Rita Felski Short Story Project:
How and Why Stories Affect Us
English 11
Idyllwild Arts Academy
Objectives & Required Components:
● To define ONE of Rita Felski’s frameworks - Recognition, Enchantment, Knowledge or Shock – for how and why we interact with literature by using evidence from works of literature, and mastering your understanding of common literary devices like metaphor, simile, symbolism, motif, imagery, theme, point of view/perspective, dialogue, foreshadowing, rising/falling action and plot line. Define how authors employ literary devices to create the experience you are defining.
● You may, and are highly encouraged, to include yourself in the “conversation” of your essay by defining what it means to you to experience your selected framework - Recognition, Enchantment, Knowledge or Shock– when engaging with literary arts. You may refer to your own lived experiences and past encounters, prior to this class, with literary art, which can include written work, films or even songs. This means that this essay CAN be written in first person.
● You must use evidence from THREE of the short stories from our Unit One readings to support your definition, including at least ONE properly framed quote from each of three short stories, and at least ONE properly framed quote from Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature.
● You must use at least FIVE VOCABULARY WORDS from our current Vocabulary Walls in your essay. Please be sure these vocabulary words are easy to locate by highlighting, underlining or bolding them in your essay.
● You must engage with (and name) a variety of- and at least THREE– literary devices in your essay.
● You will engage with drafting techniques and traditional essay structures by annotating texts, taking notes and composing an essay proposal, thesis and outline. You will support your ideas by properly framing quotes as modules of evidence and support, and by combining multiple ideas and sources.
● You may choose to define RECOGNITION, ENCHANTMENT, KNOWLEDGE or SHOCK.
REQUIRED READINGS:
Excerpts: Uses of Literature (Rita Felski)
Recognition:
“Monster” Ryan Van Meter
“John Redding Goes to Sea” Zora Neale Hurston
Enchantment:
“The Hen” Clarice Lispector
“There Will Come Soft Rains” Ray Bradbury
Knowledge:
“Time and Distance Overcome” Eula Biss
“Angel of Mercy, Angel of Wrath” Ethan Canin
Shock:
“Essay #3: Leda and the Swan” Eric Puchner
“The Level of Discourse” Anthony Bourdain
FELSKI’S DEFINITIONS:
Recognition: “Knowing again can be a means of knowing fresh, and recognition is far from synonymous with repetition, complacency, and the dead weight of the familiar. Such moments of heightened insight are not just personal revelations in a private communication between reader and text; they are also embedded in circuits of acknowledgement and affiliation between selves and others that draw on and cut across the demographics of social life.”
Enchantment: “Enchantment is soaked through an unusual intensity of perception and affect; it is often compared to the condition of being intoxicated, drugged, or dreaming. Colors seem brighter, perceptions are heightened, details stand out with hallucinatory sharpness. The effect can be uniquely exhilarating, because of the sheer intensity of the pleasure being offered, but also unnerving, in sapping a sense of autonomy and self-control. The analytical part of your mind recedes into the background; your inner censor and critic are nowhere to be found. Instead of examining a text with a sober and clinical eye, you are pulled irresistibly into its orbit.”
Knowledge: “The worldly insights we glean from literary texts are not derivative or tautological, not stale, second-hand scraps of history or anthropology, but depend on a distinctive repertoire of techniques, conventions, and aesthetic possibilities. Through their rendering of the subtleties of social interaction, their mimicry of linguistic idioms and cultural grammars, their unblinking attention to the materiality of things, texts draw us into imagined yet essentially salient worlds.”
Shock: “Encountering such texts felt like a slap in the face; an exhilarating assault equal parts intellectual and visceral. Here, indisputably was the literature of extremity, of what Foucault and others call the limit experience, a bracing blend of solipsism, paranoia, brutality and despair, where the standard supports and consolations of everyday life are ruthlessly ripped away.”
Point Values & Submission Checklist:
10 Points Teacher Conference
10 Points Proposal
10 Points Thesis
10 Points Outline
10 Points Peer Review
100 Points Final Essay
THE PUBLIC DOCUMENT:
Creative & Critical Analysis Project
Inspired by Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas.
“Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken.” - Valeria Luiselli
“WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota, therein the question: what did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces. Until a friend comforted, don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together.” - Layli Long Soldier
PROCESS PART ONE:
Complete all required readings, annotations, notes and pre-writing notebook entries, as required.
Locate a “public document” to which you want to respond both creatively and critically, as inspired by Valeria Luiselli, Layli Long Soldier and other authors.
Compose a Thought Paragraph, in which you summarize your public document, discuss what you propose to do with it, what literary devices and genres you will engage with, what your purpose is, who your audience will be and how Valeria Luiselli, Layli Long Soldier and other writers/artists inspired you.
Begin keeping track of all sources consulted, even if a source isn’t directly referenced in your work but is only viewed, assessed and passed over. Begin collecting this information in your Annotated Bibliography. In your annotated bibliography, you must include at least 6 sources, including our primary texts by Luiselli and Long Soldier, your public document and at least three other sources. Each source should be summarized, evaluated for its purpose, and labeled using the BEAM method as a source type– Background, Evidence, Argument or Methodology.
Compose your Creative/Critical Response to your public document.
PROCESS PART TWO:
Compose your Critical Introduction, in which you introduce and summarize all of your sources and discuss how they informed and inspired your work, introduce and summarize your own project and discuss what your intentions were, discuss why your project is important, discuss who your audience is and what you hope they take away from your project, and discuss your writing and research methods. Finally, discuss the challenges and victories you faced in completing this project.
Participate in peer workshops for the three main components of your project: Creative Critical Response, Critical Introduction and Annotated Bibliography.
Revise, edit, polish and expand your project, as needed.
Present your project for 10 BONUS POINTS. No more than FIVE people can present.
SUBMIT YOUR FINAL PROJECT PACKAGE.
REQUIRED READINGS:
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (Valeria Luiselli)
SJ Res 14 (US Government)
Excerpt: Whereas (Layli Long Soldier)
Suggested: I Am Jane Doe (Documentary, 50 Eggs Films, DIR: Mary Mazzio)
VALUE: 200 Points
PROJECT PACKAGE CHECKLIST:
20 Points Thought Paragraph
20 Points Annotated Bibliography (6 Sources)
50 Points Creative & Critical Public Document Response
50 Points Critical Introduction
All of the above items must be included with your final submission.
20 Points Workshop 1
20 Points Workshop 2
20 Points Workshop 3
TIMELINE:
Fr 4/14 Introduce Project
We 4/19 Begin mining for your Public Document
Fr 4/21 Thought Paragraph: Public Document & Public Discourse
We 4/26 Begin Drafting Public Document Response
Fr 4/28 Begin Drafting Annotated Bibliography
We 5/3 Begin Drafting Critical Introduction
Fr 5/5 Project Writing Period
We 5/10 WORKSHOP 1: Public Document Response
Fr 5/12 WORKSHOP 2: Annotated Bibliography
We 5/17 WORKSHOP 3: Critical Introduction
Fr 5/19 Revising & Editing
Su 5/21 PROJECT PACKAGE DUE 11:59 PM
COURSE CHALLENGE CONCEPTS
War Cry, Gentrification, Harm Reduction, Manifesto, Person-First Language, Security Theater, Alternative Fact, Diversity Hire, Gaslighting, Autonomy, Performative Allyship, Identity Capitalism, Open Letter, Black Swan, Advocacy Group, Systemic Racism, Straw Man Fallacy, Jumping the Shark, Marginalized Community, Covfefe, Tarot Deck, Side Boob and Celebrity Tweet.
These are a few of the Course Challenge Concepts I distribute randomly to first-year writing students at the beginning of the term, in stacks of 10-20, on actual tiny pieces of paper I sometimes pull from an actual hat. My list currently has 187 concepts divided into three categories: Abstract Ideas, Genres, and Logical Fallacies. My list spans the divide between academic and kitsch ideologies, inviting students to make connections between popular culture, social change, creativity, and rhetorical traditions.
I invite students to quickly script and perform a team skit that employs five of their team’s collected stack of concepts as characters, often on the first day of class. Students resist this at first, but the fruit born of these skits sets a tone of deep thinking and open conversation that fuels the rest of the term. I also require that students employ at least two of their concepts in every assignment they submit, in every discussion post they write, and even when they workshop one another’s work or enter conversations and debates during class. I treat my students to Course Challenge Concept Bingo twice each term, whereby a drawn word is only worth bingo credit if at least one student in the class can readily define it and offer an example. Often hilarious, but mostly productive, the conversations that result from bingo fuel the rhetorical and creative fires we’ve by then already ignited.
By the end of the term, I often see students who have adopted their randomly assigned concepts as friends, as goals, as guiding lights. One returning student this semester embraced harm reduction as a point of inspiration for the career she is pursuing in LGBTQ+ advocacy within early education systems. She specifically wants to enact harm reduction by reforming the parameters of adolescent sex education, with dreams of fighting systemic misinformation and stigma, so as to prevent future harm. Another student completed a semester-long research project on the concept of security theater as she parsed out the limitations of a global pandemic against the concept’s rich history in airports and other global governing institutions.
I’ve adapted this curriculum overlay to work in first year composition courses, literature courses and creative writing courses!