Student Literature Resources:
Journal Ideas
See also:
Intro to Literature
Course Objectives
Gallery of student projects and papers
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Lit
General advice for journaling:
The basic guideline for each
of your journal entries is the same: select a literary work or issue we've
covered
in the
course and reflect in writing (and possibly in other media) on connections
between the literary work and other fields in communications and the arts.
Your journal for the course provides you with a place to explore your thoughts
and ideas about the reading we do. The
work you do in your journal is informal: your journal grade comes from
completing your journal in a spirit of investigation and discovery, not
from the polish
or formal sophistication of your work. You need not have a strong
academic interest in literature and writing in order to keep
a good journal. I ask you to maintain your journal in a timely fashion,
but you are free to choose the aspects of the readings you'd like to respond
to, and you can shape those responses in whatever ways seem best for you. I
encourage you to be as thoughtful and exploratory as you can as you compose
your journal. Students often find journals interesting in and of themselves,
in addition to being excellent resources for class discussion, for paper ideas,
for ways of connecting current reading with prior texts, for creative projects,
and for course review. The informal, "personal" quality of the journal
makes it a good place to record your sense of the relevance of our work
in the class to your other interests. In their journals, students frequently
relate this course to other areas of study, to work experience or career
goals, or to life in general.
Suggested approaches to journaling:
- Consider the cover design or illustration of the text we're reading now. What moods, tones, conflicts, or questions does this cover raise for you, given what you've read of the text so far? Sketch a new cover design based on your current understanding of the text. In writing, explain how your design choices highlight the elements of the text that seem most important to you. (It might be interesting to repeat this process once you've read more of the text, or finished reading it. You would have a visual record of your changing ideas about the text.)
- Select a few episodes that are important to your understanding of the text, and explain what you find interesting about the characters or events in these passages. What music or sound choices would you make if you were adapting these episodes for the screen or television? Describe how your choices would be appropriate both for the particulars of each individual passage and for your sense of the text as a whole. (If we're working with poetry, you might consider how a poem might be set to music in a way that best suits your understanding of the poem.)
- Describe or sketch a set design you would use for a stage production or adaptation of a few key moments in the text. Explain how your design demonstrates your understanding of these moments. Or, similarly, describe or sketch costumes for characters in the episodes you've selected, and discuss the reasons for your choices. Likewise, you might address issues of blocking, lighting design, or other aspects of stagecraft, so long as you also write about how your design ideas demonstrate something meaningful about your reading of the text.
- Think about the different kinds of audience that might be interested in the text we're reading. Explain the aspects of the text that would appeal to these potential audiences and design an advertising campaign that would attract each audience. For instance, sketch a couple of posters and describe how they would both represent the text accurately and catch the interest of particular audiences. Or you could script a few TV or radio commercials for a film adaptation of the text or design multimedia web pages for the text.
- Choose one or two pivotal scenes/passages from the text and consider how they both pick up on what comes before and prepare for what comes later. Rewrite these scenes/passages to provide an alternate way of moving from one point in the plot to another. Explain how your rewritings remain consistent with the "original" text, but also describe what they add to or highlight in the original text. You might use this experiment to reflect on why the author chose to compose the text the way he or she did.
- Consider a literary concept such as "character," "point of view," "tone," "plot," "rhythm," or "reliability" (there are, of course, many others you might work with). What insight do you gain into the literary text you've chosen when you work with this concept? What insight do you gain when you apply this concept to a work from another field of art or communications? Are there concepts in this other field that parallel the literary concept you've selected? You might examine how closely these concepts match up and speculate about what's at stake in the ways these concepts do and do not overlap. You might also begin with a concept from another field and try applying it to a literary text.These are only suggestions, and you are free to work with these, modify them, or pursue other paths as you compose your journal.
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Page contributed by Terence Brunk
