Peer Review: See syllabus
Due Date: See syllabus
Assignment Goal
Students should create a thesis-driven essay that explains how at least two different textual works (at least one literary text and one film) represented the violence of 20th century American riots by focusing on the underlying factors involved in them.
Assignment Description
The second essay assignment offers students the opportunity to explore how literature can help us understand the violence of urban riots. In turning to texts like Ann Petry's "In Darkness and Confusion," Walter Mosley's Little Scarlet, and Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror, we can see how different authors gave narration to the themes surrounding race riots that we've discussed in class. In forming their argument about how these texts work to represent and fictionalize racial violence, students should reflect on the themes based on particular passages from the texts. They should also ask themselves, what is this text trying to tell me about race riots and racial violence in the United States at this time? Students should pay attention to what themes and ideas that they can find that connect different texts together. They should place these themes and ideas in their thesis statements, and use the thesis statement to define and explain how they will talk about these themes and ideas in the essay that follows. These themes and ideas should allow the student to explain the factors involved in the riots (the reasons, the causes, and the function of the riots). What do we need to know about why riots occur, and what can these texts tell us about the specific riots they narrate?
As they structure their ideas and notes into paragraphs, students will use evidence from the texts and the films to explain the phenomena of race riots. They should be careful to organize their paragraphs around these themes and ideas, to use specific passages or scenes from the texts and films as evidence, and to explain what that evidence means in their critical thinking. As always, once students have turned to a particular text for evidence they should briefly summarize the story and the immediate part of the story they want to talk about (the same goes for the film).
