Due: May 22nd
Length: two pages (not including title page), double-spaced, no more than 600 words
We can easily agree with the editors of Ways of Reading, who say that Susan Griffin’s essay “Our Secret” is “a kind of collage or collection of stories, sketches, anecdotes, fragments.” Considered together, these “fragments”–which APPEAR to be disjointed–form a network of analogies and parallel meanings that implicitly create a unified idea; they are linked by a “thread of connection.”
For your response, pick any one of these separate elements–long or short–and explain its relationship to the “set” of stories, sketches, anecdotes, or fragments of which it is a part (there are around seven of these “sets”). Further, explain the “thread of connection” that joins that “set” to the meaning of the essay. In effect, make the implicit connections explicit. You do not have to discuss at length the meaning of the whole essay, but, after giving some brief indication of what you think that meaning is, discuss how your “set” contributes to that meaning.
Format for Response Essay #3: You will need a title page. On that page, put your name, the date, the title of your response AND the segment of the Griffin essay your paper explicates. If the segment is long, type only the first and last four or five lines, referring your reader to the page in the book where she can read the rest
This assignment is worth 5% of your grade in this class.
P.S. Here is a bit more clarification of terms for those of you who may need it. By “thread of connection,” we mean an explicit or implied theme of a collage, such as Griffin’s theme of interconnectedness. You “pick any one of these separate elements” by choosing a single crot. You remember from our discussion of Elbow’s “Your Cheatin’ Art” that a “crot” is a single, seemingly-disjointed item in the larger collage, whether it be as short as a statement of fact about a cell, or as long as a long narrative or recollection by Griffin herself. An “element” is the equivalent of a long or short “chapter” or essay “section” in a typical (non-collage) essay. So you have two jobs. First, state how your single chosen element / segment (which you will quote on your title page) connects to the other elements / segments of that same category (categories which include autobiographical narratives, narratives about Himler, statements of fact about rockets, etc.). Second, explain how this category of crot (what I call a “set,” above) is connected to the larger meaning of the entire collage by Griffin. State explicitly how your set of crots contributes to the meaning of the whole.
