Each
group (of three-to-five students) will produce a website that will
include the following elements, all of which should be free of
distracting mechanical errors:
- Web
links for the assigned author and book:
Here you should offer as much helpful information as you can
find for your particular author and book.
Please provide links to biographies of and interviews with
the author (even if they don't all explicitly mention your text);
interpretations or reviews of the work; historical information that
relates to the book; and anything else you can find.
Your goal for this part of the assignment is to produce as
exhaustive a list as possible.
- Secondary
bibliography on the assigned text:
A bibliography containing all of the sources that offer
analysis of your particular text.
This bibliography should be formatted according to MLA
guidelines, and it should include only secondary materials.
Some of you will face the problem of finding too much
information; some of you will meet the opposite obstacle,
discovering that not as much has been written about your text.
I am not assigning a certain number of works that should be
included in this bibliography; I am saying only that it should be,
like your list of web links, exhaustive.
In other words, you should provide every book review, journal
article, interview, and book chapter that has ever been written
about your book.
This bibliography does not have to be annotated.
- Summary
of the book's plot:
A one-page summary of the story (or stories), for anyone who
hasn't read the book.
We'll discuss in class what makes up a good summary.
- Additional
materials relating
to your text that a prospective student-scholar would find helpful.
This
is another place for you to be creative.
Past groups have provided, for example, a glossary containing
English translations of the Spanish words and phrases used in a
book; recommended reading of the author's other works; suggestions
for what actors might play the characters were a movie to be made of
this story; and frequently asked questions concerning the book and
its author.
- A
"geographical" reading of the book in which you examine
the place-awareness of the text.
For this part of your website, which will be the heart
of your project, you are looking to produce anything that will make
your project better and more interesting.
Consider
your audience to be someone who lives in, say, Houston or Atlanta or
Chicago, and who is counting on your website to help her or him
experience the LA-ness of the novel more fully.
This element of your website should include three main parts:
(1)
A listing, by page number, of every single reference the
book makes to LA landmarks, street names, buildings, neighborhoods, etc.
Thus, as you read your assigned text, you should keep a pen in hand and
mark each specific LA reference, possibly keeping a list of page numbers
in the back of the book.
(2)
Information and images that will prove useful to someone who is
studying this book.
You might consider, for instance, landmarks around LA; digital/scanned
pictures of landmarks; routes that characters in the book drive in or
run in or explore; local businesses; quotes about the city.
(3)
A
few paragraphs' discussion of how much effort the author seems to have
made at being geographically accurate.
These paragraphs should introduce this section of your website
and should contain at least 300 words.
If
you simply do a good job at listing and identifying all the references,
you are assured of a B on this part of the project.
But if you're looking for an A, you'll need to do a good deal
more work and be a bit more creative.
