Second Essay Assignment—Writing About Cultural Values

Second Essay Assignment—Writing About Cultural Values

Read this entire assignment through in order to understand what to do.

Remember your due dates. Plan time to draft your essay and see your tutor several times. Remember to leave time to check your MLA and react to your originality check.

About four pages
Pick ONE WORK that embodies a period you want to interpret. Include a picture of the work.
You have to use authoritative sources only, at least three of them. You may not use the textbook as one of your sources at all.
You need a thesis in your introduction paragraph; support this thesis in well-developed, coherent, and relevant paragraphs. All papers should be formatted according to MLA 8th edition.

Prewriting: (Note: you may have to use research to help you with all of the prewriting and drafting parts of this paper)

Find out about your work. Note: you do not have to do all of the following questions; they are intended as a guide and as prompts to your thinking.

Do a pure description of the object without value judgments, analysis, or interpretation. It answers the question, “What do you see? What do you notice?” Have notes about some of the following to use in your paragraphs.

The various elements that constitute a description include some or all of the following:
Form of art whether architecture, sculpture, painting or text
Size and scale of work (relationship to person and/or frame and/or context)
Elements or general shapes within the composition, including building of post-lintel construction or painting with several figures lined up in a row; identification of objects or elements or structures.
For your particular piece, a specific description. For instance, if a painting, of what, what colors, what composition and linear orientation? What design and innovative practice? What lighting? If a text, what characters, what plot points? What setting and symbols? If a building, what elements of decoration and design? What architectural movement? [these questions are just a sample]
Understand how the work was accepted at the time and what it meant to the people of the time.
Understand what the work means now by reviewing the secondary literature written by authoritative sources.

Further Prewriting:

Think more deeply about your work and determine what the features suggest, and decide why the artist used such features to convey specific ideas. In the Introduction to Humanities class, analysis may be pointed at the question that we have asked many times: “how does it indicate the value system of the people who created it?”

historical event, allegory, mythology, portraiture, abstract shapes, etc. References to other texts or outside events.
Selection of most distinctive features or characteristics whether line, shape, color, texture, etc.
Analysis of use of light and role of color.
Treatment of space and landscape, both real and illusionary (including use of perspective), e.g., compact, deep, shallow, naturalistic, random
What the materials in the work and the appearance of the work might mean when put in their context both historically and culturally.
Does the artist’s personal life enrich the reading of the work at all? Has it been used as a distraction?
How does this work accept and reject trends that came before and, thereby, place itself in the longer stretch of art traditions.

Constructing the idea for your thesis:

Using all of the ideas from the other sections of your prewriting, construct your interpretation, your reading; reading is looking at a work as a part of its value-based system, its culture. In your interpretation, you should be able to talk about how the work indicates the value system of the people who produced it. Your thesis statement should make a statement about how your object reflects the value system of the culture that created it.

Works Cited (for the assignment)

http://writingcenter.unc.edu/resources/handouts-demos/writing-for-specific-fields/art-history

Barrett, Terry. Criticizing Art: Understanding the Contemporary. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994.

Here are some notes on doing well for this paper. Also, some reminders about the nature of good sources.

If your plan is to describe your work first and then start discussing (thus dividing the structure of your paper into two sections), you are not on the right track. Description should be used to support some larger point. Support the thesis/interpretation.

If you can write out introductory material for every piece of source material you use, chances are you are using pretty good sources. Let me share some examples.
- Good example of a source with introductory material:
  - Professor X from U of State says this sculpture indicates that this culture started to value the human individual even though its sculptors had always portrayed deities in previous eras (X 252).
- Bad example of source with introductory material:
  - About.com reports that this statue is twelve and a half feet tall.

If you need informational sources, you might be able to say something like the following: This statue, standing twelve and a half feet tall (Dictionary of Classical Sculpture), represents a new direction for the . . . .

Try to have a draft to share with a tutor (and the OC Check) a week before the paper is due. Usually that draft will have to be changed to fulfill the requirements of the assignment. Come to see me, go to the TLC for tutoring, submit your paper to Smarthinking.

I strongly recommend allotting a good amount of time to the database search.

Bring your research paper questions to class; everyone probably has the same sorts of questions. Bring your sources to see if they are authoritative and fit the assignment. Read over this assignment a couple of times.

Second Essay Assignment—Writing About Cultural Values

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