Students will write a 900-word, thesis driven essay on Claudia Rankins The White Card. The paper must engage with ONE credible source on the play. This could include a peer-reviewed journal article by a credible scholar, a book or chapter from a book published by a university press, a podcast or scholarly webpage done by a credible scholar employed by a college or a university, or an interview by an artist involved in the play. Students should make a significant engagement with the credible source. Explain the source, the context of the idea you are using, and what you think the source is saying in your own words. Students will also provide a footnote after citing the source that will say who the author of the source is, where they are employed, and why you think they are credible. Students, moreover, will need to include a Works Cited page in MLA style. This must include at least a citation for the credible source that was used and the primary text under discussion.
Students may choose to write in the first person or the third person, and students may use insights from their lived experience to help the reader understand what they are seeing in the play or why the play is important to them.
The readings of the play should pay attention to the social and political context of the play, the literary form of the play, and the political issues addressed in the play. Students will not be given a list of topics to write about, nor will they be given a rubric. Rather, students will be asked to use the introduction to explain what play they plan to discuss, how their discussion is building on a key idea form the class lectures, and what narrow, debatable, and provable point they wish to make about the play. Students, moreover, are encouraged not to deal with entire plays, since these topics can be too big for a small paper to cover adequately, Thus, students should pick a particular major or minor theme, a formal element, or a section of the play and discuss why it is important.
Students will be expected to have a clear title for their paper that gives the name of the author being discussed, the name of the play being discussed, and the key term of the essay. A key term is a central concept that the student will address in their essay. A key term should be clearly defined in the opening paragraph of the paper, and the entire paper should be about one key term. So, if the key term of the paper is love, the student should specify what kind of love they are going to discuss in the paper, and they should ensure that each paragraph in the paper is about love.
This is not a five-paragraph essay. That is, the paper should not have an introduction, three somewhat related topics, and a conclusion that repeats what was said in the paper. Typically, in a paper like this one the first body paragraph will explain the key idea from the credible source that you are using. The entire paper should argue for one narrow, debatable, and provable thesis. Each paragraph should build on the thoughts and ideas from the previous one. Rather than repeating yourself in the conclusion, students should take the last paragraph as an opportunity to reflect on what they did not have the time and space to discuss, to ask questions that they do not know the answer to, or to suggest possible implications of their reading for the broader themes of the class. That is, the paper ought to be framed as a response to an idea, argument, or discussion from class. This might be a situation where you argee with an idea with a difference, disagree with a reason, or complicate an idea. It can also be a situation where you address a gap in the class, say by discussing a passage that we did not discuss in class. If you do so, you have to explain why the gap you are discussing matters to a larger conversation from the class.
Students may write about any passage or topic within the play they wish, so long as they can back up what they are saying with textual evidence. When marking the assignment, the professor and the grader-marker will consider the following questions:
Is it clear which play is under discussion and what section of the play is being discussed? Is the play, in other words, the primary text under discussion in the vast majority of the paragraphs?
Is it clear what the student thinks is important or interesting about the passage, theme, or texts under discussion?
Is the discussion meaningfully connected to the larger ideas in the class? Does it address the form and content of the play?
Does the paper engage with a key term and make an argument about the play based on that key term?
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