Due 29 September-2 October

No class meeting 29 September; instructor in office to confer, phone, email.

Submission format: Email attachment to instructor at whitec@uhcl.edu, or arrange otherwise. No hard copy.

Submissions are posted (as is) on course webpage by instructor.

Weight: 20-30% of final grade

Organization:

• Essay(s) on Objectives 1-3

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• Research plan (may be incorporated in essay[s]--please indicate in email if not stand-alone)

Essay length: Write one long essay or 2-3 briefer ones

• If 1 essay, 9-12 paragraphs;
• if 2 essays, app. 5-6 paragraphs each;
• if 3 essays, app. 3-4 paragraphs each.

Research Plan Length: 2-3 paragraphs, or incorporate into essay(s) (details at link: Research Plan)

Title your essay(s).

Spacing: No need to double-space, but OK. All electronic copies converted to single-space for onscreen reading .

Prep time and writing time: Spend app. 3-4 hours writing your exam in its final form, but prepare as much as you like or can. Preparations include review of notes and texts, but also outlining and drafting, which you may use as notes when you write your final version.

Your research plan may be either a separate text or part of your midterm essay(s)--whatever works best for you.

Special requirements:

• Any essay you write should have a title.
• Refer to at least one passage or insight from the Midterm Submissions 2009, Midterm submissions 2008, or any midterms from earlier semesters of seminar.
• Refer to at least one class presentation--web reviews, student-led discussions, even instructor's presentations if something works.

Possible references--not required but potentially helpful:

• outside readings and other courses, texts, or discussions anywhere.

Organization: 1-3 Essay(s) on Objectives 1-3

Write an essay describing your learning experience in the seminar, its subject, readings, and objectives . Suggestions appear below, but I'll read what you send me. Course-specific expectations:

• A member of the class would recognize what you're discussing as falling within our subject area, and find the surface style and thematic progression readable.

• References to leading aspects of objectives 1-3 (you can't cover everything, so don't try, but keep returning to objectives and terms)

• Examples drawn from shared texts: Crusoe, Lucy, A Small Place, The Man Who Would be King, poems. (You may also refer briefly to other texts beyond the course that relate.)

• References to class terms, ideas, discussions, issues. (Again you may also refer briefly to terms and ideas from other courses or experiences beyond our seminar.)

• You may personalize your discussion and use the pronoun “I” (not required), but keep returning to shared material. You might organize by describing previous knowledge or experience of genre, then what learned.

If you're really stumped, ask yourself some questions and start building some answers. I'm not looking for this or that particular insight as much as how you respond honestly and constructively to our shared readings and discussions with the objectives (terms and themes) in play.

Purpose of exam:

• Demonstrate comprehension & application of objectives 1-3.

• Working knowledge of terms & texts.

• Set a path of learning in new territory

• Attempt "dialogue" style of criticism, a.k.a. intertextuality

Questions / topics: Write your best essay about the course, its readings, and its subject and objectives.

You can't cover every aspect of Objectives 1-3. (The seminar won't have covered everything by midterm.)

Cover as much course material as you can explain compellingly and readably (I’ll let you know if you don’t do enough), but you can’t cover everything and aren’t expected to. Much of your own contribution will be selecting, prioritizing, emphasizing, and connecting what matters to you and whatever set of identities you represent. Make it interesting and make it matter, first to yourself and then to a reader.

Possible Prompts:

• What did you know and have you learned about colonial and postcolonial literature?
   

• What are the field’s attractions? Intimidations? Methods or styles? Applications? What have you found most interesting and useful?
   

• Your reaction to studying texts in dialogue or intertextually rather than as autonomous texts?
   

• What would you like to learn or achieve, according to what the course offers? (The world's too big to learn it all, so don't hesitate to concentrate on a region or period of colonial / postcolonial history)

• How does this course fit or not into your learning or career concerning classical and multicultural literature? How can you imagine applying it in teaching or research?
   

• If you were already familiar with our subject, sketch your experience and indicate how it's been confirmed or varied.
   

• Objective 3 describes most Americans' unfamiliarity with our topic. Aside from exoticism or difference, what possible gains or applications are possible for this field of study?
   

• Don't feel intimidated. Keep our materials in sight and write what matters to you. I'll read what you write and help however I can.

• An exercise for self-starting is to ask yourself, relative to the course and its readings, what you've been thinking about and why. If parts of the texts or course interest or even bother you, that's a sign that they matter. What are they telling you, making you question? What can you know or learn about these issues, questions, or topics? Make notes, organize oppositions of values and styles and turn them into dialogues.

Overall, your task as a writer is to explain and demonstrate your understanding of our course's content and methods.

Given Obj. 1, you should consider putting our texts and concepts in dialogue:

Put yourself in dialogue with the course--self / other, known / unknown, familiar / unfamiliar, America / world

Since our course's materials may be unfamiliar, your writing strategy might personalize your essay(s).

One possibility would be to share something of your own literary background, interests, and ambitions, progressing to how this course may or may not match or extend them.

Or address a future student just beginning the course. Guide or help them anticipate the course, assignments, style.

The "path of learning" is another personalizing or humanizing approach. It may sound mickey-mouse at first, but it can take you places, and you can submerge the artificial parts.

• Several references to Robinson Crusoe, A Small Place, Lucy, and The Man Who Would be King. (You may naturally prefer to discuss the postcolonial texts, but don't lose their dialogue with the colonial texts.)
   

• References to colonial-postcolonial history and theory in class, web reviews, or other websites
   

• References to handouts or links highlighted in lecture
   

• References to objectives 1-3 (not every word or theme, but what matters and applies to texts)
   

• Optional: poems by Walcott or Kipling, or paintings by Gauguin
   

• Optional: personal references to course, contents, outside texts, knowledge, experience

Evaluation standards: As in most Literature courses, quality of reading and writing is the key to judging excellent work from competent work—not just reproducing data but organizing it into a unified, compelling essay.

• "Unified": Thematic continuity and transitions are essential. Connect parts to form larger ideas. Pause between paragraphs to review what you've written or to preview what comes next. Summarize. Explain. Review and preview.

• "Compelling": Exams require comprehension and expression of instructional contents, but excellence is achieved by students extending or refreshing what they learn with new examples, insights, and expression.

• Style: At the graduate level, competence with surface issues like spelling, punctuation, and grammar is taken for granted. An occasional careless error won't kill your grade, given time pressures, but repeated or chronic errors are remarked and factored.

• Audience: Write so someone in our seminar could recognize your terms and explanations and enjoy your personal contributions and style. Future students may read your essays in our "Model Assignments." Keep the instructor in sight—connect with shared terms and texts, and "write up" in terms of organization and ambition of thought.
  
• Your instructor naturally likes to see you valuing and using his ideas from lecture and syllabus, but mere repetition or coverage is frustrating, so integrate instructor's and course's materials with your intellect, your voice, your career and aspirations.

Instructor's Reaction & continuing dialogue:

A week or two after submission, you'll receive an email from the instructor including your grade report with a midterm grade and a note responding to your effort and accomplishment.

Consider replying to instructor about your midterm note. Graduate students work with faculty somewhere between master-apprentice and colleagues. Discussing your graded work can be a starting point for learning to interact with faculty. If you don't communicate in this way, look for other opportunities before semester ends. Professors can be intimidating and unhip, but they're used to cooperating if you cultivate chances. We're just older versions of yourselves!

The midterm is designed to give the student considerable choice in emphasis and outcomes while requiring coverage and competence in common course materials. In the most successful submissions for these and similar exercises, students use their own voices and references to express and advance ideas or themes developed by the seminar's texts, objectives, lectures, presentations, and discussions.

A dependable principle for such preparations is to start as early as possible so that your conscious and unconscious mind have time to work through the mental operations implicit in your interests and the subject matter. One hour a week ahead is worth two hours the night before.

1. Reflect on what you think about when you think of the seminar and its readings. A normal exercise for discovering your mind is to think about a subject before sleeping, then pay attention to what you think about the subject on waking.

Talk about the seminar and its subjects with someone in or outside the course and pay attention to what you find yourself saying and what questions your acquaintance asks. What assumptions are you and your acquaintance operating on, and what about the subject conforms to or exceeds those assumptions?

2. Start notes for the midterm. Write down any impulse toward the subject matter, no matter how obvious or blunt. When you return to your notes, review them--extend some, cut some, put different notes together.

3. Review assignment, model assignments, evaluation standards.

4. Review & reread parts of texts that either worked for you or remained puzzling.

5. Start drafting. Professors or professional readers can usually detect the difference between raw, unedited prose that was recently composed and never reviewed, and prose that has been reviewed, refined, and extended.

6. Have a trusted reader read what you've written. Ask them to indicate what worked and what didn't. Many readers won't tell you what didn't work because they'll just glide or bump through it, but you can infer by process of elimination.

7. Keep up with what's working for you (or not) for sake of final exam development and/or conference with instructor.

8. Don't forget the Research Proposal!

9. Welcome to email or phone instructor any time before or during submission-window. Always better to solve problems beforehand, plus I like seeing you working on problems. I check emails more often than phone messages.

10. When you think you've finished, put the exam aside for at least an hour, then give it a final read-through: proofread, edit, correct, improve. At the graduate level, "better" is more important than "late."

See also "Possible Prompts" above.

1.  To bring classic literature of European colonialism and emerging literature from the postcolonial world into dialogue—either conscious debates between authors or exchanges arranged by later readers.

• Essential theoretical terms: Intertextuality and Historicism.

1a. To mediate the “culture wars” between the “old canon” of Western classics and the “new canon” of multicultural literature by studying them together rather than separately.

1b. To extend the colonial-postcolonial transition to a contemporary third wave of transnational migration. Alternative terms: post-national, post-race, post-modern.

2. To theorize the novel as the defining genre of modernity, both for colonial and postcolonial cultures.

2a. By definition, the genre of the novel combines fundamental representational modes of narrative and dialogue.

• dialogue as formal but humanizing encounter of self & other

• narrative as personal and cultural trajectory, direction, or history

• Can Colonizers be understood as other than villains? Must the Colonized be cast as victims? Does dehumanizing the other automatically dehumanize the self, or may it be liberating? (Moral opposition increases drama, but moral relativism cultivates relations.)

• Can literary fiction instruct students’ knowledge of world history and international relations? Compared to nonfictional discourses of history, political science, anthropology, economics, etc., how may colonial & postcolonial fiction help more people learn world history, contemporary events, and the global future?

2b. To extend genre studies to poetry and film (especially Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, West Indies [b. 1930; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1992]).

3.  To account for Americans’ difficulties with colonial and postcolonial discourse.

3a. Is America (USA) an imperial, colonial, or neo-imperial nation? Or an “empire in denial?”

• Compare and contrast "settler" and "non-settler" colonization

  • settler colonies: USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Israel

  • non-settler colonies: India, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Philippines

  • in-betweens: Latin American countries like Mexico

• USA as last “superpower” and previous empires like Rome and England.

• Issues of American ignorance of larger world and alternative worldviews

• What are the colonial-postcolonial experiences and literatures of the Middle East?

3b. Does American resistance to or ignorance of postcolonial criticism react to this discourse’s development from outposts of the former British Empire and French / Francophone traditions? 

3c. How may colonial-postcolonial discourse fit into American nationalist and multicultural curricula? If this is your only colonial-postcolonial course, how may it serve your scholarly or teaching interests?