For Wednesday/Friday: Kumare = Handout

If you missed class on Monday, we watched the first half of Kumare, a documentary that loosely relates to some of the themes from our recent works. We'll finish it tomorrow (Wednesday) and then write about it on Friday. Remember that Paper #1 is due on Monday (see assignment below), and there is no class on Monday. 

Here is a link to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXUzG6YKuvo

ALSO, if you missed class, here is the handout I passed out:

WRITING PAPERS FOR HUMANITIES COURSES

THE GOAL: Remember, the goal of writing papers is to create a written conversation between you and the authors of the texts. It shouldn’t just be you saying “this happens, and then this happens, and this is important because of this...” Imagine that you’re actually having a discussion with the books in question, and in your paper, you speak, they speak, and you respond to their ideas.

AUDIENCE: Don’t write for me (the professor) and avoid saying “as we discussed in class,” or “like that one book about the X-Men said,” etc. Write for a general audience that is interested in the topic but wasn’t in our class and might not have read all the books. This way, you assume less and explain more. The more you assume, the less you represent the full conversation in your paper.

QUOTE: When exploring your ideas, be sure to quote passages from the books that would help other people see where your ideas come from, OR passages that you can respond to in order to examine problematic ideas. When quoting passages in your paper, make sure to follow the format below. Introduce the quotation (tell what author or work it comes from) and then cite it at the end (the page number, or if no page numbers are provided, simply cite the author). Don’t use stand-alone quotations.

EX: As Victor Frankenstein explains in Chapter Five of Volume Three, “I shall be with you on your wedding night.’ I should almost regard the threatened fate as unavoidable. But death was no evil to me, if the loss of Elizabeth were balanced with it; and I therefore, with a contented and even cheerful countenance, agreed with my father, that if my cousin would consent, the ceremony should take place in ten days, and thus put, as I imagined, the seal to my fate “(195).

After quoting a passage, be sure to respond to it: help us understand what this passage is saying and why it’s important to your discussion. Don’t assume the reader can read it the way you can, or understand why you’ve quoted it.

WORKS CITED CITATION: Make sure to cite all your works in a Works Cited page at the end of your paper like so:

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. [the basic citation is the author + the title of the work + publication information]
• Claremont, Chris. The Uncanny X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. New York: Marvel, 1981.
• Kumare. dir. Vikram Gandhi. Kino Lorber, 2011