ASSIGNMENT II
Skill: Examining a Concept from the Perspective of Multiple Disciplines
Topic: Defining, Describing, Measuring, and Pursuing Happiness
Sources: Gilbert, Senior (download these from class website) + your own research
Draft: (5 pp., double spaced) due Monday, March 7 in class [4 copies]
Revision: (6 pp., dbl. spaced) due Monday, March 28 in class [+ draft with my comments]
In your last essay, you analyzed the concepts of several authors in order to create and define your own concept and prescription for education. Now, in your second essay, you'll examine the different ways a concept is framed by different disciplines. In so doing, you’ll also need to be reflective in discussing your own personal experience with the topic. Scholarly disciplines often have entrenched ways of looking at a topic, but writers can often break new ground by observing and analyzing the way different disciplines frame a topic. That will be your goal in this essay.
The concept you'll examine is happiness. We’ll read an essay by happiness researcher and writer Daniel Gilbert to start feeling our way into the concept. We’ll also read an essay by journalist Jennifer Senior to both provide a new perspective on the concept and to provide an example of what a writer working with different types of sources can do. You’ll then need to spend some time working on finding your own examples (use the Suggestions on the other side of this page to get you started) and making them speak to each other and to Gilbert/Senior—as well as your own experience.
The query that your essay will answer is not as narrowly defined it was in the previous assignment. Instead, you’ll want to choose one (or possibly more) of the following queries to address in your essay: What is happiness? How can happiness be attained? How can happiness be measured? Should happiness be a goal in life? You will not want to say the obvious, but to find an interesting angle and claim to stake about happiness that might surprise or educate your readers.
Draft, due in class on Monday, March 7:
Senior makes a number of writerly moves in her essay, among them:
a. She strategically uses personal anecdotes to engage the reader and explore her concept.
b. She uses well-chosen and carefully summarized research to deepen and enrich her concept.
c. She chooses striking and apt quotations to examine her concept and punctuate her points.
In your five-page draft, you will work on making these writerly moves, but on a smaller scale (since your essay is shorter than hers). Like Senior, you'll want to move back and forth between anecdote, reflection, and source use so that you can explore the concept of happiness. Like her, you'll be pursuing a certain perspective or angle on happiness, and, like her, you'll want your essay to engage your reader along a path of inquiry that brings in different kinds of voices to help you answer the query you decide to pursue. Your essay will need to refer to at least two different kinds of scholarly sources (see Suggestions on the reverse of this page).
Bring FOUR COPIES of your draft, stapled, to class on the due date.
Suggestions for Disciplines that Discuss Happiness
1. Psychology (You might look into The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, the researcher Martin Seligman (who lists 3 types of happiness), Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or the Journal of Positive Psychology.)
2. Philosophy (Some examples include Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Nietzche’s Twilight of the Idols, but there are many, many more.)
3. Religion (Most religious texts speak of the path to happiness—but make sure to tread carefully when dealing with religious texts. You might also look into theological academic journals.)
4. Economics (Andrew Oswald wrote an easy-to-read introduction to the economics of happiness, and many others have looked at happiness from an economic perspective.)
5. Politics (Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson included the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. In the past decade, the country of Bhutan has made “gross national happiness”—as opposed to “gross national product”—their country’s goal.)
You might also find it useful to examine the way some non-academic sources address happiness, such as song lyrics, self-help books, pop-culture magazines, etc.