Draft - 2

Unit Two - information.docx

Unit Two: Inside Llewyn Davis by The Coen Brothers

About this Unit:

In our second unit, our primary source will be The Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis. Our second essay will mark the climax of the unit. Along the way, you will further engage with primary source material through reading, discussion, and watching a few videos that provide context for our dig into the text.

Again we will rely upon secondary source material--this time in an essay entitled "Songs of Innocence and Experience" by Jonathan Romney; I have supplied a video on Using Sources to help you build this skill.

In addition, you will view presentations on further compostional issues: our first PowerPoint on sentence-level grammar and a video on the all important topic of organization.

Don't forget to participate in discussion threads and take the unit quiz.

Unit Objectives:

By the end of this unit, students will:

II.1. Further develop active engagement with primary source material by noting their observations and discussing those observation with others. II.2. Further develop active engagement with secondary source material by taking and sharing notes on that source. II.3.  Demonstrate an increased awareness of correct sentence-level grammar in their writing. II.4. Generate a series of topic-based paragraphs. II.5. Organize a sequence of paragraphs that proceed logically in support of the thesis. Steps to Complete for This Unit:

1. Perform assigned viewing of Inside Llewyn Davis. 2. Use the material provided to take notes on the film. 3. Read instructor commentary and view analytical videos on the primary source. 4. Participate in the three discussion threads on the film. 5. Review the material on Using Sources, and read and take notes Romney's essay. 6. View the presentation, "Sentence-level Grammar, part one." 7. View the presentation, "Topic-Based Paragraphs and Organizational Logic." 8. Take the Unit Quiz. 9. Compose and submit a partial draft of the second essay. 10. Compose and submit the final draft of the Essay Two.

Watching Inside Llewyn Davis

To-Do Date: Jun 24 at 9:00pm

Let's begin in the same fashion that we began Lady Bird: following Roger Ebert's advice, let's watch the film once all the way through attentively, but for entertainment. Our more careful observations will be better served with a second viewing.  Given the plot structure of Inside Llewyn Davis, this approach is even further called for. You'll see what I mean.

The film is on  Swank (Links to an external site.) , which is accessed in a manner very similar to Kanopy. If you are having trouble figuring our where to find Swank, use the following video. Never mind that I'm referencing The Dark Knight in the video--both films are in the same place... as are the remainder of the films we will use in this course.

"If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song...."

While watching Inside Llewyn Davis, use this note taking guide   download. Some of us are still too confined to plot in our note-taking, discussion (and, as a result, our essays) to get to real analysis. Look at what the best of your fellow students post: what approach are they taking?

As noted stylists, the Coen Brothers represent a great opportunity to break beyond plot; moreover the film employs a number of themes and motifs that beginning critics (that's you!) may latch onto.

· Circularity is probably the dominant motif. We see it in the records that spin, the timelessness of folk music, the round-trip journeys, and the plot itself.  The film might pit a more traditional Americanism of timeless folk music in opposition to the modern, linear logic of progress that we expect both in American capitalism and Hollywood films.

· Since Llewyn isn't always likable, the film creates a question about our judgment of the artist in relation to our judgment of their art.

· The film is very much about a generation--the Baby Boomers--and their inability to exist in the world created by their (often disdainful) parents and grandparents, members of the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation. Millenials and GenZers should be able to identify with this element.

· The film also sets up questions about tradition and modernity, music as an art and a business, the impending social upheaval of the 1960s, and Llewyn's relationship to the cat(s).

Let's first watch through the recording session of "Please, Mr. Kennedy,: which concludes at 0:33:30. For this film, I will eventually supplement with some video material that does not feature me, but I'd like to give you start. Please watch the following video in which I discuss the opening scenes of the film with these thoughts in mind:

Thread: Inside Llewyn Davis--Part One – due 26th

No unread replies.No replies.

Before participating in this discussion board, please make sure you've watched the first 33:30 of Inside Llewyn Davis while taking detailed notes. In addition, you will want to remind yourself of our discussion board standards by reviewing the discussion board rubric   download. And, finally, it should go without saying that we a required to be respectful and courteous at all times.

Here's what I want you to do in your initial post: In at least a full paragraph (minimum five sentences), explain what you think is interesting, important, and meaningful.  You don't have to have all of the answers, but you want to provide specific examples as the basis for further discussion.

Again: consult your notes. You may post more than once if you'd like to engage more than one topic in detail. I do not want a review (an evaluation of whether or not you like the movie): I want you to contribute specific observations that we can use to begin to understand how this movie works to construct meaning.

Make sure your post is up by the posted due date.

Then, after you've posted, you'll be able to see your classmates' posts.  Respond to two of them--talk about, in at least three sentences, whether you see what they see in the film.  Where are your interpretations similar?  Different?  Be specific with examples.

Responses need to be submitted by the following due date.

Sentence-Level Grammar: Part I

To-Do Date: Jun 26 at 9:00pm

Obviously, we are not going to learn everything there is to know about grammar here and now.  The instruction of grammar is actually not an objective of this course; ideally, you have already learned all of the basics of English grammar during your secondary education or any remedial coursework you've taken. To that end, I don't want to spend too much time on a subject that can be quite tedious; and, frankly, for adult learners sound grammar usually results from  a less than conscious feeling about what is right.

Having said that, my experience is that many 102 students do exhibit at least a couple of concerns related to correctness, mechanics, and grammar. To that end, we need to have a set of terms that I can use to comment on your writing so that you may work on your particular concerns. I've generated this powerpoint on the simple sentence   downloadto go over the most foundational elements of the simple sentence.  Be sure to review it carefully as it will be covered on the unit quiz. 

In our third unit we will cover compound and complex sentences as well as common issues with sentence level grammar.

Development: Claims, Evidence, & Warrants

To-Do Date: Jun 26 at 9:00pm

If the thesis is the brain of the essay and the organization is the skeleton, then development is the muscle of the essay. An underdeveloped essay is an unconvincing essay.

How do we adequately develop an essay? Through the analytical process.

· Each paragraph should have an argumentative purpose articulated in a topic sentence. 

· This purpose should rely on making at least one claim. Like the thesis, a claim is an arguable statement.

· Claims must be supported by evidence.

· Evidence is never self-evident; you must warrant that evidence.  To say you need to warrant evidence is another way of saying you need explain how your evidence supports your claim.

"You should just walk around always in a great big condom...."

For the next thread watch from 0:33:30 to 1:07:00, just before Llewyn plays "The Death of Queen Jane" for Bud Grossman.

Llewyn's character is based on a combination of the personality of Bob Dylan and the musical repertoire of his mentor, Dave Van Ronk.

Who is Bob Dylan? Well he's the second highest selling musical act of all-time behind The Beatles and ahead of Michael Jackson.  He began his career as a central figure of the American Folk Revival, arriving in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1961...the exact setting of this film.  Dylan changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, taking the name of Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.  He couch-surfed, slept with his friend's girlfriends, and stole records from people generous enough to put him up.  Where Dylan differs sharply from Llewyn Davis (and every other musician of the AFR) is that Dylan wrote his own songs.

Dave Van Ronk was older than Dylan, married, and rented an apartment where Dylan often crashed (not unlike Jim, played by Justin Timberlake).  Many of the songs Llewyn plays were standards of Van Ronk's set.  While Van Ronk did not write those song--such as "Hang Me, Oh, Hang me," "If I Had Wings," and others played by Llewyn--Van Ronk certainly made them his own.  He even recorded and album called Inside Dave Van Ronk.

As such, Llewyn's character explores the conflict between two very different versions of American culture: that of the individualism, productivity, stardom and financial success embodied by Dylan; and that of the communalism, tradition, and selfless obscurity embodied by Van Ronk.

As a definition of folk music, please view these two well known versions of "500 Miles," a song performed by Troy, Jim, and Jean in film:

"In my experience, the world's divided into two kinds of people--"

For our upcoming, final discussion thread watch the remainder of Inside Llewyn Davis.

In many ways, Inside Llewyn Davis is an "anti-Hollywood" film with an atypical style and structure.  This nature of the film makes sense given its thematic concerns, but it does create a situation in that we don't have the traditional sense of 'where it's going.' But, of course, maybe that because, like Llewyn, the film isn't "getting anywhere" in the traditional sense... This is not to say that the center of the film isn't populated by absolutely crucial and fascinating scenes:

Among my favorite scenes in the film is Llewyn's discussion with Jean at a the coffee shop.  I think we can make some inferences about the true nature of their relationship based upon their debate over Jean's conventional goals and Llewyn's rejection of those goals as "square." How do you think they feel about each other? What draws them together and drives them apart? Notice that Jean buys into the modern linear logic of progress. For her music is a way to make money, have children, buy a home in the suburbs; this all sounds great, but is this what she really wants? Will it make her happy? Does she love Jim? Llewyn ridicules her obsession with "the future" with mid-century tropes (not unrelated to JFK's moonshot) such as "flying cars" and the awful orange juice substitute, Tang.  But is Jean wrong that "the same shit is going to keep happening to" Llewyn? Isn't that kinda the point of a folk song?

Just after Llewyn learns that he has a child (likely living in Akron, Ohio), he attempts to return the Gorfein's cat.  Llewyn has his worst moment of the film when he erupts on Lillian, yet I like to ask students to put themselves in Llewyn's shoes.  He's homeless--not because he's lazy or untalented, but because his work has value that is cultural rather than financial. Even if he wanted to be a parent (which is debatable), he doesn't have the means or the simplistic worldview of Howie Greenfung's parents.  He is completely misunderstood by the master of "early music," Joe Flom, and even the Gorfein's. Why would Lillian think a professional musician wants her to sing along? The fact that we learn that Mike killed himself soon after only further mitigates Llewyn's guilt here. So Llewyn has an outburst, but it makes sense.  He's at a low point and he's in a safe space.

The ride to Chicago gives us two figures that are worth thinking about: Roland Turner, played by John Goodman, represents an older version of "cool," embodied in Jazz; while Jazz has always been taken more seriously as an art form than the Rock n' Roll or Folk that supplanted it, Jazz musicians often struggled in their personal lives, both financially and with drugs.

Johnny Five, played by Garret Hedlund, is a representative of the Beat movement; not accidentally, Hedlund played the most famous Beat--Jack Kerouac--in a previous role. The Beats were poets primarily, but dabbled in just about every Bohemian art form, and are seen as forerunners of the Hippies during an even more socially conservative era.

I think the sequence has two key motifs. First, even though Llewyn has a lot in common with the two men, their desperation does little to compel solidarity. They fight continually in attempting to avoid being the lowest of the low. Second, whereas authority had embodied comically in the judgmental looks of elevator operator or the man on the subway, now that Llewyn has left his circuit, he is now vulnerable to a crueler and less forgiving authority. Here, I'm thinking mainly of Johnny Five's arrest followed by Llewyn's encounters with the unsympathetic waitress and the policeman at the train station.

In preparation for Llewyn's make or break moment--his performance for Bud Grossman--, I think some context is important. First, Bob Dylan's manager was a man named Albert Grossman, who did in fact own a club in Chicago called The Gate of Horn. Llewyn hands him his record...

Thread: Inside Llewyn Davis--Parts Two & Three due 22nd

No unread replies.No replies.

Before participating in this discussion board, please make sure you've finished Inside Llewyn Davis while taking detailed notes. In addition, you will want to remind yourself of our discussion board standards by reviewing the discussion board rubric   download. And, finally, it should go without saying that we a required to be respectful and courteous at all times.

Here's what I want you to do in your initial post: In at least a full paragraph (minimum five sentences), explain briefly what you think is interesting, important, and meaningful.  You don't have to have all of the answers, but you want to provide specific examples as the basis for further discussion.

Again: consult your notes. You may post more than once if you'd like to engage more than one topic in detail. I do not want a review (an evaluation of whether or not you like the movie): I want you to contribute specific observations that we can use to begin to understand how this movie works to construct meaning.

Make sure your post is up by the posted due date.

Then, after you've posted, you'll be able to see your classmates' posts.  Respond to two of them--talk about, in at least three sentences, whether you see what they see in the film.  Where are your interpretations similar?  Different?  

Responses need to be submitted by the following due date.

"Au revoir"

Llewyn's performance of the English folk ballad, "The Death of Queen Jane," for Bud Grossman forms the climax (or maybe the anti-climax) of the film.  This song along with "The Shoals of Herring" (the song he plays for his father in the nursing home) are the only songs Llewyn plays that were not definitive of Dave Van Ronk's repertoire. As a result, I think these performances should be compared. Grossman doesn't really evaluate Llewyn's talent; rather, his response is a cold, hard capitalist assessment: "I don't see a lot of money here." This response may not be qualitatively different from that of Hugh Davis, who simply releases his bowels.

The subject of each song is also important.  "Queen Jane" treats the thankless and unrecognized (and possibly meaningless) death of a woman in childbirth: she literally gives her life in productivity for her country, and we shouldn't be afraid to see some resonance with the other pregnancies and references to small children in the film. "Herring" is about sailors, and it seems that Llewyn wants to posit his surrender of folk artistic ambitions--a surrender his world will not accept--as at the very least becoming the subject of folk art. His father's reaction undercuts re-joining the merchant marine as both "something new" and "something old."

And yet circular journeys are productive, but maybe not in ways we easily recognize.  The record goes round, but the needle move imperceptibly and we may be affected by the song anew. We like to hear songs again, right? There's some meaning is re-experiencing art, music in particular.

So, before we consider the end of the film and dismiss Llewyn's circularity as meaningless, I'd like you to consider the following performance of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol" by Bob Dylan on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1964:

Consider Dylan's performance. While he is broadly recognized as a master of the "hammer claw" style of folk guitar, no one would claim that his voice is traditionally pleasant.  What is this song about? Well, it's about a crime: a wealthy young white man who beats a poor middle-aged black woman to death.  But that's not the tragedy, according to Dylan: the tragedy is that the justice system lets him off with a short sentence.  This is to say the song is about systemic racism. And Dylan played this song on The Tonight Show in 1964 at the peak of the fight over the Civil Rights Movement when there were only three television networks!!!

Do you think Bud Grossman would "see a lot of money here"? Probably not, and he'd be wrong: Bob Dylan is the second highest grossing musical artist of all-time, right behind The Beatles and ahead of Michael Jackson. Moreover, does the profitability of such a performance even matter? Certainly not in the long run...

My point here is that we don't know that  Llewyn won't eventually break through. We don't know if Jean will have her child, or if she will end up with Llewyn, or if Llewyn will return to Akron to raise his child. And all of these open ends inform our understanding of the meaning of the film as well as it's ending

Now maybe the loose threads at the end invite the possibility that Llewyn evolves, that he makes some new sort of "progress" by adhering to his circuit. But it also seems possible that he does not, that Llewyn will always be what he is. I would argue that there is nothing wrong in Llewyn being what he is.  The Cohen Brothers have a history of validating protagonists for merely being true to themselves.  I'm thinking particularly of their cult classic, The Big Lebowski, which you must see if you have not.  That film concerns the unproductive--yet eventful--adventures of "the laziest man in Los Angeles," Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski.  And maybe like, The Dude, Llewyn Abides:

Using Sources: Romney's "Songs of Innocence and Experience"

To-Do Date: Jun 29 at 9:00pm

As you approach the conclusion of your analysis and discussions of Inside Llewyn Davis, we need to read THIS SECONDARY SOURCE   downloadby Jonathan Romney.

Please take notes as you read using this source analysis sheet   download.

I've located this source on Academic Search Premier (Links to an external site.) , and you can look it up there to find all of the citation information, including a citation button.  

Most appropriately, secondary sources are (like your essays) explicitly about the Articles about tangentially related topics--such as development in folk music in this case--are often not helpful to first year writers, leading them off topic.

Do not use outside research in your essays in this course until the final research essay; use only the provided source material or sources that result from the research process for the final essay.

The sources I provide are models of the sort of thing you will be searching out for the final research paper.

primary source. Please view the following video on Using Sources:

Topic-Based Paragraphs & Organizational Logic

To-Do Date: Jul 1 at 9:00pm

Like our previous compositional topics, organization is a subtle and complex concern. That said there are some rules-of-thumb that I'd like to discuss with you in the following video. Like the PowerPoint on sentences, this material will be covered in the unit quiz: 

To review:

· Many problems in organization stem from a problem in the thesis.

· If you don't know what you are attempting to accomplish, you cannot know what to do first.

· Topics define paragraphs.

· Body paragraphs should have topic sentences.

· Paragraphs should not shift topics.

· Paragraphs with suitable topics should be an appropriate length.

· Tiny paragraphs are not fully developed.

· Paragraphs that go on for over a page likely don't have one clear topic.

· Finally, organization is a multi-level concern in the essay.

· Logical organization generates a tension that works at all levels:

· Sentences relate to each other (they "flow").

· Paragraphs have clear topics.

· Paragraphs are ordered in a step-by-step demonstration of the thesis.

· Avoid summary.

Drafting Worksheet--Essay #2

Start Assignment

Please complete and upload this  DRAFTING WORKSHEET    download. There are seven questions of varying point values, so do not forget to address each of them.

For this essay, rather than submitting a partial draft, we are taking a step back in order to develop the foundations for the later portions of the essay.  This worksheet will help you with the basis of your introduction, but it will also help you think ab Student Sample Intro and Body Paragraph

To-Do Date: Jul 1 at 9:00pm

I have provided THIS STUDENT SAMPLE   downloadto guide you as you make adjustments in the composition of your second essay. Please view this as a sample rather than a model--it is not perfect, but it is on track as a first essay effort of ENG 102.

1) I have lightly edited this sample. For example, the original composition often employed the past tense, we know that appropriate collegiate style uses the THRID PERSON and the PRESENT VERB TENSE consistently.

2) The sample appropriately identifies the text by title and director up front with a summary of the premise of the film.

3) The sample identifies a concrete topic--"relationships"--that is will be able to analyze in the body of the essay. I do, however, think the author could better characterize this topic. The most important relationship seems to be the mother daughter relationship. Other important relationships include Lady Birds romantic relationships and her friendships. How will the essay explore these types of relations to lead to an interpretation? Which leads me to my next point...

4) I like that the introduction ends in a arguable claim--that compassion results from guilt. But is this true? Is this the only source of compassion in the film? We can only better answer this questions by relating this interpretation to the topic of relationships.

5) I like that the first body paragraph has a topic that is not introduced as the beginning of a summary, but is something that can serve the interpretation. However, the paragraph is heavy on claims and very light on detail. We need detail from the scenes we discuss so that we can explain how the text works to convey the meaning you are arguing for.

out your organization and development.

Essay Two--Inside Llewyn Davis

Follow  this assignment sheet    downloadin your composition of our second essay.

You will want to write the draft introduction first and receive feedback before uploading your carefully proofread and revised version of this assignments.

Of course, you will want to consider  the grading rubric    downloadthat I use for your essays.