Composition
10
Final
Project
Due
Date: Wednesday, May 29 or
Thursday, May 30
Objective:
- To illustrate your understanding of an author’s work and be able to convey is in either a well-written essay or a creative project.
Choose
one of the following:
1) John Steinbeck wrote,
“No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is
true, and true of us…If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen.” It
might feel strange that you might find anything “true” about yourself in The Old Man and the Sea, but some
readers have “listened” to the story as if it were about themselves. For your
final project, you are to convey that you have listened to at least one story that has had “power” over you. You are to
construct a carefully prepared paper or project in which you consider what the
book/story has to say to you, where you came in, and what you heard about yourself
as you “listened.”
2) Write a paper or
present a project that comments fully and specifically on the significance of
Santiago’s words, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated” (p 103). It does
not have to be on The Old Man and the Sea;
think of other stories of self-reliance, self-preservation, etc…
3) In a preface to one of
his novels, Joseph Conrad writes that his task as a writer is “by the power of
the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to
make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything.” Write a
carefully prepared paper or construct a thoughtful project in which you show
fully and specifically the extent to which an author that we read this year
fulfills the writer’s task of making you hear, feel and – above all – see. You
may want to give attention to all the possibilities in the word “see.”
What
we have read this year:
- The Old Man and the Sea
- Of Mice and Men
- The Lovely Bones
- This Boys Life
- Short stories
- "I'm a Mad Dog biting myself for Sympathy"
- “What You Pawn, I will Redeem”
- “Yellow Woman”
- “The Yellow Wallpaper”
- “The Cask of Amontillado”
Grading:
- Did you fulfill the objective of the particular assignment, answering its prompt thoroughly?
- Is it clear that you put in the required time and effort to not only explore the particular work, using quotes and textual evidence, but also in accurately and thoroughly reflecting your understanding of its impact on you as a student?
