Reading Response: The Republic

Assignment Description: Reading Response Papers

The purpose of the reading response assignments is to give you the opportunity to take a crack at interpreting literature yourselves, thus to give you a better appreciation of the challenges involved and to get you thinking about what goes into analyzing the material we read. Three times over the course of the semester you will be expected to submit a short paper that responds to questions posted to iLearn. One should be completed on or before Oct. 18th, one between Oct. 19th and Nov. 15th, and one between Nov. 16th and Dec. 13th.

Assignment Basics

Length: 2-3 pages. The minimum is 2 full pages.

Due Dates: Variable (see below)

Subject – The papers should consist of responses to the interpretative questions posted for a given reading on iLearn

Submission – Please submit the paper in iLearn, and also a paper copy in class.

Three times over the course of the semester, you will submit a paper at least 2 full pages in length that offers your response to the discussion questions posted on iLearn about the reading assignment for a particular day. You have a great deal of choice as regards the readings to which you wish to respond. The only requirements are that you turn in one paper on or before Oct. 18th, a second on or before Nov. 15th, and a third on or before Dec 13th. Other than that, you are free to choose which papers you will write. Look at the schedule and the discussion questions and plan to write papers on topics that sound interesting to you, or on dates that fit well with your schedule. The papers should be written about the reading material for the day they are submitted. In other words if, for example, you are turning in a reading response paper on Oct. 2nd, that paper must be on Medea (see the reading schedule in the syllabus). By corollary, if you want to write about the Medea, you must submit your paper on Oct 2nd.

Avoiding Pitfalls: Writing Mechanics

Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation, etc. – Although this is not a composition class per se, it is important nonetheless that your papers conform to college standards in matters of grammar, syntax, etc., and will be marked down if they do not. If writing is not your strong suit, it would be a good idea to pay extra attention to this. One useful option is to

bring your paper in to the Learning Assistance Center and ask to talk to a writing tutor. The LAC is located in HSS 348. Their number is (415) 338-1993 and their web page can be found at

http://www.sfsu.edu/~lac/index.html

If you would like a referral (not necessary, but it allows me to communicate with the center) I am more than happy to provide one. I am also happy to talk to you directly about your writing, although the people at the LAC are there specifically to help you with general advice on writing and are probably the best ones to consult first. It can not be stressed enough that writing is the most important skill you can develop in college – more important by far than knowledge of ancient literature. Fairly or not people are going to judge your talent, your potential, even your intelligence by how well you can express yourself. If writing is not your strong suit you owe it to yourself to take the opportunity you have now to improve in this absolutely vital area.

In reading my markings note that the following abbreviations are used...

I.S. – Incomplete Sentence: the sentence lacks a fully formed main clause R.S. – Run-on Sentence: a sentence that should be broken down into two or more shorter sentences. W.C. – Word Choice: the word you have chosen is inappropriate in this context. Are you sure that you know what it means? Awk. – Awkward: a catchall for sentences which, although grammatically correct, read very poorly for one reason or another.

Informality of Style – This is typically more a problem of expectations than of skills. College essays (a category to which our reading responses belong despite their short length) should be written in a formal style. This does not mean that they have to be pompous or stilted, but they should be free of slang, colloquial expressions and contractions.

Problems with Quotations – You are welcome to quote the texts that we are studying in your papers. However, many students believe, wrongly, that every paper, or even every paragraph within a paper, must be structured around one or more quotations. There is absolutely no need to organize your writing this way. You should instead quote only in cases where the wording of a passage is important and therefore needs to be made available to the reader so that he/she can understand what you have to say about it. Otherwise paraphrase (with a reference) is almost always more economical. When you do quote, your quotation should be integrated into one of your sentences rather than inserted between two of them. Thus...

Hera’s rage is so all-consuming that, in Zeus’ words, she would “devour Priam and Priam’s sons and the Trojan armies raw” [Iliad 4.40-41] if only she could. This is how the gods hate; such anger, when indulged by mortals, leads to calamity.

is better than...

Zeus says that Hera’s rage is all-consuming. “Only if you could breach their gates and their long walls and devour Priam and Priam’s sons and the Trojan armies raw – then you just might cure your rage at last” [Iliad 4.39-42]. This is how the gods hate; such anger, when indulged by mortals, leads to calamity.

[I will use the Iliad as an example throughout this document, even though we did not read much of it for this class.]

As far as the citations themselves are concerned, you are welcome to use inline citations (as above), or footnotes, or even endnotes if you like.

Paper Length – The reading response papers are intended to be short assignments, but when I said that two full pages was the minimum I meant that literally. The challenge in an assignment of this type should be to squeeze everything you have to say into only two pages (or a little more). If you find yourself instead trying to stretch your paper out to fill two pages by expanding the header on the first page to ridiculous lengths (I have seen some that took up more than a third of a page), by leaving a substantial chunk of the second page empty, or by fiddling with font sizes, margins, etc., the real problem is that you need to go back to the material and find more to say. Papers that are not a solid two pages long will be marked down for it.

Summary – The idea in this paper is to show me that you have been doing some meaningful thinking about the reading assignments and about literature. With only two pages to work with you need to keep everything extraneous to this purpose to a minimum so as to fit as much of your own thinking into the paper as possible. You definitely should make reference to the text where appropriate (see above), but you don’t need to summarize the work; I already know it. Spend the little space you have on making your own views clear.

Lack of Coherency – Students sometimes try to pack a dozen or more assertions into these two page essays. Whether this comes from a desire to be comprehensive or because the writer has only a little to say about each of their many points, a paper of this kind is always unconvincing. It is far better to develop one or two ideas fully than to jump to a new idea every sentence or two. The assignment does not demand that you mention address every discussion question a day’s assignment. Instead I want to see that you have come up with something interesting to say about something in the day’s reading. You are more than welcome to focus the entire paper on a single discussion question, provided

you have something insightful to offer about it. Indeed, the narrower your focus the better your paper is likely to be.

Inspirational Opening Paragraphs – Somewhere in their primary or secondary education many students get the impression that every essay must begin with a paragraph that either makes grandiose claims about the subject matter or asserts the student’s love for it. While the former might be appropriate if you were writing a book, it is out of place and a waste of valuable space in a short analytical essay; the latter is just silly. Skip the fluff and jump right into making your analysis. The only sort of prologue that might be useful is one that helps clarify the coming argument by giving the reader an outline of what is to follow or serves to put it in its proper context (i.e. a thesis statement), and even here you should try to keep it brief. Avoiding Pitfalls: Conceptual Issues

Unsupported Arguments – Far too often students made claims about a work of literature without citing any textual support whatsoever. Bare assertions of this kind do not demonstrate of command of the material, nor do they demonstrate that you know how to interpret our texts. What you need to do in this assignment is to show how you reason from certain elements in a piece of literature that you have read to a conclusion you have drawn about that literature. Since the analysis connects the literature (the “data” if you will) to the conclusion you draw from it, you need to explicitly discuss the evidence you are using. If you leave out the evidence and give me only the conclusion it is impossible for me to evaluate whether you are learning how to interpret the texts. If, upon reflection, you find that you really don’t have any particular literary evidence in mind when making your claims you will often find that your assertions fall into one of two categories: impressionistic responses and emotional responses.

Impressionistic Responses – Although the term “Reading Response” is a common one for a short analytical essay it can lead to a certain amount of confusion. Students sometimes write something like this...

I somehow feel that Aphrodite was more a positive figure than a destructive force in the Iliad.

Apart from the fact that this sort of statement sets up a false dichotomy (an either/or proposition) its main flaw is that it makes no argument. Indeed, it does not even really make an assertion about the Iliad at all, but rather an assertion about the writer’s response to it. This is not what we are aiming for here. You need to make a claim about what a literary work is saying, and then support it with arguments rooted in the texts themselves. If you find that you have gotten a certain impression from the reading, that can be a good place to start, but rather than simply share the impression in the paper you need to ask yourself how you came by that impression. Once you have found what it was in the texts that gave you that impression you need to further ask yourself whether your impression

was idiosyncratic (something only you would experience), or whether the story could be reasonably expected to have evoked a similar reaction from an ancient audience. If the latter, you have the basis for a good reading response argument.

Emotional Reponses – Similarly, the title is sometimes interpreted as an invitation to share an emotional response to a story or to one or more of its characters. This is emphatically not what I am looking for. I certainly hope that you enjoyed the works and responded to them – they were intended to evoke powerful emotional responses and the survival of these pieces for so many centuries is a function of its ability to do so. That said however, the essays are meant to be analytic exercises for which the writer’s love (or hate) for the subject of the analysis is irrelevant. The important question is how the people who told these works (i.e. the ancient Greeks), felt about them, which leads to the next point...

Treating Fictional Characters as Real People – It seems safe to assume that none of us in Classics 410/HUM 401 thinks that someone named Zeus sitting on top of Mt. Olympus makes the rain fall, or that any other the other figures or events portrayed in these tales are, or ever were, real. And yet it was surprisingly common to find statements in reading responses like the following...

“In my opinion the Greeks never really understood Aphrodite’s true character” (not an actual quote from anyone’s paper, but a paraphrase of many)

If you pause and think about it, statements like this make no sense. The Greeks invented Aphrodite (and the rest of the mythic system). There is no genuine Aphrodite to which the Greek conception of her can be compared. There are only the stories that the ancient Greeks chose to tell about her, and in consequence the Greek view of Aphrodite cannot be “wrong”. By the same logic, although some of these stories may conflict with one another in this or that respect, from our point of view all are equally valid; we can’t say that one is more accurate than another because there is no real goddess against which the relative merits of different depictions can be measured. Hence saying that one version of a story or one characterization of a fictional literary figure is wrong is as nonsensical as saying that all of them are.

In studying ancient Greek literature we are not studying the Greek gods per se, or their heroes, or their monsters. There are not, and never were, any gods, heroes or monsters. What we are studying is a group of real people and a certain language that they developed for talking about the world and about their lives. In literature the ultimate objects of our study are not the fictions they created as part of this language but rather the people who invented them. One feature of good storytelling is that we are powerfully moved to suspend our disbelief and think of the fictions we are offered as being genuine. Much of what we are reading in this class is not just good, but indeed brilliant, storytelling, but

when it comes time to look at the works analytically the temptation to think of the fictional people and events as being real is one we have to resist.

Judging Literature (or Historical Greek/Roman Cultural Practice) by Modern Standards of Morality, Justice, etc. – When we encounter a new culture, either by direct observation or through its literature and art there is a strong tendency for most of us to assess that culture by the ethical standards of our own society. This kind of exercise is, almost by definition, ethnocentric, and I would encourage you to make the effort to step outside your own ingrained cultural expectations and try to understand ancient societies on their own terms. That said, I will not tell you that you should not ask yourself whether you find this or that aspect of an ancient culture, as reflected in literature, to be just, moral, etc., but the reading response papers are the wrong place to express your answers to such questions, whatever they may be. What I want you to show me that you understand is the process of analysis by which we can gain an understanding of what the literature meant to the people who wrote it. What your own views are on the moral validity of ancient society, while interesting, should not be part of the reading response exercise.

Let us take one example. The feature of ancient Greek culture that occasions more moral outrage among modern students of the Classics than all others combined is the way in which sharply defined gender roles shaped the experiences of women. The central thesis of many reading responses runs something like this...

The Iliad shows that the ancient Greeks were really awful people because of the way they treated women.

The problem with structuring an analytic essay around an argument of this kind is that it places the emphasis on your ethical judgment of ancient Greeks, rather than on understanding how the piece of literature in question works, which is the aim of the class. You are more than welcome to discuss how literature shaped the ways in which women understood their lives (or for that matter how men understood theirs), or how aspects of people’s real-life experience found expression in literary form. If you think that literature can tell us something about the ethical viewpoints of the people who created them you are free to consider what those might be, but you should leave your own ethical judgments out.