a core concept or set of related concepts from Reading Autobiography. If what we have done so far together as a class resembles something like an analytical inventory–a hodge-podge of things we noticed and insights we developed–this is your opportunity to tell a more compelling critical story about Educated in a more sustained way. This “story” should be grounded in a claim that you’re making about the autobiography, and you will use engagement with specific moments in the book to serve as textual evidence. Please quote from both the book and RA, though note that these quotes don’t count towards the total word count.

Creative Prompt: Autobiography is, almost by definition, comprised of memories. This is obvious. But Westover’s approach to exploring memory is unique. Her meditations often draw out the tension between the the narrated “I” and narrating “I” quite explicitly, for example, and she often troubles over the question of autobiographical truth vs. capital-T “Truth” throughout. That is, her engagement with memories are often analytical and self-reflexive. For this prompt, please relate one of your own memories, and do so in a way that suggests a similarly intentional density about what memory is, what it accomplishes, how it is constructed, contested, and recalled. Then write a brief critical follow-up (1-2 paragraphs, referring to and quoting from RA as needed) describing your intentions and analyzing the results.

 

Blog 1

“Against Catharsis,” T Kira Madden (600 – 800 words–Due Sunday by 5pm). You may choose either the creative of critical prompt.

Critical Prompt: This prompt emerges direction from our “Reflective Engagement” exercise from class this week. Please take two concepts from Reading Autobiography–one each from chapters 2 and 3 on autobiographical “subjects” and “acts”–and use them as a way to address some aspect of Madden’s essay “Against Catharsis.” Please be sure to include quotes from both Reading Autobiography and Madden’s essay, though these quotes will not count towards the total word count. The goal is to use these helpful ideas and concepts to help explain or explore or appreciate something happening in Madden’s essay. This can be more of an exploratory blog post–it does not have to be a thesis-driven argument.

Creative Prompt: 

Madden, in her essay, refuses to let her audience be a merely passive consumer of her text–or worse, a voyeuristic presence witnessing the readers pain. Instead, she gives us a throttling image less to heal herself than to invite us to return to and re-imagine our own pasts. “Art is a superpower,” Madden writes, “that allows creator and consumer to be in dialogue regardless of circumstance or logistics or miles, a shared experience, a third plane found when two people meet when seeing one another through the page.” To be more direct, she wants us to “remember [our] own moments as a child on the other side of the glass.” She gives us a memory that, she writes, “is not longe mine. It’s yours.” It’s a stunning reversal, and a strong call or engagement and what the authors of Reading Autobiography would call “relationality.” In your creative post, please take Madden up on her invitation and narrate a moment–using whatever pattern of emplotment or voice you’d like–from your life as a child on the other side of the glass. Please interpret Madden’s scene broadly, as she does: this won’t be a moment of your narrated “I” banging on a car window, of course; it is any moment where any barrier–physical or emotional, vast or minute, real or imagined–led to an indelible memory that you could never shake.

 

Blog 2: Educated–Choose either the creative or the critical prompt (650 – 800 words–Due Sunday at 5pm)

Critical Prompt: In our daily reflective engagements, we have engaged Educated piece-by-piece, focusing on a key passage here, and applying a useful concept from Reading Autobiography there. For your blog post (see requirements on length, etc., under “Policies”), you will offer a more sustained reflection on Education–tying together multiple, related moments together that cohere around a core concepts or set of related concepts from Reading Autobiography. If what we have done so far together as a class resembles something like an analytical inventory–a hodge-podge of things we noticed and insights we developed–this is your opportunity to tell a more compelling critical story about Educated in a more sustained way. This “story” should be grounded in a claim that you’re making about the autobiography, and you will use engagement with specific moments in the book to serve as textual evidence. Please quote from both the book and RA, though note that these quotes don’t count towards the total word count.

Creative Prompt: Autobiography is, almost by definition, comprised of memories. This is obvious. But Westover’s approach to exploring memory is unique. Her meditations often draw out the tension between the the narrated “I” and narrating “I” quite explicitly, for example, and she often troubles over the question of autobiographical truth vs. capital-T “Truth” throughout. That is, her memories are often analytical, or at least self-reflexive. For this prompt, please relate one of your own memories, and do so in a way that suggests a similarly intentional density about what memory is, what it accomplishes, how it is constructed, contested, and recalled. Then write a brief critical follow up describing your intentions and analyzing the results.

 

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