i need help

OBSERVATION EXERCISE(WORKSHOP 1)

This exercise is to help you develop your critical reading and writing skills. The purpose

of reading is not to just get to the end, but to discover what is interesting to you. In this

activity, you will practice focusing on textual details, which will in turn help you develop a

thesis statement and unique analysis for your essays.

You will use the first two weeks’ readings to complete this exercise, so have your

reading out as you do this.

Directions: Identify a paragraph from either Immanuel Kant’s “What is

Englightenment?” or Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that you want to reread

and analyze very closely. Please read through it once, and look at the examples on the

next page, before beginning the following steps.

1. On your Google Doc, type out one paragraph from one of the above texts that

you want to look at closely. (If your chosen paragraph is fairly long, feel free to

make cuts and/or abridging changes.)

2. Label the next section, “Part 1.” In this section, write down what you initially

notice from the paragraph. What things catch your eye? What makes you pause? What

do you feel like the paragraph is focusing on? You should aim for about 5-8 things.

Don’t worry about how big or small these elements are - they should just be what you

notice. Did a word stick out to you? A sentence? A metaphor?

3. Label the next section, “Part 2.” Now, take what you noticed and coalesce this

into an itemized list of each item you identified in the previous step. Try to think about

why these moments stuck out to you. Why did that word catch your eye? Why did that

sentence made you pause? There is no one right answer. Try to explain why you think

these things are important. You don’t need to write in highly structured paragraph form -

you’re just articulating your thoughts from Part 1.

4. Label the next section, “Part 3.” Finally, write 5-8 reflective comments on this

process. This should be a metacommentary where you reflect on the whole process.

What did you notice when you had to slow down? What did this process allow you to

see in the text that you might have missed before?

Keep in mind, “missing something” is not a sign of intelligence (or lack of). Have

you ever rewatched a movie and noticed little details before because you’re less

caught up in the plot or your eye goes to another part of the screen? That’s what

we’re trying to do by focusing on this one paragraph.

(Examples are taken from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me.)

Example 1

“Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other

worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there

was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this

television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white

boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular

girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and

endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes,

immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with

streams and glens. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I

came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the

pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I

obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that

my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity,

was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable

energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that

other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which

infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity

of escape.” (pg. 20-21)

Part 1

1. There’s a lot of language about space, galaxies, asteroids, etc.

2. Lots of commas in this paragraph—this includes lists and descriptions.

3. The word “bodies” in the first paragraph sticks out.

4. The language “bearing witness” stands out.

5. He describes West Baltimore as a “pandemonium” compared to Mr. Belvedere’s

“happy hunting grounds.”

6. The sentence that begins the descriptions of suburbia are very lush, soft and

natural (glens, streams woods, etc.).

7. A fair number of $3 words (firmament, immaculate, pandemonium, tenacious,

inscrutable).

8. Both suburban and Coates’s home described as “dispatches”.

9. He uses “football cards” instead of baseball cards.

10. The end comment of “velocity of escape” makes me think of speed and space.

Part 2

1. The space language builds on the America galaxy term Coates uses. Such terms

give this term an otherworldly quality and implies that the American experience is

much more differentiated than common rhetoric. It spreads and stretches like a

galaxy. It involves multiple solar systems, stars, and black holes. Unlike the

“melting pot”, “stew”, or even American Dream analogies, Coates’s American

Galaxy feels more complex and less contained.

2. The lists build a sense of momentum and set up a direct comparison between the

experience between his “dispatch” in Baltimore and that of a suburban, white child. It

makes both of these experiences seem overwhelming but in different ways. A direct

comparison also puts perspective on the suburban (white) experience and that of

Coates’s childhood. It attempts to prioritize the struggles Coates faced compared to that

of what a more affluent child might worry about.

3. Words like “firmament”, “immaculate”, “pandemonium”, and “bearing witness” carry

a religious connotation. Coates is not advocating zealotry, but lending emotional weight

to this paragraph by invoking this language.

4. By describing the suburban childhood and his own as “dispatches”, these moments

transform into elongated messages, something that is fluid and changeable. The word

dispatch also brings the space/galaxy imagery back into the paragraph. “Velocity of

escape” works in the same way but it also implies power, speed, and momentum

required to escape. And the word escape is loaded. Coates’s trajectory is away,

escape, out which sort of concretizes the us/them divide described by the suburban

experience and Coates’s experience.

5. Baseball cards are considered a “stable” of American culture, and “football cards”

makes me feel like he’s flagging this as a moment of subversion.

6. Describing suburbia with natural language allows that area to feel natural and

pretty. Also a synonym for lush is rich which helps connect with Coates’s imagery about

white, affluent, suburbia.

Part 3

1. At first, I didn’t notice the slight change to certain American icons (such as

blueberry pie for apple pie; football cards for baseball cards). That slight

subversion I think builds on the larger project he has of American galaxy that he

threads throughout the piece.

2. In my initial read through I was so focused on the concept of American galaxy that I

did not notice how much of that language he used in the paragraph to reinforce that

imagery/metaphor.

3. The connection with nature/natural/affluence also is subtle.

4. I really had to focus on the sentence structure, which allowed me to see how long

the sentences in this paragraph are. Even the shortest sentence is a bit complex and

lengthy. That affects the rhythm.

5. I totally read by the religious loaded words in my first read through.

6. It was hard to tell if Coates’s use of all the $3 words was his natural style or part of

a larger rhetorical strategies. Normally I just go with my gut, but I really had to stop and

think about that here.

7. The media/dispatch language to describe expectations of certain experiences was

subtle and slowing down help me connect the dispatch language to the galaxy

metaphor.

8. The galaxy metaphor builds to the final moments with “velocity of escape” and

“cosmic injustice”. All the subtleties became clearer.

Literary Lenses and Analysis(workshop 2)

In this class, the concept of literary lenses should not restrict you, but rather give you ideas about what you can find in a text. Note that every lens does not exist equally in any given text, and still a text may be viewed through multiple lenses. It is up to you to find the most compelling evidence to support your point of view in your analysis.

It is important that you actually Google/JSTOR search both the words in the text you want to use, and the outside concept. Each word has tens and hundreds of different definitions, connotations, historical uses, associated ideas, etc. Your job is to focus on one of those things in the textual citation, and one of those things in the outside concept.

Analysis explicates a connection between the text and another idea - it doesn’t just identify this connection.

1. One way to approach this explication is by word association - what specific idea of the textual element is related to what specific idea of your outside concept, and how?

i.e. The personification of the moon, “lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her” (Stevenson, 24) evokes a dream-like state for the characters.

This example simply identifies a connection. There is no explication of the relationship between personification, the moon, and dreams.

i.e. The personification of the moon, “lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her” (Stevenson, 24) evokes a sense of mystery. This inanimate orbiting rock is transformed into a living creature, laying down next to the characters within their own field of gravity. The moon is tiltable and affected by the wind, reflecting the transformative power of the environment. It is as if the moon lays watching the characters, seeing the mystery of Mr. Hyde unfold. This metamorphosis is the stuff of nightmares, rendering the characters’ reality

into a dream-like state where the natural laws of the universe no longer apply. It is as if the moon is impartially gazing on the characters in the square “full of wind and dust,” while the “trees in the garden were lashing themselves along the railing” (Stevenson, 24). The environment comes alive and further obscures the enigma of Mr. Hyde, reflecting the haze of confusion the other characters are wading through. This personification indicates that the characters’ natural world has become an unstable reality, further preventing them from discovering the instinctive truth of Mr. Hyde’s person.

This example connects a specific element of the moon - its stoniness to its livingness - to a specific element of dreams - an unnatural reality. This analysis explicates this relationship so that the reader understand how exactly personification of the moon indicates mystery - the fact that this transformation indicates the characters’ experience of their own reality.

Even if you already know what “dream” is, Google it. Look it up on JSTOR. You will find all kinds of connections between dreams and other ideas you didn’t know existed that will help make your analysis more interesting.

2. Another way to approach analysis explication is by using the questions below to organize your thoughts in a way that answers specific questions.

*Note: As you answers these questions in your paragraphs, for every question, you must also answer, and how does this prove the thesis claim?

Historical

Plot details, settings, and characters of the work are representative of events, settings, and people in the author’s life or are a result of or reaction to the author’s cultural context

Questions to consider:

• What time period was the work written, and what time period is the literary work taking place in? Is there a connection?

• What is the background of the author? How does this affect their world- view? What role does this world-view have in the text?

• Were major historical events taking place? What were they? How does the text reflect this?

• Are the characters a product of their time? • Are any of the characters a voice for change? What message is the author

trying to convey through them?

Philosophical

The function of literature is to teach morality and probe philosophical issues, such as ethics, religion, or the nature of humanity.

Questions to consider:

• What view of life does the story present? Which character best articulates this viewpoint?

• According to this work’s view of life, what is mankind’s relationship to God? To the universe?

• What moral statement, if any, does this story make? Is it explicit or implicit?

• What is the author’s attitude toward his world? Toward fate? Toward God?

• What is the author’s conception of good and evil? • What does the work say about the nature of good or evil? • Is good rewarded? Is evil punished? • Is the world ordered or random? • What does the work say about human nature?

Formalistic

The work is an independent and self-sufficient artistic object; this perspective comes from the 19th-century idea “art for art’s sake”

Everything necessary to interpret the work is inside it, and outside influences like the author’s own life and historical times can be disregarded

Close reading is important, and searches for structures, patterns, imagery, motifs, and figurative language along with the juxtaposition of scenes, tone, and other literary techniques

Questions to consider:

• How is the work’s structure unified? • How do various elements of the work reinforce its meaning? • What recurring patterns (repeated or related words, images, etc.) can

you find? What is the effect of these patterns or motifs? • How does repetition reinforce the theme(s)? • How does the writer’s diction reveal or reflect the work’s meaning? • What is the effect of the plot, and what parts specifically produce that

effect? • What figures of speech are used? (metaphors, similes, hyperbole,

personification, etc.) • How does the writer use paradox, irony, symbol, plot, characterization,

and style to enhance the story? What effects are produced? Do any of these relate to one another or to the theme?

• Is there a relationship between the beginning and the end of the story? • What tone and mood are created at various parts of the work? • How does the author create tone and mood? What relationship is there

between tone and mood and the effect of the story?

• How do the various elements interact to create a unified whole?

Psychoanalytic

Literature is primarily a fictitious expression of the author’s personality, mindset, feelings, and desires

Requires an investigation of the psychology of the characters and their motives to determine the work’s meaning

Started with Sigmund Freud; archetypes include rebellion against the father, death-wish forces, and sexual repression

Characters’ dreams, visualizations, and fantasies hold psychoanalytic truth

Questions to consider:

• What does the text reveal about the author? What message is the author trying to relay?

• What attitudes appear in the text? How do they change or progress through the piece?

• What kinds of family dynamics are happening in the work? • Perhaps a character shows signs of mental repression, what events have

influenced this? How does it affect their daily life? How does it affect relationships with family and/or friends?

Feminist/Gender

Use a variety of gender-related issues concerning the author, the work, the reader, and the societies of each of them respectively to determine the work’s stance on the feminist continuum

Feminist critics look for development of male and female characters and their motives to see how author and his or her times affected the gender roles in the work

Questions to consider:

• Is the author male or female? How do they connect with the text? • Are there traditional gender roles? Do characters follow these roles? How

would they view a character that did not follow traditional roles? • Are women minor characters in the text or do they take on a prominent

role? What roles do they have? Does it relate back to the gender of the author?

• How does the author define gender roles? • What role does society/culture play in gender roles/sexuality in the text? • Would an LGBTQIA character be accepted in the text? Why or why not?

Socio-economic/Marxist

Considers aspects of the political content of the text, the author, the historical and socio-cultural context of the work, and the cultural/political/personal situation of the reader in relation to the text

Focus on themes as they relate to economic class, sex, and instances of oppression and/or liberation

Questions to consider:

• What role does class play in the text? • How does class affect the characters and the actions they choose? • Maybe a character moves from one class to a new one, what are the

implications? • What characters have money? What characters are poor? What are the

differences? • Does money equate to power? • Perhaps a rich character is a villainess and a poor character is morally

rich, why is this? What causes this?

Information taken from Pellissippi State Community College Library, SharpSchool, and Germanna Community College.

Workshop 2 Close reading is active reading. It is not for the purpose of finishing the text, but rather

extracting a nuanced understanding of ideas.

Here are some actions to do while close reading:

1. Begin by asking, what does this sentence/word/idea remind you of? What did it

make you remember about anything you’ve ever read, heard, thought about,

said, or experienced?

2. Ask yourself questions about what’s happening in the text, in a sentence, or

within a single word:

• What role is it playing? (Perhaps hermeneutically?) What is it doing in

relation to the other words/ideas in the text?

• What is the text’s attitude towards that idea/word?

• What is it presuming? In order for you to agree, what does it need you to

mutually assume?

• What is it privileging?

• What is it promising?

• What is its impact?

• What is it suggesting?

• Is there an accidental contradiction? Or, is it on purpose? What’s the

significance of that contradiction?

• Is there an anxiety?

• What is it trying to refer to, and what do you think it’s actually referring to?

One way to form your own questions - that guide both your reading and writing -

is to Google “rhetorically accurate verbs.” There are hundreds of these verbs;

choose the one(s) that strike you most, and use them to ask a question about

something you’re reading.

3. Consider a particular field that you’re interested in, and ask questions about how

the text relates to that field. Here is an extensive document of questions (Literary

Lenses and Analysis) that pertain to ideas of history, philosophy, narratogy, etymology,

psychoanalysis, gender, and class. Some example questions are:

• Are any of the characters a voice for change?

• According to this work’s view of life, what is mankind’s relationship to

God? To the universe?

• What recurring patterns (repeated or related words, images, etc.) can you

find? What is the effect of these patterns or motifs?

• What attitudes appear in the text? How do they change or progress

through the piece?

• What role does society/culture play in gender roles/sexuality in the text?

• Does money equate to power? How?

Writing an analysis paragraph(workshop 2)

Using your ideas from these close reading techniques, we will build a citation-

based analysis paragraph.

A citation-based analysis paragraph makes a claim about a specific citation,

whether that is a sentence, a phrase, or a single word. The goal of this paragraph

is not to rephrase or summarize the idea, but rather to expand on it and provide

your own thoughts on it. Ultimately, this is the paragraph you will write in your

final paper that will work to provide a reason that your thesis is plausibly true.

To start writing your paragraph, please create your own Google doc in the shared

Workshop 2 folder and complete these steps:

1. Find a citation from one of the readings that you want to talk about. A

citation can be a full sentence, a phrase, or a single word. This citation

may either be a direct quotation or a paraphrase. Make sure to cite it using

MLA formatting.

e.x. Fanon describes the tabula rasa as the very beginning of

decolonization (35).

2. Identify what stands out to you in this citation. What word? What tone? What

about the sentence structure?

e.x. The tabula rasa

3. Now explain why that stands out to you. What does it remind you of? What

are you detecting? For example, if you detected irony in your citation, what

exactly is the ironic part of the citation?

e.x. The tabula rasa is reminiscent of Sigmund Freud’s mystic writing pad.

4. Expand on that idea in 4-ish sentences. What is the impact of that thing you

detected? You may end up citing other parts of the text to support your analysis.

Use rhetorically accurate verbs, and for more guidance, you may want to

answer one of the questions on this document.

*Note: While I am including another source, you don’t need to. This source

is not a result of me doing research on the topic of tabula rasa; my citation

just reminded me of this thing I had read before.

e.x. Freud’s writing pad is a metaphor for the persistent relationship

between the conscious and unconscious - that traces of memory, though

we may not remember them, stay with us and affect our current perception

(“A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’”). For Fanon, however, he urges

people to decolonize with a completely blank slate. There should be no

traces of what was so that what may be has the opportunity to flourish.

Fanon’s idea, in the context of the human psyche, privileges the

conscious and perhaps even refutes the notion of the unconscious. In the

generation of revolution, the memory of colonization is obliterated and

therefore creates “new men” (36). In contrast to Freud, then, we may say

that the unconscious is a burden in Fanon’s notion of decolonization. The

unconscious is not simply a place where unremembereds are stored, but it

is the place where the colonizer lives in the psyche of the colonized

individual.

Outlining the paper(workshop 3) By doing a close reading, and turning that into a paragraph, you can use that to outline

the rest of your paper.

Ask yourself, what is the one idea in that paragraph that you want to keep writing

about? How do you think you could expand on that? That “one thing” will be the core of

your thesis, and it is what you will touch on in the rest of your close reading paragraphs.

In order to set up your plan for the paper, please complete the following on your own

Google doc:

1. Copy and paste the paragraph you turned in.

2. Type out a thesis statement. If it’s still drafty or vague, that’s ok!

3. Type out 4 more citations from your text of choice, and cite them using MLA.

4. Under each citation, follow what we did in Workshop 2, in 3-4 sentences:

a. Identify what part of the citation you’re interested in. Is it a word? The

tone? Something about the sentence structure?

b. Write what you are going to bring out of that part. What does it remind you

of? What questions does it make you ask?

c. Write what you think this citation is doing, in the text and in relation to the

thesis. How does this citation build off of the paragraph you already

wrote? How is it supporting the thesis?

Note also that each paragraph should have the components of the Duke MEAL Plan, as

you worked on in discussion.

● If you’re having trouble just approaching the text, follow the tips (Workshop

1)!

● If you’re having trouble getting out an analysis, or ideas related to the text,

consider answering any of the questions in this (workshop 2) and this (Literary Lenses and

Analysis) document!

● If you don’t know how to actually write and structure your paragraph, follow the

steps on this (Writing an analysis paragraph) document! Added to the steps in this document

should be a Main point (topic sentence) and explicit Link to the thesis, as the

Duke MEAL Plan formulates.

Duke MEAL Plan