Midnight’s Children: Booker’s Booker

This is the first week of class and our inaugural attempt at a bit of a blog on the books for our seminar. The idea behind this rudimentary bit of technology is to generate serious conversation outside the classroom about the novels. Each of you in the class will be assigned two weeks in which you are to post a “lead-blog” prompt. The lead-blog is a brief, but provocative argument about the text that we are reading for that week. Your comment on the site will be posted at least 24hrs before the class session you are assigned and your classmates will respond to the argument with the comment function on this site. The arguments should be thoughtful readings of the text that cannot be answered away with a simple yes or no, but instead require a reexamination of the text.

My expectations for your lead posts are that they use at least one sentence of text as evidence for the argument being made, that they will be approximately one to two paragraphs in length with an eye towards the pithy, rather than the verbose, and finally, that they will represent an authentic insight into the text’s positioning in relation to a matter of literary, cultural, or political context.

Likewise, the response posts (each of you will write 10 before the end of the semester) should be thoughtful and deeply tied to close reading of the novel. You will, of course, be responding to one of two lead-posts for a given week, and you should cater your response to the particular argument set forth by those peers. While you might very well disagree with a particular argument, you might equally agree, but wish to complicate the particular bit of writing with readings of different passages in the novels.

Ultimately, this is great practice for your critical writing during the semester and there is nothing that will sharpen your prose and your sense of literary argumentation like having to write thoughtfully for your peers. It the blog coughs up a bit of bile or froths at the mouth once or twice, we can only gain in the knowledge that words are powerful and that we can revel in that kind of dialogue.

~ by Chris on January 21, 2008.