Mr. Howard 314L: Literary Contests and Contexts Paper # 3
Paper # 3 will be a hypertext essay focused around interpretative contests. Your goal is to advance a thesis that challenges or “contests” previous interpretations in order to put forth a reading that you consider to be better. You will design your essay using a web editor called Dreamweaver. By using hypertext links, you will be able to demonstrate to a reader the choices that were involved in your interpretation, and you will also allow them to make choices as to how they explore your argument. In this paper, we will be dealing with interpretative contests that involve your choices as a reader. Whenever you argue to support a thesis, you make interpretative choices about how to link together pieces of evidence and commentary on them. Your interpretation is always only one of many, and it should take into account previous interpretations of the same text. In order for your reading to be original and insightful, it should also challenge previous interpretations. You should do this on the basis of textual and contextual evidence, using the skills that you have developed in the first two papers. However, you should also recognize that what you do with this evidence is partially based on a choice that is related to your responses as a reader. Part of being a skillful interpreter involves being able to justify these responses and to persuasively explain their importance to other readers. Hypertext will allow you to acknowledge the multiple possible interpretations of your text while also letting you highlight the choices that you are making as an interpreter. These choices will be “links” through the network of a text that help you to meaningfully connect details into an argument. There are many ways to structure a hypertext essay, but it is very important that you have an organized plan. Format: The paper will be the equivalent of 8 pages long, double-spaced. You should first write it as a Word document in order to make sure that you have fulfilled the length requirement. However, the structure of this paper will be unusual in that it will be a hypertext essay. Remember that hypertext is defined by Ted Nelson as “non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the readers, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” (3). This means that your essay will ultimately consist of pages of material that can be navigated in various orders that you must also plan. In other words, this paper will be an essay that is structured as a carefully-planned, text-oriented website. Your essay should have a thesis that interprets a text in aesthetic, historical, and/or cultural terms. You must make a claim of one or two sentences that suggests how you will branch off from previous interpretations to advance your own. However, before developing this thesis, you must give the reader a map of other possible interpretations. Each of these interpretations will be represented as a path composed of a series of pages connected by links. You will then show how you can link some of the same textual evidence in different ways in order to generate a new interpretation. You should also add new evidence that will advance your position. The essay will then have a conclusion that explains your motivation as a reader for choosing this particular interpretation in terms of values and beliefs. You must argue persuasively for why other readers should consider your interpretation valid and important on the basis of your evidence and argumentation as well as the values behind them. Don’t worry if you’ve never designed a web page before. We will be using a very user-friendly web editor called Dreamweaver, and we’ll be taking some class time to learn basic web design skills. Grading Criteria:
|