Final Project for Composition 10

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?