To Kill A Mockingbird

Please follow one of the prompts below. Your creative response paper is an exercise in analytic and interpretive reflection. Your paper should be at least 3-4 double-spaced pages (and no more than 5) in length and you should only cite the readings on our syllabus. Pay careful attention to citing your sources and quotations and include a bibliography. In the body of the text you can quote using the author’s last name and year of publication. For example, in his essay “The Uncanny” Freud states: “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (Freud, 1963: 47). If you are using a PDF without page numbers you can cite the year. If you are citing lecture you can indicate it with (Mojaddedi, date of class). Your paper is due via canvas in the midterm folder by 11 Am on November 16.

Pick one option. You must draw on one of the conceptual pairs listed (and the associated readings) in your interpretation.

A. Conduct a mini ethnography and immerse yourself in a setting or your immediate surroundings. An ethnographer’s goal is to carefully observe, record and analyze a milieu, event, or culture through a “thick” or detailed description that reveals meanings. What is your encounter? What exactly do you see, hear and notice? How would you describe the experience? What lies behind this experience? You must divide your paper into two sections. The first half is purely descriptive and utilizes creative writing to bring to life the encounter or setting, and the second half is your interpretation which draws on the course readings and insights and one of the conceptual pairs below.

B. Pick a short story, novella, museum exhibit, theater performance or a film/documentary of cultural or historical relevance (not a television series). Your analysis should draw from the concepts we have been explicating in class in order to demonstrate how the film or exhibit relates or illuminates them. How do you understand the relationship between your object of analysis and the analytical frameworks we have covered so far? How does your film or exhibition illuminate these themes for you and how does it encourage us to challenge assumptions and ideas about society, and “objective” relations? Does it reveal hidden forces or contradictions at work? You must cover at least one of the following conceptual pairs:

1. Representation and culture

2. the uncanny and psyche (you can also write about civilization)

3. everyday life, tactics and practice

4. interpretation

5. language and subjectivity (you can also write about the pronoun “I”)

6. author vs author function