Lawyers and Literature Course Evaluation: Fall, 2007 Your evaluation for the course will be based on the following: 50% a personal course paper (topic to be approved by the instructor, or, "write the course") 25% class participation (and/or end of course debriefing) 25% participation with selected colleagues in organizing an evening's discussion and presentation of an assigned novelfor the course (including a group narrative paper on the selected novel) There is no maximum page limit for your personal course writings (or for the group novel presentation). Commonsense and experience suggest that those who write more tend to suggest a broader--and sometimes fuller--engagement with the course readings. (I do not mean to suggest that I weigh your writings!) You may, for your personal writing, write a "traditional" research paper, that is, a paper in which you select some subject or theme associated with "lawyers and literature" (a theme suggested in the course readings and discussions or a topic you devise)(topic/theme to approved by the instructor). In contrast to a traditional research paper you may want to consider the "write the course" option. Writing the course is at once a rather simple idea but rather tricky to define. It is simple in that instead of picking out a single topic or subject for a paper, you write about the course and your engagement with the readings (or some selected part of the readings). Writing the course is tricky in this sense: you must try to write the course in a meaningful, engaging, literary way. There are, obviously, many ways of going about such a writing. Some students seem to have an intuitive grasp for "writing the course," while others are tone deaf to the possibilities entailed in this kind of writing. I will try to provide additional information about the "write the course" option as the course progresses and will alert you to that information by way of the course website. [For a student paper that exemplifies this idea of "writing the course," see: Deirdre Purdy, Lawyers & Literature as My Mother Lay Dying–Spring, 1997, 22 Legal Stud. F. 293 (1998)][on-line text] All papers presented in "Lawyers and Literature" will be evaluated on the basis of the following criteria: soundness and quality of the writing; nature, complexity, and development of the ideas you use to structure the writing; demonstrated engagement with the assigned stories and novels (or some selected sub-set of them)(of course, you may draw as well on stories, fiction, and essays that have not been assigned); soundness, appropriateness, and creativity of the "structure" you adopt for your writing; depth, range, and creativity of your thinking about the stories|novels you explore in your writing; indication that you have read, reflected on, and can put to use the various texts you have been reading in the course. I am available for consultation and advice on any of your writing (for the course and beyond), and will read (and evaluate in a manner you may proscribe) whatever you might want me to read during the course (and beyond). Given the nature of the writing, and the work in preparation for it, it seems prudent to begin to think about how to undertake the writing--now--even as you begin the readings. I recommend, for anyone who wants to think carefully about writing, Peter Elbow's Writing With Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1998), a book that any writer might put to use both in "Lawyers and Literature" and beyond. (There are no significant changes in the 2nd edition; consequently if you can find a copy of the 1st edition, it will serve equally as well.) Iif you're to read a single book on writing, I'd have it be Peter Elbow's Writing With Power. For a starter course on Peter Elbow's thinking see my: | Notes on Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers | It was reading Peter Elbow, and Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), that prompted my essay about law students as "writers": | "Things We Carry Into Legal Writing" | No one these days with an interest in the lawyer as "writer" can ignore "legal writing" and "legal writing programs." For my take on legal writing, and an attempt to see it from the narrative perspective, see: What Kind of Story is Legal Writing? Ruth Knight Bailey was a student in a course called Women and the Legal Profession when she wrote her essay, "Inheritance in Ink", about writing. Ms. Bailey worked for a good number of years at the Michie Company, in Charlottsville, Virginia as a legal editor. She is now living in Johnson City, Tennessee where she teaches and writes. You should, of course, avail yourself of resources on writing available on the course website (and related websites); these resources have been gathered to help you think about writing, about "writing the course," and to help you think about yourself as a writer more generally. Read to Write Introspective Writing Law Student Accounts of Introspective Writing Writing Our Lives Things We Carry Into Legal Writing The course website presents a good deal of information and background on various kinds of writing that might figure in your writing the course. If you have questions about any of these resources, or about your writing, you should talk with me about what you are trying to do and the difficulties you face in doing it. You should begin your writing for the course as soon as possible. I'd hope the pitfalls of waiting until the end of the semester to undertake the course writing (or course paper) are obvious. While I do not present any formal structure that your course writings must follow, you should not take this to mean that I am indifferent about your writing, or that I do not expect a great deal of you. We will, as we progress (and digress) through the course take something of a journey together (as you undertake your own travels amidst the stories and novels). In "writing the course," you might try to say something about the nature of the journey you (and we) have undertaken. And if the course has not been anything so grand as a journey, then you will need a different metaphor, another way of talking about what has happened, about what you have read (and what you have heard in the class discussion). At some point in the course, you will want to rethink the stories, to see how they "fit" together (if indeed they do), to see what you can make of the stories as you write about them (and write beyond them). The question the course poses is this: In what sense do the stories give you something to write about? What new way of imagining yourself do they offer? Indeed, what will you do, as you set out to do something with the stories? Where will your writing take you? Where do you want it to take the reader? In writing the course, you may find occasion to describe what happened in the course; you will also be making an evaluation, a judgment, about the way we've gone about the work we've tried to do in the course. It will take a good bit of courage to look, honestly and without despair, at what you've written for the course, to realize that you took short cuts, cheated yourself, that you passed up a chance to say what you most wanted (and needed) to say, or said things that you did not mean. And yes, you might keep in mind that the failure of your own writing, our conversation, and this course, is itself a kind of education. Key Pedagogical Concepts for "Writing the Course" Andragogy (a theory of adult education) Wikipedia Definition Malcolm Knowles Self-Directed Learning Basic Definition The International Encyclopedia of Education Perspectives on Theory, Research, and Practice Developing Self-Directed Learners Active Learning Active Learning: The Concept Wikipedia Definition Active Learning Adult Learning Principles of Adult Learning Adult Learning Theory How Adults Learn Adult Learning: An Overview Student-centered Learning Wikipedia--Overview Student-centered Learning: Is It Possible? Teaching Research Method Using a Student-Centred Approach Phenomenology and Writing Phenomenological Writing [part of a hypertext on phenomenological inquiry] Nurturing the Reflective Lens in Student Writing Psychological Aspects of Introspective Writing Poetry as Therapy Essay Writing Wikipedia--Overview The Age of the Essay Resurgence of the Essay Essay as Self-Knowledge On Essays [Cynthia Ozick, author of the assigned "Puttermesser" story] The Personal Essay--A Form of Discovery How to Write an Essay Narrative Essay Narrative Essay A Brief Guide Prewriting Exercises for Personal Narratives Creative Non-Fiction Wikipedia--Creative Non-fiction What is Creative Non-Fiction? Creative Non-Fiction Compendium Lines in the Mud: Exploring Creative Non-Fiction Critical Thinking|Reading|Reflection Critical Reading Towards Critical Writing Critical Thinking Through Writing The Critical Project [James R. Elkins] Writing Across the Curriculum Encouraging Writing Achievement A note on "essays": "[I]f essays are works of 'reading,' they are also works 'wrought,' a thinking that occurs through the material fabrication of language, a work and a working in language, not simply a working through intellectually or emotionally--language not as a summary of findings b ut as the inventor of findings." [Rachel Blau DuPlessis, f-Words: An Essay on the Essay, 68 (1) American Literature 15, 19 (1996)(DuPlessis goes on to note that: "The choice of the essay mode is no guarantee of quality, just of desire. One wants scruples, suspicion, and examintion, not an unconscious revelation of vacuum, not addictive narcissism." Id. at 26)] Again, DuPlessis: "Writing an essay comes from curiosity and need--the need to examine opinions and contradictions and to interrogate cultural materials, especially those taken for granted. The essay has an ethos of intense examination." [Id. at 27 (although I must say, I've never come around to seeing the need for the word "interrogate" as DuPlessis uses it here; it's a fashionable term in academic circles and one I do not find an improvement over the term "question")] "Essay is the play of speculation, polyvocal, quirky, maenadic, suspicious. The test of the essay is whether it opens a space for the reader. It is interested and agnostic, situational and material, presentational, investigative, and heuristic. It present that which is seen 'under the conditions established in the course of writing' . . . . What is taken by some as rhetoric or style or manner . . . is in the essay a way of knowing. A Path. In some old woods, in the middle of somethng. The path of rhetoric is the path of knowledge. The digression is the subject. The polyvocal collage. The thick plurality. . . . The probing, the backtracking, the outbursts, the resistances are the essay's findings." [Id. at 28] Since we sometimes talk about the "personal essay," I pass along DuPlessis's reservations about the term, reservations which I share: "[T]he term personal, when applied to essay modes, offers a made-in-Hollywood site for my resistance. I have real trouble with any oversimple characterization of the essay as personal or autobiographical. the adjective personal can suggest the individual, quirky array--or even disarray--offered up as the opposite of objective or expository prose. Personal may be an esay way of summarizing the upstart quality . . . that fuel the essay with situated, nonobjective thought. Yet somehow this term can be translated into a soft relativism, a genial selfhood, or questions of 'voice.' . . . . Still, to talk about the ssay's material practices and its emphases on positinality provides a broader way of engaging the functions of what others call 'personal.' " [Id. at 30. ("[I]f the essay is functioning in the way I am attempting to set forth here it is arguably a very unegotistical mode, for it maintains a notion of service, of the exemplary use of the ego or its experimental dissolution within a cultural project. . . . Far from being exercises in narcissism, in gaining a personal voice, essays are practices in multiplicity, in polyvocality, in intercutting other opinions, in offering heterogeneous, faceted perspectives. . . . In short, essays are not a way of gaining a voice but of losing one in the largeness of something else." Id. at 32)] A Hundred and More Ideas on Writing for the Course: Narrative and Story Resources || Narrative Theory and Literary Criticism I'd be surprised, no, more like downright shocked, to learn that you could not make use of some of these resources (indeed, there are far more resources here than anyone could explore in half-dozen literature courses). Obviously, if you are going to make use of any of these resources you should cite them like you would hard-copy sources.   Lawyers and Literature Home Page