Literature in the Visual Arts in Medieval Europe

1. DUE FEB. 21. Read Andrew Taylor,  “Was there a Song of Roland?” Speculum 76
(2001): 28-65. (This the most recent issue of the journal, which is in Robeson Library
periodicals section; 2 additional copies of the article will be placed on reserve in the
library.)

2. Oral report on secondary literature, article or book. Use bibliographic databases such as
the MLA and the BHA (these and other resources are linked to the main course page) to find a piece of secondary literature that seems interesting and useful. Have me approve it. Prepare a short oral report, no longer than 5 minutes, in
which you answer the following questions: 
     •    What question is the author trying to answer? 
     •    What is his/her answer to this question? (This will probably be the thesis of the
     article.) 
     •    What evidence does the author offer to support the thesis? 
     •    How persuasive is the argument? How strong is the evidence? 
     •    How significant is the thesis? How much does the article help us understand the
     subject matter?

The table of due dates for this and the following assignment is here.
General instructions for the oral reports are below.

3. Oral presentation of your own analysis of a text or visual art work. I will provide topics
as the due dates approach; however, if you have an idea of your own that you would like to
work on, please feel free to discuss it with me. These presentations should be no longer than 6 minutes.

The table of due dates for this and the preceding assignment is here.
General instructions for the oral reports are below.

General comments on the oral presentations

1. Be very focused. These presentations are short. You need to be very prepared and very focused. You don't have time to ramble, you don't have time for elaborate introductions, you don't have time for lengthy quotations or lingering looks at images. You need to state a thesis very clearly (your own in the "brief analysis" reports, your author's in the "secondary literature" reports), and offer clear, well organized, succinctly expressed evidence to support it. 
2. Write it out and read it. For some reason, many people always seem to feel that there is some stigma attached to reading your presentation, but, in fact, writing the thing out and reading it is the best way to make sure that you will cover what you want to cover in the time allotted. You will probably find that you read one double-spaced typed/printed page in about 2 minutes. But that doesn't allow for ad libs. I have listened to professional scholars deliver hundreds of papers, and I can only remember about two attempts to speak from notes rather than reading a prepared text. One was a complete disaster, and the other took much longer than it should have and was not as clear as it should have been. So unless you are an absolute genius at extemporaneous speaking, or unless you want to memorize your presentation, I strongly recommend reading from a carefully prepared text.

4. Term paper. Due May 9, at the usual class time. 
This is to be your analysis of a (group of) texts and/or images, with secondary research.
The term paper may grow out of one or both of your oral reports, but it does not have to. You should
think about a question or a small set of closely related questions, think and read about the
question/s, focus your study on one well defined and relatively narrow question, and then
do some thinking and some research before writing a paper of probably no less than 10 nor
more than 20 pages answering your question and considering the significance of your
answer. 
 

• How much research? Enough to have a sense of whether others have worked on the same or very similar questions and, if so, what they have said. I do NOT expect that you will have read everything related to the subject. Try to start with a couple of fairly recent articles or books, which will probably make reference to the most important positions staked out by earlier scholars. Then read a few of the works referred to by the recent scholars. You should also do your own search for earlier works. 
• How to cite. When you incorporate the words or ideas of others into your paper, you must clearly identify their source. Exactly how you do it is not so important, as long as you do it clearly, and as long as you do it the same way throughout your paper. Many publications in the humanities use the MLA style, or something like it, and if you ask me for a preference, I suggest using MLA style. But if you prefer something else, especially if you are accustomed to using some other style, feel free to use any of the generally accepted styles for citations. 

Notes on documentation styles, with link to information about MLA style. These notes were prepared for a freshman honors seminar a couple of years ago, and make one or two references to things said in class at that time, which you can ignore.
• Writing advice and suggestions. Here are some tips and some advice on writing term papers. This, also, was prepared a couple of years ago for a freshman honors seminar, so remember that this was written for freshman, and don't be offended if any of the advice seems ridiculously obvious to you as adults and graduate students.
• Submission. The paper is due at class time, May 9, 2001. Early submission is welcomed and encouraged. Submission by mail, fax, or e-mail is acceptable. Send mail to James Rushing, Dept. of German and Russian, 311 N. Fifth St., Camden, NJ 08102. You can send faxes to me at 856-225-6602, but if you submit by fax, be sure that it reaches me by 4:30 pm on May 9. If you submit your paper as an e-mail attachment, please use a recent version of WordPerfect or Word (or send a pdf file if you want to). Sometimes attachments don't open properly, so don't send your paper by e-mail and then immediately disappear to some place far away from your computer; you might have to resend it. E-mail papers to me at rushing@camden.rutgers.edu.