Assignment Page for Paper 5: Texts and Contexts

For this assignment, you will not write a formal paper. Instead, you will prepare a series of annotations explaining and analyzing selected passages from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Username: english302
Password: marktwain

This assignment is in two parts:

Part I. A 300 to 350-word passage (about two to three paragraphs) on the “context area” you chose as your focus for this book:

• Historical contexts: Medieval life and culture; chivalry; King Arthur and the Round Table
• Social/Cultural contexts: Technology and science (19c. and medieval)
• Social/Cultural contexts: Class, social justice, gender roles, race, contrasting customs
• Social/Cultural contexts: Belief, superstition, magic, religion,
• Historical/Cultural contexts: Time travel, science fiction, book and film adaptations
• Literary contexts: Language, style, humor, satire, parody, literary allusions
• Political contexts: Nineteenth-century history and  politics; progress; industrialism; imperialism

You can see the signup sheet here: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl302/contexts.htm.
If you have not signed up yet, you can do so here: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl302/signupform.htm.

Since these are broad topics, you might choose to focus on a single aspect of your area; for example, you might want to write a passage about Sir Kay, or Merlin, or the Morte Darthur, or the nineteenth-century bicycle, or the Colt revolver, or nineteenth-century U.S. policies on imperialism, or Twain’s use of slang.

Your passage will do two things: (1) it will provide specific information about the subject; and (2) it will explain the significance of this subject to the book. For example, you might describe the nineteenth-century bicycle—how it looked, when it was popular, and so forth.—in your first paragraph and then discuss its significance (symbolism, etc.) in your second paragraph.

Part II.

In this section, you will write 7 (seven) annotations of the sort that you have worked on in your discussion sections. You may, if you wish, include those annotations as part of your seven.

The annotation does not need to be simply a definition of a single word; rather, you can explain several sentences or a whole paragraph. For example, you may want to annotate a paragraph from one of Hank’s speeches on democracy by relating it to nineteenth-century ideas about democracy, even though none of the words needs to be defined for a general audience. Remember, each annotation should include both an explanation of the passage’s meaning and an interpretation of the passage’s significance in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Choose one of the following.

1. Select a single chapter or passage and write your 7 annotations based on this section. You don’t have to stay within your context area for this one; your annotations can be from any of the areas. During the draft workshop, you can discuss your ideas with others in the class and ideas and collaborate on figuring out the meanings.

OR

2. Write 7 annotations related to your context area. These can be chosen from anywhere in the book.

When you choose these passages, cite either the page number of the edition we are using in class or the URL of the chapter in the online version at http://wikihost.org/wikis/conn/.