(This webpage is the assignment for our course's second midterm, to be updated and refined up to 25 March.)

Three parts to Midterm2:

Part 1. Continue genre definition and example(s) from Midterm1: Using the Introduction to Genres page, redevelop / revise and extend your "working definition" of genre in all three categories (Subject / Audience, Formal, Narrative) and use them to analyze the genre of your choice you began in Midterm1. Cite, explain, and analyze two or more examples of your genre from your reading, viewing, or listening experience and  and 2 research sources from course website or beyond. (total length: 6-8 paragraphs, 3+ double-spaced page equivalent)

Part 2. Learning about Tragedy 2: Revise, continue, improve, & Extend Essay begun in Midterm1 on learning experience with tragedy, extending to include Sophocles's Family of Oedipus plays. (Revise / improve midterm1 draft & add at least 5-7 paragraphs for 9-10 paragraph total.) 

Part 3. Begin Research Report: Write at least 3-4 substantial paragraphs with two sources toward completion of your Research Report on selected special topic (to be completed on Final Exam)

Format: in-class or email

• No regular class meeting on 1 April but classroom available for students who want to write exam in-class; instructor keeps office hours 4-8 on Wednesday 1 April.

• Email exams due to whitec@uhcl.edu by midnight Friday, 3 April. "Submission window" is 26 March-3 April.

Most unusual feature of this course's midterms and final exam: All 3 parts are semester-long writing projects. In response to feedback from instructor, additional course readings, and your continued learning, you will revise, update, and extend your Midterm1 drafts in Midterm2 and the Final Exam.

Several courses I instruct feature continuing writing assignments, but spring 2015 Tragedy is the first course to require students to revise earlier parts and combine earlier drafts to a complete whole.

This means the three essays you wrote for Midterm1 become three longer essays for Midterm2, and even longer essays on the Final Exam.

Instructor reads each draft as a more-or-less complete essay-in-progress. You will be graded not only on what you've added but on the overall quality of each entire essay, including surface quality and thematic unity. You are expected to make improvements in response to your instructor's feedback.

Rationale: Writing is Literature's most important skill, a multi-level exercise in creative and critical thinking that develops the intellect and judgment. The best-proven way to improve writing is through guided rewriting.

Special requirements:

• Both your essay and your research report must have titles.

• Somewhere in Midterm2 refer directly to something you learned from another Spring 2015 student's midterm1 on Model Assignments. (Models make an important ingredient for improving writing.)

Details on Midterm2 Content

Part 1. Continue genre definition and example(s) from Midterm1: Using the Introduction to Genres page, redevelop / revise and extend your "working definition" of genre in all three categories (Subject / Audience, Formal, Narrative) and use them to analyze the genre of your choice you began in Midterm1. Cite, explain, and analyze two or more examples of your genre from your reading, viewing, or listening experience and  and 2 research sources from course website or beyond.

Length: 6-8 paragraphs total ( 3+ double-spaced page equivalent)

Contents (mostly repeats or redevelopments from Midterm1 rewrite, with notes on rewriting and extending):

"Working Definition" = use the Introduction to Genres to define the meaning, importance, and limits of "genre." Specifically define and distinguish Subject / Audience genre, Formal genre, and Narrative genre with brief, general examples. This "working definition" can be revised, questioned, or extended as you work with examples of your chosen genre.

Continue illustrating and analyzing the genre you chose in Midterm1: Revise and extend your definitions, example-descriptions, and analyses that you began in Midterm1. Explain so that someone who doesn't know what you're talking about can understand what you're talking about, both in definitions and examples. 

Continue analyzing your example(s) as genre: This essay is a classic exercise in the critical-thinking pattern of definition-example-analysis, in which the writer ventures a working definition, tests it against examples, then revises or extends the definition based on how the example interacts with the definition. Result: refreshed and continuing learning about genre and of text-examples.

• Requirement: You must describe or analyze your chosen genre through all three categories from Introduction to Genres:

  • Subject / Audience genre

  • Formal genre

  • Narrative genre (aspect most emphasized in course)

"Cite, explain, and analyze two or more examples of your genre from your reading, viewing, or listening experience and  and 2 research sources from course website or beyond."

• If you introduced enough examples on the Midterm1 draft, you may simply revise and improve your explanations and analyses of those examples. If you didn't introduce enough examples or have thought of some new ones that help, add 1 or 2 more.

• Your research sources may include the Introduction to Genres page and another term-page from our course website or my coursesite's terms index.

General revision advice based on Midterm1 submissions:

Introduce your example(s) as early as possible, and use it or them to help explain the three genre categories.

Part 2. Learning about Tragedy 2: Revise, continue, improve, & Extend Essay begun in Midterm1 on learning experience with tragedy, extending to include Sophocles's Family of Oedipus plays. (Revise / improve midterm1 draft & add at least 5-7 paragraphs for 9-10 paragraph total.) 

Assignment:  Correct, improve, and extend your Learning Essay 1 from Midterm1. Review instructor's feedback. Rethink ideas and extend examples with more analysis and citations of texts and course website resources.

Required references to texts: As examples and illustrations for your learning experince in Tragedy since Midterm1, you must refer to passages in all three of the Family of Oedipus cycle (Oedipus the King, Antigone, & Oedipus at Colonus) as well as to the selected scenes from Hamlet. Of course you may also refer back to plays we read for Midterm1, or improve your references to those plays. You may also refer to the Bacchae.

If you did not refer to our course readings in your Learning Essay's first draft for Midterm1, incorporate references to examples from Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon + selections from Libation Bearers & Euminides); Mourning Becomes Electra / Homecoming, and Lysistrata; plus or minus other plays (or films) you know or class has presented, like The Bacchae.

After improving or redeveloping your Midterm1 draft, transition to or unify those opening paragraphs with additional paragraphs describing your learning experience since Midterm1. In these new paragraphs, focus particularly on the Oedipal plays + Hamlet (excerpts). What have you learned that is worth learning (or teaching) about tragedy, genre, psychology, families, fate and free will, the individual and the community (or authority), Western Civilization, or other themes relevant to these plays?

Consistent themes throughout course:

Tragedy as the greatest genre?

Tragedy modernizes and expands appeal by incorporating other narrative genres (comedy and romance) and by managing spectacle.

The tragic flaw.

Tragedy involves families who simultaneously love and hate each other as their fates are bound together. Oedipal Conflict, Electra Complex. Aristotle's Poetics 13c, 14c

Depending on your emphases, you may not need to refer to every one, but the best essays unify as much material as possible.)

Begin Research Report: Write at least 3-4 substantial paragraphs with two sources toward completion of your Research Report on selected special topic (to be completed on Final Exam)

for Midterm 2: Write 3-4 paragraphs introducing your topic, contextualizing it with our Tragedy course, and describing your research and what you've learned so far. You may conclude by previewing what you want to learn next for the concluding paragraphs of the report in the final exam.

(Final Exam: 8-10 paragraph report summarizing your research and learning on your topic and how it relates to our course.)

Research requirements: For midterm2, two research sources providing information on your topic are required. These two sources may be from our course website or from beyond. Especially consider using "essential instructional page(s)" and Model Assignments provided with your "Special Topic")

Other recommended research sources include reference books, MLA searches, interviews with former teachers or professors.

You don't have to agree with your research sources; you can treat them as material to differ with or to provide contrary information; but you have to refer to them. Avoid writing what you could have written without taking our course--writing off the top of your head and repeating familiar cliches makes for bad writing and reading. 

Choice of Special Topic: You are expected to continue the topic you proposed in Midterm1. However, you may change topics as long as you explain why you originally chose your first topic and why you are switching to the new topic. (This explanation may be brief, but make it meaningful in terms of your learning.)

Assignment description: Write a complete report describing your research and learning concerning your Special Topic.

• Student is responsible for having researched at least two sources on subject before Midterm2.

• Organize the information you found and review how you may use it, either in your knowledge of literature, college career, teaching, or personal development.

• The emphasis is on information, not opinion and analysis, though some summary, analysis, and evaluation is welcome and expected. It's a report foremost.

• You are encouraged to connect your findings to course objectives or texts.

Default organization: The path of least resistance is to describe and unify your report as a "quest" or "journey of learning."

Works Cited / Bibliography: Include a list of your major research sources (at least two for Midterm2, four total for Final Exam).

• MLA style is preferred, but other standard forms are acceptable. Don't spend too much time fussing over forms when you should be feeling impassioned over your subject.

• My test for documentation: Would I be able to track it down using the information provided?

Evaluation standards: Readability, competence levels, and interest.

• Readability & surface competence: Your reader must be able to process what you're reporting. Given the pressures of a timed writing exercise, some rough edges are acceptable, but chronic errors or elementary style can hurt.

• Content quality: Comprehension of subject, demonstration of learning, use of course resources, + interest & significance: Make your reader *want* to process your report. Make the information meaningful; make it matter to our study of literature and culture. Reproduce course materials accurately but also refresh with your own insights and experiences.

• Thematic Unity and Organization: Unify materials along a line of thought that a reader can follow from start to finish. (Consider "path of learning": what you started with, what you encountered, where you arrived.) Consult instruction sites on Unity / Continuity / Transition & Transitions.

 . . .  [end of notes from final exam description of research report] . . .

Fall 2013 is the first semester that students write their Research Reports in two stages. For samples of openings from successful Research Reports from past semesters, see below or go to .LITR 4333 Model Assignments.

Grade and feedback: As with Midterm1, you will receive a grade and notes for improving each part for the final exam. (Opening genre topic may or may not appear on final exam, depending on success in Midterm2.)