Oral Presentations

Your oral presentations can take one of several forms, but they all must be limited to either a fifteen-minute talk or a 45-minute set of activities. Here are some options for your oral presentation:

• You may present your own reading of a major passage, theme, or figure in one of the literary texts from the unit in which your presentation falls.
• You may compare your own reading of a literary text from the unit in which your presentation falls to one of the assigned or recommended critical essays on that work, or discuss how your understanding of the literary text changed in light of your reading of the critical essay.
• You may analyze any of the assigned or recommend works of literary or cultural criticism in the course, or discuss the pros and cons of applying it/them to a given literary text from the unit in which your presentation falls.
• You may present your own comparative analysis of any two texts from the unit in which your presentation falls.
• You may discuss a theoretical, pedagogical, curricular, institutional, or political issue, question, concept, or problem you care about in relation to any of the texts from the unit in which your presentation falls.
• You may give a progress report on your annotated bibliography or seminar paper, with an eye toward charting the changes in the way you've approached the topic as the semester has gone by.
• You may design a set of activities (small-group work, debate, etc.) to teach us something about a literary, critical, or theoretical text or concept.

See the topics page for a list of and commentary on the major issues and questions we've been addressing thus far in the course. It might help you in narrowing down the subject of your oral presentation.

EN 510: Major Writers, Spring 1999
Created: 2/16/99, 11:26 am
Last modified: 2/16/99, 11:26 am