English 505

Okay, I haven't posted in a few days, so here's the rundown of the last week: Friday and Tuesday we worked on thesis statements, which their first papers completly lacked. I gave a lecture on theses on Fri and Tues in the comp. lab we looked at a couple of good reference sites that show some great examples of weak vs. strong thesis statements, how to hone and revise theses, etc. I'll include the links. We also looked at some sample intros from scholarly articles and I had them try to locate where the thesis was in the intro, if it was strong, etc. This also introduced them to academic rhetoric. I also handed out the two texts that the students will be doing rhetorical analyses of for their second response, due this Fri. I'll attach the docs. One is an excerpt from Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat called 'A Question of Identity' and the second is Borges' 'Funes, the Memorious.' Today we were also supposed to talk about Joy Harjo's poem 'Remember' but my first lecture on rhetorical analysis, which the students seemed to think was pretty boring, took up the whole period. I wrote what I thought to be a pretty good handout on rhetical analysis that I will have to attach later. The selection of these three texts does have some logic: the first, a clincal / creative non-fiction text is about a form of amnesia that is stuck in a loop of about two miuntes. It's about radical forgetting and the role that memory, a type of narrative, a cognitive text, plays in the construction of idenity, and further, reality. The second, a piece of short fiction, is about a guy who has a disorder, a sickness brought on by brian trauma that makes it impossible for him to forget, i.e. radical remembering. The Harjo text is, for one thing, about cultural memory. My goal is, first, to put what we've talked about in terms of rhet. analysis into practice, second to use three differnt genres / modes of rhetoric to approach a complex of related concepts, that is, the role of memory and forgetting on--at the micro level--the formation of a personal text, an identity, and--at the macro level--the role of memory and forgetting in the writing of history and culture, our country's mnemonic text / narrative. Does this make sense? -A

http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/thesis_statement.shtml#top
http://writing2.richmond.edu/writing/wweb/thesis.html