English 226 Presentations Fall, 2014

(30% of semester grade, or 30 pts. possible)

Description and Instructions
For this project you’ll select your own topic and focus and then “teach” it to the whole class. You’ll also develop a thesis about your focus and attempt to convince us that it is a valid idea.
Considerations:
  • Your emphasis must be on lyrics—not on the music per se nor the artist's biography exclusively.
  • Your argument should be informed by adequate research: a minimum of 3 quality sources, not counting Wikipedia (you may use Wikipedia, but it won’t count as one of the three). Try to use a variety of types, thought this is not a requirement. If you expect to use nontraditional sources of some sort, simply discuss with instructor and we will probably be able to work something out.
  • Your focus should be neither too broad nor too narrow.
  • Your topic/focus should matter. I.e., the social, political, or artistic significance and timeliness of your thesis should be evident.
  • You want to draw, whenever possible, on class discussions, lectures, activities, timelines, and readings, and this includes an understanding of form in poetry.
  • You do NOT want to merely regurgitate facts about an artist or a topic.
  • You DO want to analyze and interpret one or more specific lyrics in depth, using any critical lens.
  • You DO want to develop a presentation which makes use of verbal as well as audio-visual resources. Keep in mind that the most INEFECTIVE means of teaching or arguing is the straight lecture. Feel free to be creative, and try to keep your session active and varied: include visual aides, large-group discussion, handouts, etc.
Purpose and Audience
Your purpose, as in any argument, is to convince your audience that your position is valid and possibly the best one among several. You also want to help us learn something new and relevant. Your audience is your instructor and classmates.
Purpose of this Assignment
  • Everyone will get to explore a self-selected topic of interest.
  • Everyone will gain an extra thorough understanding of an issue in rock poetry by teaching/arguing that issue to the rest of the class. You will also learn about the topics presented by other students, and gain an understanding of some of the controversies centered on popular music and rock lyrics as poetry.
  • Everyone in class will come to appreciate some of the competing ways in which poetry can be interpreted and appreciated. They will also gain appreciation of popular art as both source and product of cultural knowledge.
  • Everyone will find new ways to enjoy poems.
Possible Topics and Approaches
1) Select an artist whose lyrics you feel have been unjustly ignored or neglected.Put together a presentation in which you argue for the importance of that artist as a poet to the rock canon and/or the literary canon. You'll need to establish criteria for "good poetry," or "good literature," then show how the work in question fulfills your criteria. You may also need to argue against prevailing opinions or reviews of the work.
2) Devise a presentation which analyzes and illuminates what you believe to be the key themes or concerns of a particular rock lyricist's work. Formulate a clear statement about what those themes or concerns are, and illustrate/support it with specific examples from throughout that writer's poems as well as research. Try to make clear how an understanding of those themes can help a reader/listener better appreciate the artist's work and rock lyrics in general. (Alternative: trace key changes in an artist's lyrics over his or her career.)
Thematic possibilities:
  • Representations of women, minorities, or any marginalized group
  • Personal, regional, national, and/or cultural identity
  • Family relationships (fathers and sons; mothers and daughters; etc.)
  • Sincerity vs. cynicism
  • The American Dream
  • Mythos of the Automobile
  • Spirituality
  • Rebellion/Protest/Transgression/Deviance
  • Witness
  • Sexuality
  • Class struggle
  • Work
  • Tradition: maintaining and subverting
  • Other:
3) Put together a session which traces the development of a particular topic, theme, question, motif, or formal device over time.
4) Present to the class a "diagnosis" of contemporary life and relationships through an examination of rock lyrics.
5) Compare and contrast the works of two artists. Formulate some meaningful central point about their key similarities or differences, and about the larger relevance of your comparison.
6) Select a particular time period which you consider especially important to rock lyrics-as-poetry, and develop an argument for the importance of that period. Alternately, you might select a particular genre to examine. You might even define what you see as a NEW genre.
7) Select a group of songs and analyze them in terms of gender, race, nationality, class, or generation. Formulate a good central idea about the function of those categories in the work in question, and about how a given writer thinks of them. Be sure also to define your terms.
Research and Design
FOR HELP WITH RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION, SEE POWER POINT TITLED, “RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION.”
FOR HELP WITH VISUAL DESIGN, SEE POWER POINT TITLED, “VISUAL DESIGN: A NUTS ‘N BOLTS REVIEW.”
Evaluation Criteria and Rubric
Points possible: 30
Each item below is worth 6 points. Please note, however, that each presenter’s final score may be modified by consideration of other factors: the relative difficulty of the topic; the order of the presentation in scheduling (first student has less time to prepare; last student has most time to prepare); my observations of planning stages and overall effort.
  1. Quality of Argument : appropriate focus, clear issue, clear and consistent thesis, appropriate background info., plenty of specific and varied support for thesis, adequate research, accurate facts, fairness to opposition, appropriate documentation (MLA; unobtrusive but clear).
    Pts. earned (6)______
  2. Quality of Analysis : at least two lyrics arethoroughly and convincingly analyzed through one or more critical lenses.
    Pts. earned (6)______
  3. Execution : good voice projection, effective pacing, working equipment (tested ahead of time with backups), good visibility of visual materials, etc.
Pts. earned (6)______
  1. Relevance and Engagement : clearly argues about a topic linked to the study of lyrics and poetry, and the presentation is engaging, inventive, insightful, and energetic. This also includes creativity.
    Pts. earned (6)______
  2. Editing and Proofreading : all text is edited for clarity, elegance, and concision as well as standard correctness. In-text citations and Work Cited are correctly formatted.
    Pts. earned (6)______