Length: Total 2000 words (I want you to count words rather than pages because you will skip spaces frequently and thus have fewer words per page than in a typical essay).
Due Dates: Rough Draft Workshop, with all materials collected, and the author ready to discuss concerns and gaps, May 31; Final Draft, June 7.
Part 1
1400-1600 words
Assignment for Writing # 3, page 453, Ways of Reading:
It is useful to think of Griffin’s prose as experimental. She is trying to do something that she can’t do in the “usual” essay form. She wants to make a different kind of argument or engage her reader in a different manner. And so she mixes personal and academic writing. She assembles fragments and puts seemingly unrelated material into surprising and suggestive relationships. She breaks the “plane” of the page with italicized inter-sections. She organizes her material, but not in the usual mode of thesis-example-conclusion. The arrangement is not nearly so linear. At one point, when she seems to be prepared to argue that German child-rearing practices produced the Holocaust, she quickly says:
Of course there cannot be one answer to such a monumental riddle, nor does any event in history have a single cause. Rather a field exists, like a field of gravity that is created by the movements of many bodies. Each life is influenced and in turn becomes an influence. Whatever is a cause is also an effect. Childhood experience is just one element in the determining field.
Her prose serves to create a “field,” one where many bodies are set in relationship.
It is useful, then, to think about Griffin’s prose as the enactment of a method, as a way of doing a certain kind of intellectual work. One way to study this, to feel its effects, is to imitate it, to take it as a model. For this assignment, write a Griffin-like essay that focuses on a particular aspect of history. You will need to think about the stories you might tell, about the stories and texts (not your own) that you may gather. As you write, you will want to think carefully about arrangement and about commentary (about where, that is, you will speak to your reader as the writer of the piece). This essay is quite difficult in that you must make sure that it is focused on an overall thesis and that, of course, your reader is able to understand and follow that thesis without too much strain!
Part 2
300-500 words
(1) List the different sets in your collage. (As you know from class discussion, Griffin’s essay consists of sets on cell biology, rocket science, authorial reflection, Himmler’s story, the child-rearing theories of Dr. Schreber, Griffin’s family history, reflections on a series of paintings, stories of various individuals.)
(2) In her collage Griffin suggests that this form allows her to move, in Robert Root’s phrase, “beyond linearity.” Thus Griffin may allude to the collage form when she talks of “a larger pattern of meaning” (405), of entering “history through childhood experience” (409), of how at “a certain age we begin to define ourselves, to choose an image of who we are” (410), of how “art transmute[s] experience,” of the fact that “the process of knowing oneself is in constant motion too, because the self is always changing” (421), and how “[w] hat we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society (441). And surely she is in some way referring to the form of this essay made up of “crots,” to use Elbow’s term, when she writes: “The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and give the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom.”
Write a page or so in which you reflect on how well your collage does what Griffin seems to claim hers does. For example, you might answer any of the following questions: Does your collage lead you to some fragments of wisdom? If so, how does it do so? If not, why not? How does your collage present your constantly changing self? How does it show that self in relationship to the larger matrix of relationship and society? How successful is your collage in bringing you (and your reader) to a larger pattern of meaning, to presenting a useful image of who you are?
Please note the elements of the collage essay.
Please note also this checklist for the collage essay.
