Short Take Assignments

Each of these assignments is worth 15% of your final grade. For each question, you will be required to write a short paper (4-6 pp. exclusive of Works Cited for undergraduates, 5-7 pages exclusive of Works Cited for graduate students) that answers a particular question about the previous week’s reading and viewing. [The kinds of questions posed will be models for the kinds of questions you will be doing for your long critique so that you’ll get a feel of how you might conceptualize, focus, and structure your longer paper.] The papers will be assigned early in the week and due at the beginning of class on the following Tuesday. You should upload each paper into the appropriate folder in our course file on www.turnitin.com before class on the due date. 

These assignments may require you to go back and review a film we’ve watched in class, to follow up readings, scripts, and links on a Film Preview, and to go to the standard online bibliographies and source material. Any materials from any of these sources should be correctly documented in MLA style. However, they are not "research papers"—i.e. the goal is for you to answer the question posed, not for you to go find out what everyone else in the history of literary and film criticism has said about this question.  

Short Take #1 (due May 24 at the beginning of class and in www.turnitin.com)

In their article “Reinventing the Hero: Gardner’s Grendel and the Shifting Face of Beowulf in Popular Culture,” Michael Livingston and John William Sutton argue that modern adapters use the Beowulf story as a sophisticated vehicle for social commentary, which is peculiarly appropriate for “our postmodern, post-Vietnam, post-9/11 era, [where] ideas of black-and-white morality have been greatly complicated and problematized” (11).   Contrasting the film versions of Beowulf and The Thirteenth Warrior to the original literary text, evaluate how well Livingston and Sutton’s argument holds up in terms of the figure of the medieval hero. Bring forth concrete evidence from all three texts in support of your critical thesis. The full citation for the article is

Livingston, Michael, and John William Sutton. “Reinventing the Hero: Gardner’s Grendel and the Shifting Face of Beowulf in Popular Culture.” Studies in Popular Culture 29.1
          (2006): 1-16. Web.

Short Take #2 (due May 31 at the beginning of class and in www.turnitin.com)

In different ways, Malory, Fuqua, and Boorman all reflect on the responsibilities of a leader to his loyal knights and on the responsibilities of those knights to their leader. All three created their art during long and controversial conflicts (the Wars of the Roses, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq conflict). Of the three works, which one would you argue most clearly articulates the artist’s position on his world and times? And why?