Weeks 1 – 4 (M/T/TH)

Week 1

1/4 (🧱day)
PowerPoint Presentation: El Boom and Magic Realism

Read Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Gospel According to Mark” (handout)

Week 2

1/8
Independent Reading Day

1/9
Discuss Borges’ “The Gospel According to Mark”

Read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” 

1/11
Discuss “A Very Old Man”

Read Juan Rulfo’s “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”

Week 3

1/15
MLK Day (no class)

1/16
Discuss “Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”

Read Ines Arrendondo’s “The Shunammite”

1/18
Song Talks

Discuss Arrendondo’s “The Shunammite”

Week 4

1/22
In-class activity: Literary Comparison Brainstorm activity 

1/23
In-class activity: Next steps for literary comparison essay

1/25
Song Talks

In-class activity: from Prewriting to the Draft, Day 1 (body paragraphs 1 and 2)

Organize your two passages so that the older text is introduced first and the more recent text is introduced second. Then begin to sketch your argument. In this preliminary stage, try not to overthink your analysis and focus on teasing out the implications of the words on the page. (We’ll build and refine later.) This sketch should (1) examine the meaning of the unifying motif in the first/older passage without referring to the second. Just focus on that passage alone. This step is crucial. Then, starting a new paragraph, (2) examine the meaning of the unifying theme in the second/more recent passage in contrast to your analysis of the first/older passage. In this step, as you analyze the second passage, you should explicitly refer back to the first and highlight a meaningful difference between the two roughly homologous passages.

You can see an example of my three-paragraph sketch here. To help you identify the rhetorical structures that organize my paragraphs, I’ve bolded my claims and underlined my analyses. Evidence supporting my claims is in a normal font.