For most of this course, you will be encountering creative works you’ve never experienced before. But we’re not doing that quite yet. As we get started, you’re going to select a story that you’ve already read (or watched or played)–one that prompted a memorable experience. Making such a selection can seem a bit daunting. Maybe you’re not in the habit of reading these days or maybe you don’t think the stories you consume are worth mentioning to a “literature” professor. Trust me, this process will work with any story (a novel, film, album, videogame, etc). This is because all stories (from Star Wars to Beowulf and from Hamlet to Bridgerton) are fundamentally tools that do work on our brains. These tools are crafted by artisans (authors, content creators, stand-up comics, songwriters, video game developers, etc.) who draw on an ever-expanding set of techniques as they create. Literature scholars like to argue about which stories are superior (this is why we have a literary canon), but if it has a character doing something, it’s a story.
In other words, be honest about what you like! Your semester will be most enjoyable if you use this first assignment to explore something you have genuinely enjoyed. Once you’ve put a name to the experiences you’ve had with stories in the past, you can find more stories that have provoked similar experiences in others. If it’s hard to pick just one story, you can go through this process for two or three different stories. The more you explore in this assignment, the more you’ll discover about your preferences (and remember, that’s the point of this assignment).
Once you’ve decided on the story you’ll explore in this assignment, make sure you have access to it. It’s often been the case that students don’t have a copy of the book they read five years ago or don’t have the right setup to play a specific video game on campus. Talk to me if this is the case. Within the two weeks you’ll spend on this assignment, there should be time to track it down. You can also change your choice if it turns out you can’t access the story. You will need to be able to quote from it to meet the requirements for this assignment.
We have two primary goals with this assignment. First, we want to isolate specific story experiences and try to figure out which specific features of the story prompted those experiences. While we’re doing this, we also want to try to remember how we learned about this story that has been meaningful in our lives (this will be the beginning of our work exploring algorithms). Once we’ve isolated the features of the story and considered how we came to know about the story, we’ll try to figure out the technique/s the author used to create those features. We’ll do this step by step and you’ll submit a piece of writing that shows your thought process. This means that you are not (for this or any other assignment this semester) going to be asked to produce a traditional “English paper” (clear thesis statement supported with evidence from the text). Instead, you are going to describe, explore, and chronicle your process figuring out how you think one or more stories work. You might feel an urge to find out if others have already figured it out and it’s fine to do this (though definitely not required). It’s unlikely you’ll figure everything out, and that’s okay. If you do find a source that offers an explanation (like an article or a blog post), make sure to cite it!
Describe your Experience
Describe how you came to experience the story you’ve chosen, starting with your best recollection of how you found the story. Did you search for it or did a friend recommend it? Was it assigned reading in a course or did it show up on your Netflix feed? Try to remember the year or even the specific time of year. Next, try to remember the way you felt when you first experienced the story. More specifically, try to put into words the emotions you experienced when you encountered the story.
Classify your Experience
Now that you’ve described your experience, you’re going to consider whether others have had that same experience with a story. This might be a little challenging because it’s not what we typically do with stories in a classroom. You might be expecting to interpret stories in a course with an English professor, perhaps using class discussion to debate the meaning of Frankenstein’s relationship with the monster he created in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
But with this assignment, I’m not asking you to find out if someone has interpreted the story you’ve chosen in the same way you have. Instead, I’m asking you to determine if others have had a similar experience with any work of literature. You can see in the list of experiences below that an experience is different than an interpretation (and wildly different works of literature can prompt similar experiences. What you see below is just a fraction of the many unique experiences people have with stories
- Wonder
- Fear
- Courage
- Justice
- Empathy
- Love
- Superiority
- Serenity
- Curiosity
- Paranoia
- Confidence
- Amusement
Instead of interpreting, we’re going to use a scientific method similar to what biologists use when they work from observations in the field toward taxonomic classification of species. If they observe an organism that hasn’t already been classified, they get to name a new species (after conferring with other scientists, of course). But they might find that what they’ve observed is not a new species (it’s actually just a funny-looking zebra). We’ll discuss new experiences as a class, helping you determine if you’ve actually had a new experience or found a funny-looking zebra. If the experience you had isn’t in the list above, you can give it a name and, if you want, submit it to RED so it appears in our list of experiences going forward.
Describe the Features Prompting your Experience
Here’s where it becomes important to have access to the story as you do this assignment. Return to the story and try to determine what exactly it was that shaped your experience. Was it some aspect of the plot? Was it the way the narrator told the story? Was it a surprising character? Was it some aspect of the world the author created? It might be a combination of features so include everything! If it’s specific language from the story, include direct quotation in this section. If it is something that can’t be quoted (some aspect of the plot or some feel of the storyworld), put it into your own words with as much detail as possible. Here are examples of direction quotation and paraphrase:
Direct quotation from Frankenstein:
“My rage returned: I remembered that I was for ever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow…I only wonder that at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind, and perish in the attempt to destroy them.”
Paraphrase from Frankenstein:
The story is presented from a variety of narrative perspectives: the explorer, Dr. Frankenstein, and his monster.
Try to Determine the Technique that Created the Feature
As you try to figure out which features of the story prompted your experience, try also to imagine the technique the author used to create that feature. I say imagine because that’s exactly how this sort of analysis works. You probably can’t know exactly what the author(s) did or why they did it (even if they explain it in an interview!) so the trick is to remember that this thing you experienced was created deliberately by someone (or, more likely, a team of people). These people created the storyworld, made choices about the plot, decided to narrate the story in a particular way (this involves specific camera angles if you’re looking at film or video games), and crafted characters. There might have been discussions (even arguments) between authors and editors, screenwriters and directors, or game designers and graphics editors. What set of decisions do you think prompted your emotional response and who is most likely responsible for it?
Once you’ve done your best to identify the technique that prompted your experience, you’re done! Each Story-Experience-Feature-Technique linkage is one unit. This assignment requires you to identify at least one unit, but you can repeat this process for however many distinct experiences you had with a story. You can also repeat this process for however many stories you want to explore in this assignment (I’d suggest no more than three). You can organize your post according to the steps outlined above, as I’ve done in my example post, or you can write a post that includes all that information but presents it in a way that you think will be more compelling to your classmates. You have the option to share your post with your classmates or keep it private so I’m the only one who sees it.
The Parts of This Assignment
Part 1: Chronicle and Process your Reading Experiences
Describe your experiences
Classify your experiences
Describe the features prompting your experiences
Try to determine the technique used to create the features you describe
Part 2: Create a Post on Course Website
Title
Featured Image (something you’ve created or something you’ve found)
Complete media file details for featured image
“caption” field should include an attribution statement (TASL guidance here)
“alternative text” field should provide a summary of what is in the image
“description” field should include the URL for the image file you downloaded
Reading Experience with any sources clearly cited (hyperlinks for online sources and in-text citations for print sources) with a list of works cited at the end.
Part 3: Write a Project Reflection
After you submit your post, I will read it and prepare feedback for you (usually as a video of me reading your post aloud and sharing ideas for ways you might want to expand on the ideas for the final project). You will have one week from the time I have sent your feedback video to watch it and prepare a project reflection to submit through Canvas.
Part 4: Contribute to our Recommender System
During the first class meeting after this assignment is due, you will submit your experience to our course website and we will spend time in class discussing the experiences you identified and brainstorming how a system for classifying the experiences readers have with stories might be used to improve current recommender systems.
FAQs
- Do I have to share my post with the class? You can choose to share your post with classmates or share it only with me (set your post to “private” if you only want me to see it).
- Should I choose something short so I can finish reading in time? You don’t need to finish reading the text you select in order to complete this assignment (you should only create notes for the part of the text you are able to read). Keep reading after you’ve turned this assignment in and consider expanding your edition at the end of the semester (a more substantial tour guide edition is one option for the final project).
- Should I do research on what I’m reading? Only if you want to. You can process your reading experience without looking at what others have said about the text, but some students like getting the perspective of others. If you do look at secondary sources, please mention this in your reading experience section (even if you don’t wind up citing the sources)
- So, this isn’t a typical “English paper”? No, it isn’t. There is no requirement to have a single argument or claim. You are not required to find peer-reviewed sources to support or contextualize what you want to say. There is no requirement to be original. I want you to let your interests guide you and share your experiences, questions, and theories with me (and your classmates!).
- Can you share an example of what a finished product is supposed to look like? Yes! The post I’m asking you to read before next class is my attempt to do this assignment. Yours does not need to look like mine, but I offer it as an example in case you find it useful.
- How will you grade this? This first assignment is graded on a pass/fail basis. If you engage with the task and turn in a project, you will get 100%. This sort of project is likely new to you, so things will be confusing! Do your best and I will give you feedback so you understand the expectations going forward.
