The assignment for the third paper is over there in the sidebar, in case you missed it in class. Please feel free to post here with any confusion, questions, or difficulty that you're having--or just to compare notes with your classmates.
Deadline: open, but posts only count for Week 13 up to Saturday midnight; after that it's Week 14.'
10 comments:
At first I found it difficult to concentrate on one topic so my paper was not so broad. I was also having trouble getting away from summarizing. I had to re-write my paper a few times, and I am still editing. I am comparing Gulliver and Diderot, the chaplain, experiences in the foreign lands. I am trying to concentrate on the passage in each story where the Houyhnhnm, in Gulliver's case, and Orou, in the chaplain's case, points out flaws in the men's own cultures and gets them to really open their eyes and see the positives in the other cultures.
Like Kim, I found it difficult not to summarize, I also at first wondered how to compare my pieces since I am comparing Montagu to Swift. I had to rewrite several pieces of paper but I think that figuring out how to compare a piece of fiction to a series of letters was a wonderful learning experience.
I've grown to believe that asking the right questions is as important, if not more important, than knowing the right answers. Finding the right questions has been my struggle through this whole class and the struggle continues to plague me for this paper. Yikes.
I'm having trouble pin pointing what question to ask as well. I also find myself summarizing a lot. I just seem to repeat my findings over and over because the evidence is self-explanatory to me.
For paper three, I have chosen to use Swift and Montagu’s works. I found myself noticing more differences than similarities between the writers’ viewpoints. It has been challenging to find an interpretive angle to write the paper on instead of summarizing my comparison of the two authors.
My paper involved Gulliver and Oroonoko. I do not think that it really is that hard to say how Gulliver changes from his interactions with the society Houyhnhnms as it is probably one of the easier text to see since we are basically told that in the end he ends up changing the way that he feels about humans and how that differs from the beginning when he first set out to sea to travel. What I actually found really difficult about this paper was the fact that there seem to be emphasis on what changed in the individuals in books that we were asked to analyze. I felt that that much of a problem since you could interpret this in which ever manner you chose by simply stating what they were like initially and how their thoughts changes at the end. My real problem with this essay was about what else should be written to fill up the rest of the space. I wanted to explain what events changed their perspective from what they initially believed and what their mentality about the anything in the world was, but I thought that in order to do so it would take too much space to explain every little instance that could potentially have given them a new outlook. Also the question itself was also a bit difficult because theoretically you could probably argue anything that you wish provided that you have some quotes to back it up, yet since we don't know exactly what these authors wanted to say when they wrote the books it is impossible for everyone to interpret a quote in exactly in the same manner. We have not studied extensively to know whether or not what we are arguing is even close to what is being expressed.
I actually thoroughly enjoyed writing this paper. Like Gary, my paper involved Oroonoko and Gulliver. Specifically I chose to focus on how the two established their "self" in terms of the ways in which they formed relationships with other people. It was fascinating to me how my ideas morphed even while I was writing. The ideas that I had initially in terms of what I wanted my paper to eventually be gradually and rather unwittingly shifted as I wrote. It have really enjoyed the chance to establish interpretive questions based on texts we read. It's given me the opportunity to really thing differently and in my own way about texts rather than just on the surface and based off of professor's prompts. I just had a lot of fun with this assignment!
Like Gary, I found it really difficult to fill space to the appropriate page number to prove my thesis. I used Diderot's text and Oroonoko to draw a comparision between the European cultures depicted in each story. I wanted to talk about the interesting choices that both writers made to depict white men as the more flawed and unfaithful humans as compared to the natives of the lands they occupied. Most of the flawed charactersitics seemed to be accredited to religion and its role. However, I'm having difficulty in trying to create cohesive and intelligent sentences without having to constantly repeat myself.
One I issue ran into was that I'm not sure my thesis is specific enough. The entire time I was writing my paper I kept thinking "this is too simple, this is too easy..". I'm worried the thesis isn't up to par with the college level paper and is too easy and obvious.
As mentioned above, not summarizing was difficult. I felt the need to show a little background into the story to get my point across clearly and more effectively. It especially helps comparing the actions of two characters and how they show their sense of self. Overall it was an interesting paper to write, as we can seek knowledge of our own self while comparing that of others.
Post a Comment