High Class Homework

The first step is to choose one of folloiw the course texts on which to focus for this assignment:

Francois Lyotard, selections from The Postmodern Condition.(CHOOSE THIS)

The second step is to determine what aspect of the text you have selected will be the focus of this research process and of the potential paper. Once you have done these things—selected your text and decided what the basic topic of your research will be—you may move on to the follow parts for this assignment.

Come up with a topic about education and knowledge (should be a research topic on education and knowledge)

Part I

Two Further Works by Your Author (1 page is enough for now) half page each

Here you must locate two overtly and obviously relevant primary resources, discovered in the library (or the library’s databases), and provide one-paragraph descriptions of each of these two items which includes an explanation of what use these items would be to you, in the event that you were going to develop a paper on your chosen text. These items must be a book, book chapter, or scholarly essay written by your author. You must read at least 40 pages of the author’s work, but it is recommended that you read the text in its entirety, whichever text that might be. Your paragraphs should each be roughly one double-spaced page. Be sure to provide complete MLA style citations for each of your two chosen works.

Part II

One Biographical Account of the Author of Your Chosen Text

.

Because these are fairly contemporary authors, this information will come from various sources: Wikipedia, Wikipedia’s bibliography, faculty web pages, curriculum vitæ, among others. After having read these entries, provide a one-page summary of your findings, and highlight any details that might be relevant to your hypothetical paper. Your summary should concentrate on details pertinent to your text (don’t simply retype the birth and death dates, names of parents, and so forth, if those details are not immediately relevant to your chosen text or topic for your hypothetical research paper. The summary should focus on and interpret details of the biography that are pertinent to the hypothetical research project.

PART III

One Piece of Academic Criticism on Your Chosen Text

.Here you must locate one scholarly essay on your chosen text or texts. Ideally, this essay will related in some way to your research topic, but it is not absolutely necessary that it do so (in fact, one of the things about reading secondary scholarship is that you discover the kinds of things in which other scholars are interested when it comes to your chosen text, author, theme, etc.). In any event, you must read the article, provide a three to four sentence summary of the main argument or arguments, and explain how the opinions and arguments expressed by the author of the critical essay would or might relate to the ideas and arguments of your hypothetical paper. Please be cautious here. Avoid plagiarism and do not simply cut and paste from the essay or from the essay’s abstract. Your essay may be taken from a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, an edited collection of scholarly essays, or be a chapter of a scholarly monograph.

Part IV

Essay

.Here you must select one or, at most, two passages from the work that you have selected and write one to two pages of analysis on that passage. Close reading or textual analysis is one important component of academic writing, no matter what department you find yourself studying in. For this part of the assignment, you should offer your reader detailed and interesting observations on specific moments in your chosen text. I suggest you find one surface level aspect (image, theme, motif…) of the text that you find intriguing (challenging, puzzling, frustrating, provocative…) and try to trace it through: for example, Lyotard’s interest in narrative or Rancière’s interest in post-Soviet history. By focusing on one (or, at most, two) passages in which this theme or pattern is evident, what tentative conclusions might you draw about the concept/idea as a whole? In other words, try to find a passage that helps you to make an argument about the overall meaning of the text and then clarify in your essay how that passage exemplifies, illustrates, symbolizes, or encapsulates some larger theme, motif, pattern, or meaning that you deem important to understanding the text.

Ideally, but not necessarily, the theme, motif, pattern or meaning that you will discuss in this essay will in some way relate to the piece of criticism that you must read for Part III. If that is the case, you are encouraged to use it for support of your ideas. Your essay, however, should not merely restate the views of the critical essay you have read on your chosen text.