(This webpage is the assignment for our course's midterm, to be reviewed, updated, and refined up to 20 June.)

Attendance not required on 21 June. Classroom available for student use. Instructor keeps office hours during class period, 3-6 on 21 June. Welcome to visit, phone, email re midterm or otherwise.

Value: app. 25-35% of final grade (grades not computed numerically)

Contents: 2 essays of 6-9 paragraphs each (details below)

Essay 1: Describe and analyze the American Immigrant narrative, its prominent patterns, motives, stages, values, and variations including "the American Dream."

Essay 2: Compare and contrast the minority and immigrant narratives, with attention to USA's dominant culture.

(Don't fear overlap b/w essays. Welcome to cross-reference between the two essays for efficiency. For instance, Essay 2 might refer to points made in Essay 1, and Essay 1 might preview Essay 2. Manage repetitions efficiently and consciously.)

Special Requirements:

Title your essays.

Refer to at least one previous midterm from course's Model Assignments. (More than one such reference is welcome and usually impressive.)

Refer to course objectives, terminology, and instructional webpages; develop or vary their meanings relative to your readings and analysis.

Content Details

Essay 1: Describe and analyze the American Immigrant narrative, its prominent patterns, motives, stages, values, and variations including "the American Dream."

Refer to 5-6 course texts, including at least one early American source (9 June), at least two short fictions from Imagining America, two nonfiction selections from Immigrant Voices, Vol. 2, ± other online texts, poems, web reviews, and critical sources. (Welcome also to refer to outside reading, but concentrate on class readings.)

Refer to objectives 1, 2, and 4, using information from linked instructional pages.

Celebrate and criticize: acknowledge aesthetic and ideological resonance of the immigrant narrative while uncovering narrative or cultural limits or consequences.

Consider the power of narrative as a cultural and literary construct. (cultural narrative)

Essay 2: Compare and contrast the minority and immigrant narratives, with attention to USA's dominant culture.

Refer to 4-5 course texts total, mostly minority narratives, poems, and other coursesite sources, but also 1-2 immigrant or dominant-culture narratives for comparison or contrast.

Shift your focus from the immigrant narrative to the minority narrative, but use the immigrant narrative as a background for comparison-contrast.

Keep objectives 1 & 2 in play, but highlight features from Objective 3.

Following items are possible prompts, not a checklist—no way to do them all:

How do the minority and immigrant narratives inform and expose each other?

How much are they in dialogue with each other, and how much are they opposed or polarized? In what ways? How is the American Dream narrative challenged or reinforced? (Many shades of gray)

Evaluate assimilation both positively and negatively. How does the appropriateness of assimilation vary for immigrants and minorities? What variations on assimilation are possible? (obj. 3c)

other possible terms or dialogues

assimilation and resistance (obj. 3c)

the ethnic group’s original relation with USA & resulting Social Contract

the “color code” (obj. 3f)

"model minorities" and true minorities

Evaluation criteria for essays: Readability & surface competence, content quality, and unity / organization.

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, + 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, especially through reference to terms, instructional pages, and objectives, but also refresh with your own insights and experiences. Avoid: "You could have written this without taking the course."

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.)