English 543 Oral Presentations: Instructions and Sign-up Sheet

Each group will be responsible for bringing into dialogue (1) a critical reading assigned on e-reserve for that particular day, and (2) the fictional work also assigned that day.  While preparing your remarks, think about ways in which the position articulated by the author of the critical study can be used to generate productive interpretations of the literary text we are discussing. Conversely, consider how the fictional text can throw light on both the possibilities and the limitations of the arguments developed in the critical study. 

You might want to adopt the following general strategy as you prepare your presentation. Work to identify (first individually and then as a group) a number of key issues that you feel are worth focusing on in the presentation--issues that come into view when you put the critical study and literary text into dialogue in the manner specified above. Each person in the group can concentrate on examining one of those issues. Then, during the presentation itself, someone can give a kind of overview statement of the key issues, followed by each member of the group zooming in on his or her particular topic of discussion.

Presentations should be 10-15 minutes total, and feel free to incorporate into your remarks questions that you'd like to see the rest of the class address as we discuss the texts on which you are presenting.

January

Th 10  Group Presentation #1: Putting Lukács's "The Ideology of Modernism" [ER]  into dialogue with Joyce's Portrait



T 22  Group Presentation #2: Putting Trotter's "The Modernist Novel" [ER] into dialogue with Ford's The Good Soldier

Paul Carter, Olta Qorri, Amanda Logsdon, Nicole Maroni, Richard MacAleese, Nicole Ross


Th 24  Group Presentation #3: Putting Woolf's "Modern Fiction" [ER] into dialogue with Mrs Dalloway

Katie Lucas, Ben Jones, Rebecca Copley, Brett Laubacher, Sean Lehosit, Molly Davis


T 29  Group Presentation #4: Putting Dekoven's "Modernism and Gender" [ER] into dialogue with Woolf's Mrs Dalloway

Andrea Latessa, Monica Skubak, Chet Hay, Whitney Hallock, Megan Corbin, Brittany Gibson

February

T 12  Group Presentation #5: Putting Lodge's "Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism" [ER] into dialogue with Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

Daniel Weiser, Kate Hanseman, Jennifer Cunningham, Brad Lawrence, Peter Hale, Nate Ellis


T 26  Group Presentation #6: Putting Connor's "Introduction" and/or "Postmodernism and Literature" [both on ER] into dialogue with Amis's Time's Arrow 

Lauren Nickell, Marcus Thomas, Abbie Brehm, Nick Tomassini, David Morris, Greg Forrest

March

T4 Group Presentation #7: Putting Brian Finney's "Briony's Stand Against Oblivion" (online version available at http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html) into dialogue with McEwan's Atonement

Brad Kolb, Erica Haugtvedt, Bill W. Dantowitz, Erich Schreiner, Dave Imhoff, Chris Skovron, Dylan Meister