+1 862 207 3288 “The Meeting of the Minds”
Length: Approximately 2,000 words. If you have a really hard time fitting your ideas into 2,000 words
you won’t be penalized for exceeding that limit provided you aren’t just wasting space. You should not
fall short of the word limit, however.
Due date: 23 October by 4:00 pm
These final projects are an occasion for you to reflect on the major themes of the semester using a
select number of works; to place those works in useful juxtaposition to each other; and to exercise
both your imagination and your critical faculties. The structure of the assignment is simple:
• You will be working with the following roster of writers/film directors:
1. Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow; 1929
2. Nella Larsen, Passing; 1929
3. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep; 1934
• Now, come up with any pretext you like for engaging these three (or four) creative artists in a
conversation on the question, “What Is Modernism?” Your essay will be the record of that conversation.
Guidelines:
• Your grade will be based on your level of detailed engagement with the texts; the understanding you
show of the major concepts and technical innovations associated with urban modernism; the subtlety and
nuance with which you draw comparisons and distinctions; and the quality of your writing.
• Although you should be familiar with basic facts like the dates, gender and birthplace of each
person, you should not do outside research for this project. You’re not striving for total biographical
accuracy but instead treating each artist as a representative of his or her creative work as you’ve
encountered it in this course.
• You can choose any way you like of setting up the conversation, whether it’s as a conference panel, a
reality show, a play, or….? Given the brevity of the assessment, formats that make a virtue of
concision—like Facebook posts or Twitter feeds—may be especially suitable. Always make sure it’s clear
what the situation is and who is speaking.
• The conversational structure means that you can’t simply have each person deliver a monologue and
then fall silent; they have to talk to each other, argue, rebut each other’s arguments, and change
tactics in response to each other’s points.
• All the speakers should lay out their arguments clearly, just as you’re expected to do in an
analytical paper. The essay as a whole won’t necessarily have one unifying argument, however, given
that you’re recording a debate among people who may disagree.
• You may have to extrapolate from the texts you have read/viewed in order to imagine the artist’s
response to a problem or situation he/she might not have encountered during his/her lifetime. But since
an important goal of this assessment is for you to demonstrate your understanding of the work you’ve
read/viewed, you should remain as faithful as possible to the texts. (For example, if you want to make
a claim about Henry Roth’s relationship to the Internet, that claim should be connected in some way to
a reading of his novel even though it was written before the Internet was invented.)
• Selective use of quotations is encouraged, although realism demands brevity, since you can’t expect
most people to be able to recite two paragraphs of their own work from memory. But all quotes,
paraphrases and references must be documented with parenthetical textual citations exactly as in an
analytic paper.
