In-class writings--English 4/4H Ideas

In-class writings

Summary

In-class writings are shorter essays, usually written in one class period, that focus on a more specific question or aspect of the course/reading than the longer papers. There are about five a semester, and they each count about a fourth as much as the out-of-class papers.

Sample Assignments

Modernism

Prepare to write on one of the following topics in class Monday 2/12:

• A critic has written that what a writer can say is often less valuable, even less interesting, than what cannot be said. Linguists attribute this incapacity for precision to the inherent ambiguity of language; postmodernists, to the fluidity of the human condition; quantum physicists, to the inherently indeterminate nature of matter; Western theologians, to the ineffability deriving from the infinity of God. Show how in The Trial what is not said is more important than what is explicitly stated or perceived by the characters. Write a well-organized essay that shows how the ambiguity of the work enhances, rather than limits, its significance.
• Mark Dintenfass wrote in an article about Heart of Darkness that modernist novels are characterized by:
  • A distrust of abstractions as a way of delineating truth
  • An interest in the exploring of the psychological
  • A desire for transcendence mingled with a feeling that transcendence cannot be achieved
  • An awareness of primitiveness and savagery as a condition upon which civilization is built
  • A skepticism that emerges from the notion that human ideas about the world seldom fit the complexity of the world itself and thus a sense that multiplicity, ambiguity, and irony—in life and in art—are the necessary responses of the intelligent mind to the human condition.

Pick one of the above characteristics and show how it applies (and perhaps how it doesn’t) to The Trial.

• Discuss the differing responses to the European conditions that produced modernism in visual art and in literature (using The Trial as your exemplar). (The slide show we used as the basis of our class discussions on the art is on the web page, but you should open it in Internet Explorer ( http://www2.sjs.org/Raulston/Ideas/Art.Kafkas.time.htm ) because the proportions of the paintings are occasionally way off in Mozilla/Firefox.)

The Trial

In chapter 2, K says, “…it is only a trial if I recognize it as such” (40).

• To what extent is he correct?
• Why does he agree to recognize it as a trial (ostensible and real reasons)?
• The Examining Magistrate says that K “thrown away” a number of his advantages by his conduct at the interrogation. What are those?
• How is his attitude toward his arrest/interrogation evolved from what it was in the first chapter?
• By the end of this chapter, what is the tone of the novel?
• What’s your attitude toward K over the course of these two chapters? Why?

--Draulston 10:58, 19 August 2008 (CDT)