Requirements and Assignments
Your attendance and participation is vital for the success of this course. You will be permitted two unexcused absences; subsequent absences will adversely affect this portion of your grade. In order to be counted as present, please make sure that you come to class with the appropriate text, which you have read and have annotated, along with a notebook.
There is a good deal of reading in this class. You will have to be diligent to keep up.
Rather than give you reading quizzes, I will provide occasional in-class writing prompts that allow you an opportunity to work out some of your ideas from the reading assignments. These short, informal writing assignments will factor into your participation grade. Your participation grade will also account for in-class activities, such as the museum week assignments.
Key Terms Scalar Entry and Presentation (2) – 5% Each
Each student will be responsible for introducing two key terms to the class. Here’s what you’ll need to do:
Sign up for two terms during the first week of classes. Be sure to observe and mark down the date to which that term is assigned. Terms are attached to specific readings for which they will be relevant. Research the term and prepare an informal 5-minute overview of that term for the assigned class day. Compose a two-paragraph description of your key term. Upload your description, accompanied by at least one example of non-textual media, to the class Scalar page. Post this by the class day following your presentation. To earn extra credit, use Scalar to create links between your term and other key terms.
Continuations Project – 5%
During our Blanton Week, we will not have any class-assigned reading. During this time, students will form groups to cover one of the four continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval. I will pass a sign-up sheet around during the first week of class. Your group is responsible for creating a Scalar page outlining the major plot details of your assigned continuation. You may divvy the work up as you see fit. The post will be due by Monday, Feb. 15th at 11:59 PM.
Response Papers (3-4 pp.) – 12.5% Each
These short essays will expand on some item of class discussion into a 3-4 page paper. Response papers will be due at 5pm, by email, on Friday, March 11th (last day before Spring Break) and Friday, April 8th. The best responses will focus on a specific textual detail or interpretive knot. Use these response papers to work closely with the text in order to unravel an interpretive difficulty you’ve noticed in one of our texts. I will provide a rubric ahead of time. You can turn in these response papers at any time before the final due date. Your second response paper should cover material assigned after March 10th.
Revision and Expansion of Response Paper (5-7 pp.) – 15%
Given our thematic investigation of literary revision, it only seems right to ask you to work on revising your own writing. For this assignment, you will re-conceptualize one of your response papers and expand it to include discussion of a second primary text as well as a critical text. Please meet with me individually before you embark on this assignment so we can discuss how you might re-work your original response paper.
Research Project Outline and Presentation – 25%
Rather than have you write a seminar paper or create a last minute research project, I’m asking each of you to plan and outline a thoughtful and original research project that investigates some aspect of the grail legend. I encourage you to ground your project in the medieval grail texts, but I am open to other types of inquiry. Regardless of your textual focus, this project must include a non-textual mode of investigation, ideally using some digital tool. In other words, this isn’t about conceptualizing an essay, but about designing a multimodal research project. You need not be an expert in your chosen text(s) or mode(s) of investigation, but you will be responsible for detailing the steps of how you will come to understand your chosen textual tradition/methodology.
I will outline this assignment in more detail as the semester progresses. This research project pitch will be made up of the following assignments, each with different due dates:
Project Proposal (3-4 pages) – 7.5%
Annotated Bibliography (10-12 items) - 7.5%
Proposed Timeline (3-4 pages) – 5%
Presentation (5 minutes) - 2.5 %
Abstract (500 word max) - 2.5 %