New Appetizer Instructions

NEW ONLINE INSTRUCTIONS

Instead of hosting a conversation in class, you’ll now be hosting a conversation online. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Before our Thursday class meeting of the week before you’re presenting, email me a brief summary of your idea. You no longer need to post an “Idea” post.
• By 5pm on Sunday of the week of your Appetizer, post a prompt as a new post to the course webpage
  • You prompt should stand in for the opening comments you would have made to the class, and contain the content of any handout or other orienting material you would have shared in person.
  • You can post images directly within the post, but if you are sharing video, please post a link instead (that is, do not upload videos as media to the site).
  • It should include very clear directions for what you would like your group to discuss: clearly set out questions or prompts for discussion.
  • Remember that only 3-4 people will be directly engaged with your Appetizer, and plan accordingly.
• By Tuesday at 5pm, post an Intervention / Redirection comment
  • Students assigned to your group will have commented at least once by this time. Resist the urge to intervene in the conversation sooner than this.
  • At this point, add a comment that will expand on the discussion your students have started to have, or move it in a new direction; feel free to add a new question, new primary material, etc.
• By Friday at 5pm, post a reflection comment
  • Students in your group will post two more times after your redirection: once on Wednesday, and a final time on Thursday
  • On Friday, you’ll add your final comment, responding to the students’ conversation and reflecting on how things went.

You may have to scale back your ambitions a little. Without access to the library, certain topics will be difficult to pull off. Consider ways you can make use of the digital resources collected on our Resources and Research Guide pages; think about drawing on a topic you’re already knowledgeable about, either from another course, or from your personal life. Contact me or Margaret Schaus for help getting digital access to resources you need.

The rest of these instructions HAVE NOT BEEN UPDATED; you will find lots of useful ideas here, but consider carefully how they will translate to the new online format.

Plain Appetizer Presentation

For your “Appetizer” Presentations, you will take the lead in class for 5-10 minutes (no more, no less) to start a conversation about a topic you’re interested in. Pick from the list of ideas below, and plan a lecture, activity, or conversation around it. We will sign up for presentation slots in the second week of the semester; you don’t need to know what you’ll be presenting in order to sign up, but as your presentation approaches, I encourage you to do that day’s reading well in advance and to consider how your presentation can connect with what we’ll be discussing in the rest of class that day.

To earn credit for an Appetizer presentation, you must achieve the following two objectives:

• Draw Connections. Connect the material we’ve been assigned to read with something beyond our assignments: a text by one of our authors the rest of the class hasn’t read; a contemporary parallel to our texts; an artistic representation of something we’ve read; a resonance between our texts and a work of art from another culture; a piece of background research that enables us to understand our texts in a new way. In other words, you need to add something to the class that wasn’t there before your presentation. To do this, you will need to read beyond our assignments in class; if your plans for your presentation don’t involve doing some independent reading, you probably have thought deeply enough about your plans.
• Get us involved. Your presentation should not simply be you talking for ten minutes: you must find a way to get the class involved. You might design an activity, moderate a discussion, ask the class to write, draw, or discuss a question in groups, or any number of other possibilities. It is not enough to simply share your work and then ask for thoughts or questions: plan out how you will prompt the class to get involved in your presentation.

Here are a few suggested formats for your presentation; you do not need to follow one of these, but they should help you get started in your thinking about the presentation.

• Pechakucha: show twenty slides, spending only 20 seconds on each slide.
• Write-Pair-Share: have the class free write in response to a question or prompt from you for 2-3 minutes, then share what they wrote with a partner, then bring their thoughts as a pair into a full class discussion.
• Debate: Present a topic, evidence, and distinct perspectives on an issue, then divide the class into teams and have them debate your question.
• Group Activity: break the class into groups, and assign each group a specific text or image to respond to with a prompt or discussion question from you. Make it clear what kinds of things you want groups to be doing and what they should bring forward to the class.
• Performance: Much of what we’re reading in class, and what you’ll read outside class to prepare for your presentation, was designed for live performance. Stage a performance of something! If you’d like to involve other students, that’s great; one person should take the lead and receive “Appetizer” credit, but anyone else involved can count the work towards their Contribution scores.
• Game: games are a great way to interact directly with our material, and they also form a prominent feature of grotesque art. Design a game activity that helps us understand or explore the topic of your presentation.

Deluxe Appetizer Presentation

For a Deluxe Appetizer Presentation, post your initial idea for the presentation at least 3 days (72 hours) before the class when you’re presenting, and post a reflection about how it went within 3 days (72 hours) after the presentation. For instructions on posting to the website, click here.

• Idea Post: This can be a purely informal, work-in-progress post about where your thinking has taken you so far; you are not committed to presenting exactly what you share in this post. But students will have the opportunity to comment on your idea, so the earlier you post, the more likely you will be able to incorporate other people’s ideas and suggestions!
• Reflection Post: Again, this can be an informal piece of writing. How did you think your presentation went? What went well, and what would you do differently next time? What sorts of feedback would you be interested in hearing from the class?

Appetizer Ideas

The following is a list of suggested topics and/or formats for the Appetizer presentations. You cannot chose the same format twice. I strongly encourage you to talk me in advance of your presentations (especially the first) about your plans to make sure they fulfill the assignment. With all of these, remember that you need to help us understand how the topic of your presentation helps enriches our experience of the core themes and texts of our course: it’s not enough, for example, to simply bring in a contemporary film that reminded you of something from the class; you need to help us understand how that comparison helps us appreciate the material everyone has been assigned to study in the course.

• The Grotesque Today. Find an expression of grotesque realism in a contemporary form of cultural production – photography, music, movies, video games, comics, fiction, poetry. Bring in a piece of it that you can share with the class, and shape a discussion or activity around it.
• Fat Studies. Bring our initial “Fat Studies” material back into play: check out the Resources page for links to the Fat Studies Reader and Bodies Out of Bounds, two good places to find additional readings in this field. Use Fat Studies as a lens to interpret our assigned readings, or bring in a new ancient or modern work and use Fat Studies to help us understand its grotesque and carnivalesque nature.
• Ancient Background. Rabelais and Shakespeare both draw on and often explicitly evoke models from Greece and Rome; you’ll see these models show up in the texts themselves, as well as in our textbooks’ notes. Pick such a model, read it or read about it, and bring some aspect of it in to share with the class. If you’re familiar with the ancient Mediterranean world from other classes, build on that background; if not, come talk to me about models that will work well or resources you can use to explore them.
• Daily Life. Comic artists frequently ground their work in the everyday realities of the world of their audience: food, drink, clothing, celebrations, festivals, religion, families, etc. Pick an aspect of daily life invoked in our texts, and find a way for the class to explore it with you. Focus in on food, for example: present us with all the information about the food at a particular meal in Rabelais, and help us understand the cultural implications and physical experience of eating that meal; maybe even try cooking a dish from the text!
• Illustrations. All of our authors have had their texts published alongside illustrations; Rabelais in particular has a wonderfully rich history of illustrated texts, most notably the full set of engravings by Gustave Doré. Using the resources on our research guide and reserve shelf, assemble a set of illustrations of episodes from one of our texts, and lead us through a discussion or activity that helps us understand how the artists are visualizing the text, what aspects they focus on, what choices they make, and how those illustrations might enrich our appreciation of literary grotesque comedy. If you’re interested in this topic, I encourage you to talk with librarian Sarah Horowitz, our local expert on the history of illustration.
• Literature in Context. Each of the authors we’ll be reading this semester composed their works alongside other authors in the same genres and periods, as well as numerous forms of folk literature and folk art. For each of our authors, I’ll suggest below some literary forms that help contextualize the work we’re reading; pick one (or add one from your own knowledge, with my permission), and find a way to present it to the class to help us understand the contemporary models and competitors that surrounded our authors.
  • Aristophanes: Euripides’ tragedies (e.g. Bacchae) and satyr plays (Cyclops), Menander’s comedies (Dyskolos, aka The Misanthrope)
  • Petronius: the comedies of Plautus (e.g. Amphitryon, Menaechmi, Miles Gloriosus) and Terence (e.g. Adelphoe); Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass; Lucian’s True History
  • Rabelais: French fabliaux (e.g. Guerin’s The Chevalier Who Made Cunts Talk; The Maiden Who Couldn’t Hear Fuck Without Having Heartburn); sacred parodies (e.g. The Liturgy of the Gamblers); the Cries of Paris (aka les Cris de Paris); Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Thomas More’s Utopia and Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. These are only a few preliminary suggestions; see me, our research guide, and our readings in Bakhtin for copious further suggestions here.
  • Shakespeare: Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister; Marlowe’s dramas (The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, The Massacre at Paris)
• Visualizing the Grotesque: Grotesque realism is an intensely visual mode of literature, and all of our authors composed alongside traditions of visual art. Choose an artist or style of art from the period of one of our authors, and bring in a set of images that help us understand and visualize the grotesque in that author’s lifetime. It will be important to work with our librarians and other resources here to identify appropriate sources, but I would particularly encourage you to consider red-figure vase painting for Aristophanes, and the works of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder for Rabelais and Shakespeare.
• The Full Corpus. Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Shakespeare each wrote texts we won’t be reading together as a class this semester (Petronius’ only surviving work is what we’re reading in class, and it doesn’t even survive intact!). Pick a play by Aristophanes or Shakespeare, or a substantial portion of one of Rabelais’ other novels, read it, and find a way to bring it into the class. Don’t simply summarize: connect what you’ve read with what the rest of us are reading, and find ways for the class to get involved in examining your text.
• Old Texts, New Lenses. Bakhtin is the major contemporary literary critic whose work we’ll be considering this semester, but numerous other scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have considered these issues as well. Read an article or book chapter by another modern scholar concerned with one of our authors or with the themes of this course, and help the class understand how what you’ve read can enrich our understanding of the course material. For help finding relevant works of criticism, talk to me and to Margaret Schaus and Semyon Khokhlov (our research librarians), and use the course research guide.
• Chef’s Choice: Have you thought of a great idea that doesn’t fit under one of the suggestions above? Talk to me about it, and let’s make it work. With my permission (ideally discussed well in advance), you are welcome to design a new type of presentation; perhaps we’ll even add it to the official class list!