#midterm essay

[en-231-world-lit-pre-1650]

If you wrote about Genesis or Job for your midterm essay, or if you plan to write about any of the selections from the Christian New Testament on the Qu’ran for the final literary analysis essay, THIS VIDEO IS FOR YOU. 

[en-231-world-lit-pre-1650]

midterm essay guidance/roundup

Far and away, the issue that the most people struggled with was identifying "key terms."

The whole category of "words in English" is not in play here. For a word or phrase to count, it has to be not just "a term in English" but one that has actually been "key" to this class.

I won't say this list is exhaustive, but it's pretty comprehensive; this is a snapshot of the vocabulary you need to be using as you draft your essay.

^ yes, you can see the QR code from my Rocketbook there in the bottom; I tried to scan as a doc, but I don't think the scanner likes that blue ink (oh well)

IMPORTANTLY,

you want to be drawing your definitions of these terms from class notes and/or the Bauman & Soffer readings; some of these terms have alternate meanings in other fields of study, so an unstructured Google search is unlikely to help you here.

We have not used these [ETA: BELOW this paragraph] yet in class, but some of you might find them helpful if you end up discussing textual transmission in significant detail, so adding them here because lbr

it is always good to have more treasures for the word-hoard

:

entextualization

the organization of a stretch of discourse into a text: bounded off to a degree from its discursive surround (its co-text), internally cohesive (tied together by various formal devices), and coherent (semantically intelligible)

-- that's from Richard Bauman, NOT in "The Philology of the Vernacular" but in a 2004 book titled A World of Others' Words: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality -- it felt like Too Much to assign for class, but you can see how the concept of entextualization might be useful if we are talking about all the ways that people make choices in how much to include when they pass on a story: what constitutes "completeness," and how do we decide?

I have spent a lot of time over the years trying to find better ways of explaining "entextualization," and the best I've come up with is a passage from my dissertation, so #ymmv but here you go:

Contextually, entextualization is to discourse as a cookie cutter is to rolled-out dough: applied, it distinguishes a cookie from the surrounding dough. To remove the cookie, to lift it out and set it on a tray with other cookies extracted and laid out for baking, is to decontextualize and recontextualize, respectively.

This gives us two more terms:

decontextualization (taking an entextualized "chunk" out of its previous context)

and

recontextualization (putting an entextualized "chunk" into a new context)

Probably the easiest way to understand these two is by example: Every single piece we read in the Norton Anthology is decontextualized (from its existence as a distinct text, circulating in a community somewhere) and recontextualized (grouped together with other examples of world literature and presented as significant among them).

[shirayuki7]

Excerpts from my midterm essay outline:

"Violence seems to be the only language these plebs understand."

"Consequences shmonisequences, as long as I'm rich."

"Renaissance art: Pagans in my Christian server!?"

"If it's not Baroque, don't fix it."

"Propaganda = wack"

"I'm a visual learner, so sue me."

"Beating people up and taking their stuff was the only way to get things done. By Fallout Boy."

[wren-likethe-bird]

In other news your girl got an A today

[lemon-drops-are-yummy]

I'm actually going to make a post everytime I get further on my essay. 250/1750 words complete.

[adlibitur]

have a midterm essay to write that’s due tomorrow and stepped on a tube of face stuff and my foot is swelling. 

fuckfuckfuckfuck FAAAAhHHK.

[xhunnybuns3]

I'm so done with this essay LOL, i just want to get it over with now x_x i wanna sleep already and im burning up and when i drank cold water i felt like dying D: thank god kitty is willing to help my dumbass. T____T I FEEL SO DRAINED. and i didnt have coffee this morning i took an after noon nap and it was so hot i felt like shit.

[zaida-in-hollywood-blog]

Must take the time to post on Tumblr how I shouldn't be distracting myself with online shenanigans in order to complete my 5-7 page midterm essay for American Film Noir...

Irony.