TASK and OBJECTIVES
Your task for this Module is to produce a multimodal literary text that explores the dreams of five characters you’ve met this semester. I have imagined this final assignment as a “capstone project”; in other words, it “caps off” your learning in the course, giving you the opportunity to demonstrate the critical thinking and writing skills you’ve acquired this semester. This project, like the pictorial narrative, will take some time, so plan accordingly.
This Module is linked to 2 of the course learning objectives:
Students will improve their writing and composing skills by producing their own literary texts.
Students will gain an appreciation for the role of the (Black) artist in educating and inspiring their readers/audience.
BACKGROUND and INSTRUCTIONS
For Module 9, you familiarized yourself with Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes From the Field. Smith’s docudrama is your mentor text for this project, just like Toni Morrison’s Remember: The Journey to School Integration was the mentor text for your pictorial narrative project. But there are some important differences between Smith’s work and what I’m asking you to do, so read these instructions carefully.
Smith interviewed about 250 people for Notes, transcribing what each person said and closely studying their affect–how they spoke, gestured, moved their bodies. More than anything else, Smith listened. In her introduction, she stresses that her artistic process begins with listening. In her performances, she becomes each person she has interviewed: “People speak of putting themselves into other people’s shoes. My way of doing this is to put myself into other people’s words” (xv).
For this capstone project, you will put yourself into different characters’ words. Whereas Smith listened to actual people talking, what you have been doing all semester is reading the words and getting a sense of the lives of literary characters. These literary characters, one after another, will speak in the text you create.
Where to begin?
What links the stories in Smith’s Notes from the Field is the school-to-prison pipeline. What links the characters who will speak in your text is the idea of dreams/dreaming. That’s why the project is titled We Are Dreaming.
So the first thing you need is five characters. The choice is entirely yours, but you should choose carefully in order to demonstrate your range. You don’t, for example, want to choose five characters who all react in a comparable way. You want a good mix of major and minor characters, male and female, old and young, Black and White. Here is just a partial list of possibilities: Rose Maxson, Oliver Brown’s daughters (from Remember), Ruth Younger (A Raisin in the Sun), Paul (A Lesson Before Dying), Sonny’s mother (“Sonny’s Blues”), Josie Burke or Lamar (Bombingham), Alonzo, Carl or Michaela (Incognegro), Alice Greenwood or Kevin Franklin (Kindred).
Next, you need to transcribe each character’s story. I use the verb transcribe deliberately because I want you to imagine hearing that character speak. What would they say if you asked them, at a particular point in their lives, what are you dreaming? Imagine each character talking about their dreams, the obstacles for those dreams, the meaning and purpose of those dreams. This will take some thought. Use the literary texts for inspiration.
Something to keep in mind: In Langston Hughes’ poem (Module 8), dreams that are deferred have various effects on the dreamer: some “dry up” and some “explode”; some “fester” and some “sag like a heavy load.” For each of your five characters, you need to determine tone. Would they be angry (Troy), reflective (Sonny), mournful (Jefferson), something else? Think about how you can put your literary character in conversation with Hughes’ poem.
After you have written at least 500 words for each of your five characters, you need to impose some sort of order to the narratives, just as Smith did, and give each a title. A title for Rose Maxson’s dream story might be “What About my Dreams?” or “I Buried Them Inside You.” Those lines comes directly from August Wilson’s play.
Now, take another look at Smith’s Table of Contents. Your project needs two more pieces. The Acknowledgements section will be easy. That’s your Works Cited page, where you list the primary texts from which you took your material. If you used any other source material, the Acknowledgements section is where you put the citation.
So all that’s left is the Introduction. In this section, which should also be at least 500 words (for a grand total of a 3,000+ word project), you will get personal. Why did you choose these particular characters? What made their dream stories appealing to you? What connections can you make between any of them and your own life? What do you (as a novice writer/artist) hope to accomplish with the stories of these five characters–what is your overall purpose? Finally, who is the audience for your project? Who most needs to hear and understand and reflect on these stories? If they did, what possible good could result? Notice that what I am asking you to do is discuss the rhetorical situation of your literary project. Reread Smith’s Introduction for inspiration and guidance.
When you’re satisfied with your project, save as a pdf and submit to both dropboxes no later than 11:59 pm on Monday, April 29.
