WS 539: Feminist Theories I
Assignments

Participation: 10%

Attendance is required and is critical for your learning, particularly in a course that covers such difficult material. Your participation counts, both as part of the course requirements and as essential to your learning. You need to engage in class discussions and contribute your insights about class readings to the knowledge that is produced, shared, and learned in this course. A significant part of what each of you will take away from this course comes in the process of your sharing your insights/making a case/formulating an argument as well as in the process of hearing what others have to say. You will earn your Participation grade through the nature of your contributions; your comments should reflect your preparation, i.e., your having read the materials and reflected on them critically.

It is your responsibility to speak up in class and carry your weight in our discussions. It is also your responsibility to make sure you are not dominating the conversation. If you have already spoken, wait until others have shared before entering the conversation again. Some of the material you contribute will come out of the Critical Reading Response you prepare for class, so you will never come to class with nothing to say. If you wish, you may read from your Response as a way of finding your voice the first time or two. But some of your best insights will come in the heat of discussion, when someone else's comments spark an insight or understanding you had not earlier seen. Our conversations will often become excited and heated, but they should always remain respectful. Critiquing ideas is part of what we do as scholars; critiquing people--or taking offense at someone who disagrees with you--has no place in scholarship.

I require your participation knowing that it is not an easy thing for everybody. Some of us find it far more comfortable to work out our ideas on paper, with time to mull over problems and find the right words for what we want to say. Such students can take heart in the fact that some students who enjoy the melee of open discussion find it far more difficult to put their thoughts on paper. But every scholar has to be able to do both. Your success in a graduate program depends both on your ability to write a series of term papers, doctoral exams, and, finally, a dissertation and also your ability to think on your feet and engage arguments in your doctoral orals and dissertation defense. You cannot make it through graduate school to the goal of a PhD without finding a way to engage the scholarly conversation in both oral and written modes.

Critical Reading Responses: 30%

Each week (except when you are making your Class Presentation) you will write a formal critique of our readings. When there are multiple readings for a given week, you may either choose to focus on one text or to compare and contrast two of the readings; you should not try to take on more than two authors in such a short assignment. Even when we focus on a single book, you should consider limiting your critique to one or two major points or chapters rather than trying to take on the entire argument.

Your Responses should be two pages each. Do not assume that this assignment is similar to reading responses you have written for other classes. Rather, your response should follow the following format:
The first page should analyze the argument of the article or book chapter. State the problem the work addresses; its thesis and major supporting points and evidence; its assumptions (explicit or implicit); its key insights; and their implications. Do not narrate a story ("First she says this; then she says that). Instead, read and make sense of the argument and then re-present it for your reader in a critical fashion.
The second page should explore the accomplishments and/or limitations of the argument. Is the problem framed correctly/incorrectly? Is something important left out of consideration, or does the author cover as much as can be expected, given the length of the reading and the problem it proposes to address? Are the assumptions behind the argument valid or invalid, given that every argument must begin by making some assumptions? Are the methods and logic of argumentation persuasive? Does the author engage the scholarly conversation? or does the argument seem to be articulated in a vacuum? Do the implications of the argument raise more problems than the argument solves? What will be the task of the next scholar who builds on this argument and/or writes on this subject? You cannot cover all these points in one page, so choose the issues that seem salient to this particular article.

The Responses are due in class on the day the readings are assigned; late papers will not be accepted after that class meeting, as part of the purpose of the assignment is to help you prepare to engage in discussion. Responses will be graded on their fulfillment of the assignment, effectiveness of argumentation and organization, and on style, and mechanics. One missed paper will be excused (in addition to the Reading Response assignment from which you are excused on the day you make your Class Presentation). If you turn in all Responses, I will drop your lowest score when I calculate your course grade.

Class Presentation and Critical Essay: 20%

You will make a Class Presentation on group of articles or one book on the day the reading is assigned. You will produce an outline of your Presentation for distribution in class as well as a 4-6-page Critical Essay to be emailed to me (in Word or Word Perfect) by midnight on the Monday preceding the Wednesday you make your presentation.

Your Critical Essay should
You will need to consult various library resources in order to find critiques of an article/book/argument. You will learn how to find such materials through library training that is part of this class. Information about the author can usually be found on the Web, often through a University site.

Plan your class presentation so that it takes no more than twenty minutes. Share your outline with the rest of the class, and follow it in your presentation. You may also bring in other supporting material, such as images, excerpts from the author's other works (as necessary to understanding the work under consideration), and video. Make notes for yourself of the points you wish to cover under each item in the outline, and speak from those notes rather than from your Critical Response. Be prepared to answer questions about your Presentation

The Class Presentation and Critical Essay are each worth 10% of your total grade. The Class Presentation will be graded on both content and execution, that is, you should cover all the points in your outline fully and should present your material clearly. Your Critical Essay should fully address all required areas and should meet the usual requirements for an academic essay: effective argumentation and organization; correct usage, style, and mechanics, including citation format (MLA, Chicago, APA, etc). Note that on the day you make your Class Presentation, you are excused from the Critical Reading Response assignment for the day.

Final Project: Literature Review (40%)

For your Final Project, you will produce a Literature Review on a theoretical perspective of your choice. Your topic may involve a convergence of theories, such as postcolonial and literary theory for the study of East Indian literature 1980-2000, or marxian and poststructuralist theory for understanding cultural studies., which itself is a kind of hybrid theory. You might consider choosing a topic that will support interests you already have and/or papers you are writing or plan to write so that this assignment will be of use to you beyond simply completing the requirements for this class. Alternatively, you might choose a topic you know little about as a means of learning more, especially if you think it will be of importance to your dissertation.

A Literature Review surveys (reviews) the scholarly works (literature) on a particular topic. They are an essential feature of master's theses and dissertations, so you will each need to know how to write one. They demonstrate that you have done your homework, that you are aware of previous contributions to the subject of your own writing project, and that you are not replicating something that has already been written. A Literature Review also helps you to define the limits of your inquiry--especially important if your project is interdisciplinary--and to situate your argument in the context of what has already been written. Your Literature Review for this class cannot do all that, as you are not yet at the thesis- or dissertation-writing stage. But you can nonetheless use this literature review to explore what has been written and argued about a particular theory and to understand it more fully than is possible in a survey course. And since the literature review you ultimately write as part of your thesis or dissertation will undoubtedly include a review of the theory/ies pertinent to your topic, you will get practice for that all-important writing task by fulfilling this assignment.

Literature Reviews do not simply summarize the theses of a list of resources. Rather they make an argument about the genealogy of a theory (or other topic) through an exposition of the major debates about that topic, showing which authors alligned themselves with this perspective, and which took that perspective, while others took an entirely different perspective. While you should be able to group arguments in this way, you should also take care to reveal the nuances of each argument and to assess its contribution to the debate(s).

In order to write such a paper, you will need to submerge yourself in the  literature of your chosen topic--in part to figure out what's important and what's inessential. As you survey the literature on your topic, study each argument the way you've learned to in the process of writing your Critical Reading Responses and your Critical Essay. Don't forget to pillage each author's footnotes, as that will give you a clue which arguments s/he considered central to the topic. You can learn a lot about your topic and make the research task much easier by seeking out summary articles on your topic from pertinent journals (often titled "Recent Studies in [Topic]") as well as anthologies of readings on your topic (such as collected article on feminist literary theory, or cultural studies, or popular culture, or poststructuralism, etc., etc). The editors of anthologies will have gathered what they consider to be the most important writers/arguments on the topic. The Introductions to such anthologies may also prove useful, as they usually provide at least a short review of the literature that will help you figure out the major players in the debate.

Your Literature Review should discuss at least 20 but not more than 30 scholarly works (books, journal articles, and perhaps a small number of Web resources, as appropriate). For most topics, you will do best to limit your Review to works written in the past decade or so, except for germinal articles that remain important and influential. The exception to this rule arises if you wish to investigate a historical debate within the field--e.g., the Marxism in the first half of the twentieth century or the development of cultural studies from Marx and Saussure to Raymond Williams. In that case, you would not include articles much past 1970.

There are many good web sites that offer suggestions for writing a Literature Review, including those from UCSB and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Your own review should be 8-10 pages (2000-2500 words), followed by a bibliography (not annotated) of at least 20 scholarly resources (which means that you will not need to include full bibliographic information in the text itself). The 20 works may--and should--include works we have read in class. Use a standard citation style (MLA, Chicago, APA, etc.).

After you have identified a topic for your Review, you will need to do some serious library research to help you identify the works you will review in your paper. You will receive preliminary training in research techniques that should successfully launch you on this project, but you may wish to make an appointment with Mary Feeney, the Women's Studies subject specialist, or another reference librarian for help with your research.

You will be required to submit a Proposal for the Literature Review, in which you describe your proposed project. The Proposal will consist of a paragraph-long description of the scope of your Literature Review (what will you cover and, as appropriate, what you won't cover) and an annotated bibliography of at least 10 works you expect to include in your Literature Review. Annotate each item in your bibliography with 2-3 sentences summarizing the thesis of the article or book.

You make a Class Presentation about the findings of your Literature Review to the rest of the class at the end of the semester. Provide a handout that covers major authors/works and any other material that your listener might find helpful, both for following your presentation and for their own future research. In your presentation, concentrate on describing what you learned and aim to give your audience a cogent analysis of the theoretical strand you have chosen so that they can take from your presentation an understanding of the genealogy of the theory, its major debates, and where it stands today (or at the end of the period you cover). Plan to take a total of 20 minutes to make your presentation (12-15 minutes) and answer questions (5-8 minutes).

The proposal is due in class on Wednesday, October 8. You will present your findings to the rest of the class on Wednesday, December 10, when we will meet for double our usual class time, 3:00-8:00 pm, in order to avoid meeting at the time scheduled for the course final. The Literature itself is due by midnight, Wednesday, December 18. You may send it to me by email as an attachment (Word Perfect, Word, pdf, or something else I'm guaranteed to be able to read even though I don't have the absolute latest version of software). Alternatively, you may put a hard copy in my mailbox in the Women's Studies office by 5:00 pm when the office closes).

Your Proposal and Presentation are each worth 5% of your total grade, leaving 30% for the Literature Review itself. The Proposal will be graded on its fulfillment of the assignment and its adherence to the standards of academic work, including citation format. The Presentation will be graded on both content and execution, that is, it should fulfill the assignment and present the material clearly. The Literature Review will be graded on its fulfillment of the assignment, the sophistication and complexity of its thesis/insights, the effectiveness of its argumentation and organization, and adherence to the standards of academic work, including citation format.
Thanks to David Graizbord and Miranda Joseph for material I consulted and, in some cases, used in devising these assignments.