Discovery:Song of Roland Pick 1 out of 3 1.The Song of Roland inspired later works of literature and art. For example, Vivaldi’s opera Orlando Furioso imagines the knight in completely different circumstances, as they’re imagined in Ariosto’s epic poem by the same name; both of these works postdate The Song of Roland, which seem to have been their inspiration. Read up on one of the works that were inspired by The Song of Roland and comment on the differences and similarities they seem to share. 2. Alternatively, read further beyond the assigned reading in our class. Although the Roland dies, The Song of Roland continues. What happens in the remaining parts of the poem, and how does that relate to medieval European history? 3.Read up more on the Latin and Arabic texts of history from which we’ve gleaned some of the truths of The Song of Roland. How many copies remain? Are there good translations into English? How much of each text is devoted to the battle at Roncevaux? What do they say about it? To successfully complete a discovery discussion, I’m looking for the following: You’ve gone outside of materials from our class to learn something more about materials in our class. This is the spirit of research. For this inquiry, your research doesn’t need to be groundbreaking, and it doesn’t need to meet the strictest bounds of scholarship. In other words, I’m not expecting you to make a discovery that nobody else in the world has made, and I’m ok with you bringing back a lesson derived from a few Wikipedia pages. Having said that, I’m still expecting you to use only sources that are credible. Avoid conspiracies that have little basis in evidence. Your efforts add value to the discussion. This might seem a tricky thing to understand. Basically, the work that you’re doing by discovering things and reporting back on them needs to show that you’ve done more than search for the “answer” to a problem and then reported that answer. You will look at information from two or more web pages (at least) and summarize your findings. You will write your paragraphs yourself; don’t copy and paste, and don’t just follow someone else’s thought process with some changed words. If you do end up quoting material, use quotation marks to show it, but keep these quotations short and to a minimum. I suggest jotting down notes while scrolling through different web pages, keeping track as you independently discover the things you’ll write about. You will show authority by providing links to the sources you’ve used. I’m not asking you to build a formal bibliography or a list of Works Cited in MLA format. At the end of your write up, just include a list of the URLs to the web pages you used to discover your material. Some other guidelines: Aim for around 200 words or more, plus the list of URLs Submissions will be graded pass/fail based on the requirements No extra credit for more than 5 discovery discussions Submissions will not usually be accepted after the closing date.
