Class Notes March 29: Orders of Business

I apologize again for not posting more of our work on Vonnegut; it's been busy the past two weeks for me, too; I realize lots of you had mid-terms last week and this one. We're going to spend at least Monday of next week discussing the novel, and probably some of Wednesday, too. Be sure to finish the novel for Monday. By then, we'll be able to discuss our interpretations and blend them into some coherent observations about the overall narrative.

In class today we spent the first 30 or so minutes peer reviewing each other's essays. We focused on introductions and summarizing passages and paragraphs. Afterwards, we worked a little more on the three-passage writing piece we began Monday. In that piece, I asked you to focus on one passage in Slaughter-House Five and summarize, explain, and anaylze it. It may have been one of the four or five passages we discussed as a class, or that your group noted during your group discussions last Wednesday. I then asked you to select another passage from later in our reading (about page 140 or afterwards) and offer the same scholastic criticism of that passage. Then, I asked you to compare some aspect of those two passages in another paragraph--a third paragraph or passage. It's important that you're able to discuss two different sections of the same long text in one passage: you'll need to do this for the third essay.

The final paragraph-passage that compares those two different passages from the novel is due Monday, typed and double spaced. Be sure to bring it to class, too, because we may use it.

Your second essay is also due Monday (the one we work-shoped today). I will read drafts until 6 Pm Saturday. After that, I won't.

I found today's attendance curious, since we had only 11 of the 19 students we normally have. I'm aware that two of you had medical emergencies, but that still leaves 6 people, almost a third of the class, absent for the peer review. I plan to address this briefly Monday.

Short 3: Description

1-2 pages
Due Wednesday, March 22

For this assignment, you will need to select one of the two films you’ve chosen for essay two. Select a scene from this film and discuss it within the context of the four clips we viewed together in class. You do not have to contextualize it within all four clips we saw; you may pick the one or two that are most relevant. It is your choice when a scene begins or ends in a film; everyone reads films slightly differently. (You may treat the scenes we viewed in class as important canonical scenes in the history of war films, and assume your reader already has a basic understanding of them.)

Discuss how your chosen scene might relate, conflict, complicate, challenge, or complement the scenes we viewed in class. You will have to be specific about whatever relationship you discover. By specific, I mean you must verbalize in words or phrases the different reasons that bridge or separate the relationship between the scenes you’ve chosen. You will have to show or prove those reasons in your essay by describing and then explaining the parts of each scene that are relevant to your idea(s) about the scenes.

To explain how your chosen scene works together with another, you will need to describe and explain what features, issues, or subjects interact together between the scenes, and what features, issues, or subjects appear different. Some scenes may, for instance, be similar in perspective, point of view, editing, or mood, but may depict dissimilar subjects for different purposes or effects. You must find a creative way to explore these similarities and differences.

Finally, for every claim you make and explain about a relationship in your chosen scenes, you will have to explain the meaning or importance of your discovery. In order to explain the meaning or importance of anything, you must contextualize for your reader what overall purpose your ideas might illuminate. You may write how the scene explains, for you, the experience of war. You may want to explain, for instance, whether the tensions you discover in your two scenes refer back to larger tension within American culture or history, or some larger issue that has to do with gender, nationalism, or film itself. The scenes may relate back to a concept in our class reading. It could be anything: you goal is to find that something, and explain how and why your short essay relates to it, and why someone else reading it should care.

As with any essay, it is also your job to incorporate this assignment into a prose style that is fluid, literate, polished, and written with a sense of authority and inspiration. The essay should not bear the clunky signature of an author “answering questions.” This, too, is part of the challenge of good academic prose.

Assume, too, that this piece may become the foundation for the conclusion of essay two.

The Ethics of Revision

The Ethics of Revision
& the soul of writing

The Ten Conditions For Revision

1. All life is meaningful.

(Every moment is urgent: time is always new.)


2. Memory is selective and fallible.

(Your memories are organic in your brain; your memories are scratches in your cortex tissue. Your feelings are flashes of electric chemical reactions.)


3. There is inadequate language to convey even one real experience.

(There is only this language; this language is always abstract. Your burden is to find words that are the least abstract.)

4. Writing is the (immediate) memory of thinking.

(You do not write what you believe. You write to discover belief.

Belief is discovery, unless you already know everything you will know.

To discover belief, you must write about your observations and then organize them.

You organize your observations according to your subsequent interpretations of them.

During organization, you will search for patterns and then explain them.

Some patterns are more obvious than others.)

5. All life is connected.

(Everything in life—events, people, objects, and places—connects through infinite relationships. These relationships are the raw material for your discovery. You must show the connections that you believe exist by proving their relationships.)


6. You have an ethical obligation to discover your life in writing.

(The more specific you write about your life, the more your experiences become yours.
You must explain your life if you have the opportunity.

Revision is the acceleration of your discoveries about your life and beliefs.)


7. Writing wanders through information, like perceptions, observations, and interpretations, in order to discover relationships.

(Your writing emphasizes some information, but must consider all information possible.)


8. Writing shows the visible and invisible connections that define relationships.

(When you connect relationships by explaining observations and interpretations, you assert a belief.

A belief is never true. It is merely as true as possible: an informed, rationale fantasy.

One sentence can never be as true as a paragraph—and a paragraph can never be as true as ten paragraphs, and so on…

9. Writing is the science of relationships.

(Science proves the facts of relationships; it invents laws. Writing is potential science. Writing also explores the perceptions, politics, genealogies, emotions, and consequences of relationships.

Scholarship proves how different relationships have stories that can be written, remembered, and connected together.)

10. Your writing voice is the cumulative expression of identity.

(Your writing voice is a cousin of your speaking voice.

Your writing voice is different: it is created from layers of your thinking and speech.

It is always an expression of different versions of you. It changes because you change. Writing captures your self through time, at a moment.

Writing can never fully express you or your subject: You can only abandon a piece when it becomes impossible to find new and better words.

Vonnegut in-class Writing Assignment

Take this opportunity to practice threading a written discussion between two different “moments” within a text. Just as you compared two different scenes from two different war films for Short 3, now attempt the same using two different passages from Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five.



To begin, select one of the passages your group discussed and noted last Wednesday, or pick a relevant passage from our class discussion today. Write up a summary of that passage into sentences; be sure to address the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the passage.

In other words:

Who is speaking and to whom
What they are saying (summarize)
When the passage takes places (if relevant)
Where it takes place (if relevant)
Why the passage was written (author’s intention, narrative necessity, etc)
How the passage was written (voice, tone, style, point of view, etc)

Next, do the same for a passage of your own choosing in the pages assigned over the weekend.

Finally, write a paragraph where you compare and contrast these two passages.

You may want to contrast the intention or “why” of the two passages.

You may want to contrast the different point of view or tone of the two passages.

You may want to contrast what idea or ideas each passage explains, addresses, or problematizes.

To problematize is to turn a statement into a question, or to complicate a simple or accepted idea by presenting information that refutes it, challenges it, or adds another perspective required to understand the idea.

Statement: War is a force that gives us meaning.
Problem: War is a force that gives us meaning? (Define war. Define Force. Define Us. Define Meaning.)

Statement: War films often try to show war heroes.
Problem: Some war films try to show that in war, the heroes are often those who don’t do the killing. (Example: Hotel Rwanda, Life is Beautiful)