Daily Archives: 19 Nov ’14

by

Scholarly Analysis Paper Handout

The class site has exceeded it’s upload capabilities, but pasted below is more information on a scholarly analysis paper.  Please read and come to class on Monday with questions.   Note:  If you have an idea for a paper, it might be easier to figure out questions if you start mapping your idea along with the requirements listed on the handout.

 

Scholarly Analysis Paper

Scholarly Analysis: A scholarly analysis paper takes the sustained reading of a close reading paper and opens your singular reading of that text up to a larger dialogue with another scholar. In this paper your thesis while it may originate more from your reading of the text will in some way engage what another scholar has said about this text.   Indeed your thesis may originate as a response to what a scholar has said about the text, in which case you may use a close based reading of the text to respond to the scholar’s argument.

Overview & Objectives:  One of the goals for the course is for students to strengthen their ability to engage with the work of other critics and writers, using and citing such sources effectively.  This third paper is an opportunity for students to practice engaging literary scholarship and putting their own ideas about a text in conversation with other scholars.

I am particularly interested in your ability to join a scholarly conversation in written form.  Joining a scholarly conversation means that you 1) acknowledge another scholar’s argument and how they made it 2) you share (by reading and studying) one of the primary literary text’s the scholar was focusing on and 3) using your own reading of the primary literary text, you engage the scholar’s original argument.  It is in many ways just like having a dialogue in person except that because you are engaging someone’s written text the claims made are more complex or more thoroughly supported than sometimes we are able to do in a quicker real time conversation.   You should make your own response thoughtful and thorough as well.

Building on past assignments: Like your other papers, this paper is still at heart a close reading based paper.   The difference is that where in the history paper, you found some outside history to expand your perspective and how you could interpret the literary text, in this assignment you will find some other (scholarly) conversation about this text that will expand your perspective and how you interpret the text.

What you need before you write:

  1. Literary text from the syllabus
  2. Some idea (whether it’s a small section or scene or a small recurring element or a major theme you see emerging in a particular way in one aspect of the text) of what you ultimately want to focus on in the text.
  3. Two “peer reviewed” scholarly articles addressing that literary text

What your paper should include:

  1. A clear and cogent thesis (argument) that stems from a close-reading based engagement with the text and a critical but respectful engagement of at least one of the scholarly text you read.
  2. A clear summary of the article(s) you are using. Your summary should let me know the author’s central topic, main thesis (argument), and the major way they support that argument
  3. You should clearly identify the specific aspect of the scholarly argument that your thesis and paper are engaging.
  4. Accurate and clean citations for the scholarly article you use.
  5. Your bibliography should include both of the scholarly texts you read, even if your paper only really engages the arguments one text.

Engaging Scholarship

  1. There are many ways to engage a scholarly argument.
  2. You may confirm all or some part of the argument by offering another point that strengthens or adds depth to the argument.
  3. You may highlight a small hole (or maybe even a major fissure) in the argument. (If you identify a problem, you must spell out the implications of such a problem).
  4. You may point out how one part of their argument actually connects to another part of their argument if they consider aspect Z in the story.
  5. Even when you want to challenge a part of the argument or add to it, you should be respectful of what the scholar is doing and acknowledge the validity of the points.
  6. Even when you want to confirm and agree with where the scholar is going, you should acknowledge the argument’s scope and the limitations of its and your potential claims.

Engaging Scholarship Don’ts

  1. Don’t simply quote a fact that the scholar uses. For instance in the Sanjay Sircar argument it would not be enough to use the essay to cite the fact that Bannerman was Scottish or that the story had many different reprints.  You need to make sure you are engaging the scholar on the idea (not just the material) they are presenting.
  2. Don’t try to say the whole essay is wrong, evil, sexist, racist, or stupid. Even if you think so. Even if you’re right. You need to be more specific. You simply do not have time/space to demolish a whole article (itself easily 15-35 pages).   Neither do you have time to take on the whole literary text. Your argument then needs to be about a specific part of the literary text and about a specific part of the scholarly text. Even if you believe you argument extends to other or all of the texts, your paper for this assignment needs to focus in on a specific aspect.   You might develop the argument more in your Choose-A-Book project if you wish.

Paper Format

  1. 5-7 pages
  2. double spaced
  3. 12 point size
  4. Times New Roman font
  5. 1-inch margins
  6. page numbers
  7. MLA inline citation and work cited page
by

Readings, Extensions, and Handouts

 

A few things:

1)  I will be emailing the readings for next week as I scan them.  I have emailed The Pasteboard  Bandit  in two separate emails to you (part 1 and then part 2).

2) Please read The Pasteboard Bandit for Monday.  I have taken the Gwendolyn Brooks off the syllabus, so we will discuss the The Brownies Book and the Langston Hughes poems on Wednesday.

3) I have extended the deadline for the third paper by a week.  The paper is now due on Saturday morning [9:00am] December 6th.  (Yes, this deadline is in the middle of presentations, so if you are presenting please plan accordingly).

4) I am in the process of creating a hand out on the third essay and how to engage scholarly criticism in your (still close reading based) analysis of one of the literary texts on the syllabus.   The main thing you need to know is that you should have a literary text from this syllabus, and you should read two scholarly articles on that text.  (Note: You must read articles that come from a peer-reviewed journal. Journals will say in their description if they are peer-review.  If you use JSTOR to find your article, it will more than likely be peer-reviewed.)   I will post the handout sometime today or tomorrow.

5) Please look over the handout for Monday as we will start where we left off, and I will specifically try to model a scholarly paper.  It will be a more useful demonstration if you come prepared with your questions.

Have a good weekend,

Allison

by

Picaninny

When we look at early children’s texts that involve African Americans, the African Americans were usually depicted as a picaninny. A picaninny is an African American character whose features are over dramatized by either illustrations or descriptions of the character. Most picaninnies are drawn/described as very dark in color, having a large red mouth, being poorly dressed, the girls would have “kinky” braided hair and the boys would mostly be bald with a shines head, and lastly most picaninny characters were aged infant-teen. Picaninnies were originally founded for the purpose of emphasizing the harm of slavery and how it effects children both physically and mentally. One of the first picaninny characters was actually Topsy frm Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Through Topsy, Stowe wished to depict how slavery could currupt an innocent child. The story of Little black Sambo is a bit controversial when it comes to the question whether it is racist or not. Many believe that Sambo is a picaninny, it’s hard to tell since he does share some traits of the picaninny (such as the big red mouth, dark skin color, and age), however, some of his traits are completely off (such as his expensive clothes, intelligence, and hair). What’s even more interesting, is that there are other versions of little black sambo, which were not written by the original author, that are unarguably racist. These other authors and many others after them took this image of a picaninny and currupted it; they made it into a joke, which we can clearly see in our previous reading, the coon alphabet. http://http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/74/2b/1c/742b1cee7ed4c0f7b097a75a500c6758.jpg

 

by

Little Black Sambo Looks Familiar

I read through Little Black Sambo, then took a second pass through it… Something looked familiar. The illustrations of Sambo & his family are somewhat similar to the characters depicted in A Coons Alphabet. A quick Google search confirmed that the two were published around the same time in– Little Black Sambo was published in 1899. However, the authors are a continent apart. The forward in Little Black Sambo notes that this was written by a Brit traveling with two little girls in India.

 

When I saw the illustration below of Black Mumbo I got the impression I’d seen this before. By flipping through A Coons Alphabet I confirmed that there are some similarities. But, how can this be believable? One mom is from India and the other is American. They’re from very different cultures, and the Caucasion storytellers are also from distant parts of the world.

                               MISSING IMAGE

 

The characters in both stories also share qualities of facial structure– they don’t look quite human. Even in Sicar’s essay he notes that the original illustrations were “grotesque” (136). So, now I’m curious… How come these ideas of what a “negro” looks like are so similar? How is this impression in both British & American Caucasian minds so much alike?

by

Little Black Sambo

“Once upon a time there was a little black boy, and his name was Little Black Sambo.  And his mother was called Black Mumbo.  And his father was called Black Jumbo (Bannerman, 2-6).”  It doesn’t take long, the first line of the story in fact, for the reader to realize that these are some unusual names, that come across as demeaning to black people.  To me, these sound like either slave names, or one’s that only an uneducated group would come up with.  These characters are depicted in the drawings as very animal-like in their appearance.

Little Black Sambo was given some very nice clothing and an umbrella from both of his parents, which he cherished.  After this he went out for a walk, in his new gear, when he was suddenly stopped by a tiger.  The tiger threatened to eat Sambo, but Sambo was able to negotiate with the beast and give it his coat instead.  Later Sambo was stopped by three more tigers, one after the other, and he had to give away all of his clothing and his umbrella in order to avoid being eaten.  I felt that this was similar to slavery, in the sense that the tigers took something that did not belong to them and that they had no right in doing so.  Blacks were taken from their home lands and brought to the U.S. to work for free, under horrible conditions.

I’m sure that it wasn’t the author of The Story of Little Black Sambo, Helen Bannerman, intention to have such a dark message.  It was probably meant to be a cute and funny story that a parent could read with their young child, but it dehumanizes black people with the silly names and odd looking drawings.