Reminder: Presentation Criteria

Presentation Criteria:

On the day we discuss your chosen text as a class, you will be responsible for starting the discussion in a 8-10 minute presentation. Your presentation should include the following components:

1) Provide a thematic summary of the day's reading; focus on recounting the text's major plot points through the lens of one of the story's main themes (Example: Sexuality, religion, chivalry, etc. in Dracula). This will allow you to keep your summary relatively brief and will also orient the class to the specific focus you will carry into the interpretation and discussion portions of the presentation.  

2) Select a scholarly article or book chapter from the library MLA database that discusses your chosen text. The scholarly article or chapter should be at least eight pages in length. The purpose of this part of the assignment is to familiarize you with professional literary arguments and help you understand critical lenses scholars use to analyze and interpret literature. 

• Briefly summarize the author's argument for the class. 
• What ambiguous issue is the author providing an interpretation for? 
• What is the author's interpretation?
•  Is it based on close reading, historical, biographical, social, or theoretical contexts, or a combination of several of these? 

You will email me a citation for your article or chapter in MLA format the day before your presentation is due.  Example: Tomlinson, Niles. "Creeping in the 'Mere': Catagenesis in Poe's 'Black Cat' and Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.'" ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56.3 (2010): 232-268. 

If you are presenting on a novel, you need to get your article selection approved in advance so that no one is presenting on the same article twice.

3) Finally, provide two questions to generate the day's discussion of the text. Although the elements you identified for the previous requirements do not necessarily have to lead up to these questions, the more related the elements of the presentation are, the better your presentation will be.