In the course of the semester you will be asked to make oral presentations to the class on various topics. Weekly journal assignments . Journal responses should be made before each class. If there is no specific question to address, you can write about themes or characters you felt were important, a particular passage that grabbed your attention, or whether you liked the reading or not and why. Always try to support your statements with concrete passages from the text, because this is a key element of literary analysis.
Journals are due every week there is no paper due.
Paper One . This five-page paper will cover Nabokov's novels The Defense and Despair . I will suggest topics below, but you are welcome to write on another topic as long as I approve it before you start writing. This paper is to be your analysis and solution of a given problem, not plot summary. Make sure that your paper has a clear statement of your thesis, and that your opening paragraph clearly lays out for the reader how you will go about supporting that thesis.