Literary Temper/Literary Criticism Project

Literary Temper/Literary Criticism Project

For this project, you will choose one Literary Temper and one type of Literary Criticism and apply them to your story. You will create a slideshow illustrating your analysis and application of the temper and critical theory, record a video of it and upload it to eCampus (more directions will follow about how to upload it). Check the Assignment Schedule on eCampus for the due date. Here are your instructions:

Stories often have a coherent view of the world. Authors may write with a certain idea of life in mind, a certain philosophy that governs the way they see the world and what happens in it. This might manifest itself in the plot or in characters’ attitudes, in symbols and descriptions. For our purposes, we are going to call this overarching philosophy a Literary Temper. For this assignment, you will need to choose one of these five literary tempers to work with. Choose the one that most closely describes the world view or philosophy of the story (or a character in the story) that you are writing about for the short story essay assignment:

Romanticism: people are free to choose against moral, spiritual backdrops. If you make good decisions, you will be rewarded. There is a God that is in control.

Existentialism: people are free to choose, absent moral backdrops other than his own. If someone feels it is right, then it is right.

Naturalism: people are largely trapped, a cog in the impersonal machinery of society. They have no real way of changing his circumstances.

Realism: an effort to recreate what real life feels like. Focuses on reporting actual things, descriptions and events, and de-emphasizes the emotional, internal life of characters. Sometimes good things happen to bad people, and sometimes bad things happen to good people. That’s just the way it is.

Nihilism: Fallout of either extreme existentialism or naturalism. Life is horrible and painful. It lacks meaning.

These philosophies are described more fully in the Literary Tempers Defined document that is posted to ecampus under the Lesson Four folder. You’ll need to read through it to gain a better understanding of the intricacies of these ideas. You are also free to look up these terms elsewhere to get a better understanding of them.

While Literary Tempers can be seen as the tone of a story, or in other words, the philosophy that describes the author’s view of the world in the story, Literary Criticism is a way you can look at a story and try to make meaning out of it. Think of literary criticism as a filter you put on a photograph.

When you apply different filters to a story, different aspects of it stand out or become clearer. Feminism, Marxism, Historicism and Psychoanalysis are a few examples of literary critical theories. If we, for example, looked at “The Yellow Wallpaper” through the lens of Feminism, we might see more clearly how the protagonist is oppressed by her husband and how the various symbols in the story relate directly to women’s rights in society. Using the “Literary Theory and Criticism Overview” document in the Lesson Four folder under Class Content, choose one literary theory that you think would be interesting to apply to your short story. You are also free to look up these terms elsewhere to get a better understanding of them.

Once you have found a literary temper that you think best fits your story, and you have decided on a type of literary criticism through which to look at your story and analyze it, create a slideshow demonstrating your understanding of both.

Here are your specific requirements:

· Use 10-15 slides

· Half of the slides should be about the literary temper, and half the slides should be about the literary theory.

· Each slide should have some kind of graphic or picture

· Avoid large blocks of text.

· Include no more than six bullet points on any one slide.

· Give a title to each slide, even if it is the same title as the previous slide given that both slides may be on the same topic.

· Use the advice from this weblink as your guide: http://www.garrreynolds.com/preso-tips/design/

You may create your slideshow in either Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides. Once you have created your slideshow, you will need to make a recording of the slideshow with your own narration. That’s right, you will have to create a video of your slideshow. You will likely want to write a script or at least create the voice over using notes of some kind. It is easier than it sounds. The narration should explain what you have found out in your analysis, but it should not just be a reading of the information on the slides. I recommend making the slides, and the words on the slides, fairly basic and brief, using the voice-over narration as the tool to explain the slides.

Whether or not you use PowerPoint or Google Slides, you will probably need to use some kind of screencasting app. This link gives you one option that I’ve used that is very easy:

https://freegoogleslidestemplates.com/blog/how-to-save-google-slides-presentation-to-video/

If you want to use another piece of software, like Apple’s Keynote, to create your slideshow and video, you can, but it will be up to you to figure out the software.

This assignment will require a bit of time, but you will notice that you have weeks 8-10 (the next three weeks) to get this done along with your short story analysis essay. Please let me know if you have any questions.