Very High Class English Reading/Writing

Most academic writers will tell you that serious academic writing begins through a sustained, intellectual engagement with a body of scholarship. Your aim in this paper is to engage with Rancière’s essay, making sense of it for the reader and exploring the implications of his theory.

Note keywords: As you reread Rancière, you’ll want to note key words, phrases, and passages that help you construct an understanding of the text. The question here is, “around what moments/quotations from the text does my understanding coalesce?” Ultimately, this will enable you to move your reader from the global to the local—to borrow rhetorician Joseph Harris’s terms—as you define the project. As you begin writing, you’ll incorporate these moments/quotations using block and in-text quotations as you define the project and assess its uses and limitations.

Define the project: As Harris reminds us, to “define the project” means something more than just, “what is the thesis statement.” “What is the writer trying to do in this text? What is his or her project” (Harris 17; emphasis in the original). You’ll want to “describe the aims and strategies” of the author in carrying out this project (Harris 18). In essence, you are making an argument about what constitutes Rancière’s project, and you will support this through your work in defining the text’s keywords. N.B. The most productive way to do this will be to find one keyword that functions as the “center of gravity” for your understanding of Rancière’s theory, and then move your explanation out from that keyword.

Assess the essay’s uses and limitations: The final stage of making sense of a text is assessing its uses and limitations. In order to make this assessment, apply Rancière’s theorization to a context of which you have direct experience or knowledge. Using your experience, explore how the terms of Rancière’s project fit or do not fit the context you have chosen to discuss. You should avoid at any of the contexts Rancière already discusses (post-Soviet history, refugee camps, etc.), and instead extend his discussion in new directions such as sports teams, clubs, student government, orchestra, this class, etc. You want to assess, for the reader, the essay’s moments of “insight and blindness”: how does it allow us to see particular aspects of the context better; what shortcomings or limitations does the context reveal about Rancière’s formulation in order to do so. Importantly, this does not ask you to adjudicate whether Rancière is “right” or “wrong.” All theories have benefits and limitations; your task is to help the reader better understand what those are. Throughout, I would encourage you to treat the Rancière with the sort of “skepticism and generosity” with which you want other scholars to treat your work (Harris 27). After all, these essays represent the sort of academic writing that we are all imperfectly engaged in.