Assignments for Mythological Narratives

Three writing assignments are required for this course: a research essay and two creative compositions. The research essay involves you choosing a specific mythological theme or thread and exploring it in some depth. We will discuss this project at length in class. The creative writing compositions are opportunities for you to discover and explore the myths surrounding your own life. Again, we will discuss these projects in class.

For philosophical reasons, I do not prescribe a particular length for the projects: a great essay can be a few pages long (as we'll see). Yet it is difficult to craft a good essay in less than a few thousand words. So, if you prefer a guideline for the length of the projects, I offer two recommendations: make them as long as they need to be; make them somewhere between two and five thousand words. There is no upper limit on the length of the projects.

I'm not interested in how much you can write but rather in the quality of your writing. Perhaps you write like Hemingway, perhaps like Melville or Tolstoy. I don't know, and maybe you don't know either. But I can tell you this: writing a shorter piece of great precision is more difficult than writing a longer, more relaxed and wandering work. In the context of smaller projects every word is on display and under scrutiny, whereas in longer works the sheer bulk of the material tends to hide various flaws. Melville, in fact, is a good example of this.

You may write short narratives in this course, but please do not write short form as a means of avoiding work. You will know, I will notice, and neither of us will be happy. Instead, make your work as long as it needs to be. If you compose a lovely, resonant, short piece, you will receive an excellent evaluation. But as I said, writing shorter pieces is actually more difficult.

With reference to good, short pieces, I suggest (strongly) looking at the poetry of W.S. Merwin, his lovely un-punctuated poetry in which the bare words embody some strange and familiar light. Here's an example of what I mean:

Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

The three written compositions are worth 25 per cent each of your final grade.

Group Presentations

Each student will be a member of several different peer groups; each peer group will present mini-presentations (roughly fifteen minutes each) on various mythological motifs and characters. Each class session will involve presentations, with one presentation from each group. Class time will be given for preparing the presentations. The structure and content of the presentations will be discussed in class.

The group presentations are worth a total of 25 per cent of your grade.

Evaluation of Assignments and Presentations

My primary focus, as an instructor, is to assist you in developing your creativity. Grades are quite far down on the list of priorities for me. I am focused on your engagement with the process, your commitment to your own work, the extent to which you show up, metaphorically, to be as present as you can be. These are evaluation criteria for me.

Attendance and Participation

The expectation is that you will attend all sessions and involve yourself in the class process. Your willingness to engage creatively with the learning process, to take appropriate personal risks, and to participate in group activities are all central to your involvement in this class. Because developing a style of creative writing is very much a process of blending your own personal awareness with skills and practical techniques, your own emotional involvement in the class is as important as your academic knowledge of the material.

Grade Inflation

Almost every semester there are students who do well on the assignments, complete all the associated learning goals of the course, participate well, and wonder why they do not receive a grade of one hundred percent (or 98, anyway). Here is the reason: almost every semester there are students who demonstrates a level of commitment that goes beyond the course requirement. Such students complete extra work, or hand in exemplary assignments, or undertake a significant amount of personal development in addition to the course expectations. Such students typically receive the highest grades.

If you do reasonably well in the course you will receive a reasonable grade. Very high grades are intended for extra or exemplary work. Unfortunately, over the past thirty years the post-secondary educational system in North America has participated in a process of grade inflation. Since the 1980's, the average grade for typical course work has been increasing by about 25 per cent each decade. Elevated assessments do not accurately reflect the work of most students. Even worse, grade inflation has caused many students to expect high grades for average work. I am not a particularly stringent assessor; but I will not inflate grades artificially.

In this course, a small number of students will (likely) receive high grades, most students will receive grades in the middle range, and a few students will struggle with lower grades. If you are uncertain about your assessment for a given assignment, or if you wish to know where, roughly, you are along the distribution curve of the class, or if you would like suggestions for how to improve your grade, please ask me for clarification.