Honors 202 006:
Discovering Literature--The Appeal of Pastoral
Fall 2005
Tompkins
G123. M, W, 1:30-2:45
Section 006
Dr. Morillo
Research Project: Pastoral in Our
Current Culture Assignment
Written and Oral parts graded as one unit worth 15% of final grade
Your job is to find any one
current cultural artifact that has
some interesting connection to pastoral ideals and pastoral
representations. Your choice need not be limited to what would
likely be defined by the pastoral genre, since we have seen that in
1937 and 1983 two movies not traditionally called pastorals nonetheless
bear intriguing relationship to pastoral. You need to select any one
item that you think shows something interesting about what has happened
to pastoral now. Possible kinds of cultural artifacts may include but
need not be limited to: literature, song lyrics, paintings,
photographs, drawings, screensavers, music, dance, movies, television,
advertising. As you've seen, presence of sheep is not a requirement.
Alternatively, if you wish to present one
particular idea from your longer final paper (on either Stoppard, Roth,
or your chosen text if it is relatively current) that will also be fine
as an example of reasonably current pastoral.
Whatever you select you will then write up in 3-5 pages how you think
your artifact makes an interesting contribution to what might count as
pastoral discourse today. You are not out for coverage here. Instead
focus on what makes some one feature (or several at the most) of your
artifact interesting to you. This
written part is due Monday, Nov. 21, at the start of class.
You will turn in one copy to me and keep one for yourself, because you
will use your copy to present briefly and orally your project to the
class in the last week. We have 17 students, so you will each have to
present for no more than 5-10 minutes, grouped as follows:
Presenting on Monday, Nov. 28
Patrick Barefoot
Stacy Cain
Kristopher Kleiner
Kelly McGill
Justine Nomina
Christopher Rice
Rachel Watson
Riley Zeller-Towson
Presenting Wednesday, Nov. 30
Courtney Bowman
Jessica Fournier
Alec Happel
James Lawrence
Shalimarie Montalvo
Jonathan Price
Peter Venema
David Wingler