MERRILL CORE (MERRILL 80A)
CULTURAL IDENTITIES AND GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS 2013:
AMERICA AND THE WORLD
Provost Elizabeth Abrams
Professor: Yolanda Santiago Venegas
Office: Annex Office 101B
Email: yvenegas@ucsc.edu (the best way to reach me)
Office Hours: M W and Fridays 11:15-12:15 a.m. and
by appointment
Course Description
Welcome! This is the 46th year of Merrill College and the 45th year of its Core course. This year
you will join the over 13,000 students who began their college careers at Merrill by studying
people's efforts to define and preserve their identities in the face of cultural, social, political, and
economic forces beyond and within the borders of the United States.
The Merrill Core is actively interested in the role the developed world, especially the United States,
has played and is playing in the developing world. How might a person’s or a people’s “cultural
identity” be affected by consciousness of the developed world? How does identity shift, fragment,
re-form? And how does consciousness of the developing world—consciousness of difference
(cultural and economic, religious and political) and inequity affect the lives we live here in the
United States? We will examine these and related questions via assigned texts, films, and speakers.
These sources and your class discussions will provide you with many occasions for analytical and
interpretative thinking and writing as you work to comprehend the nature of cultural identities and
grapple with issues and struggles of domestic and global import.
Your Core seminar course is an introduction to university-level thinking and writing skills, including
the essential practices of rhetoric (persuasion) and inquiry (questioning, analysis, research). It
stresses careful reading, analytical thinking, open discussion, and clear writing. For Fall 2013, you
will write about our Core books in five substantive essays, using Core films and speakers and any
supplemental articles assigned by your instructor to help you to think, discuss, and write about these
texts. There is also a handbook, Andrea Lunsford’s Easy Writer, to help you master the universitylevel writing skills of organization, punctuation, grammar, and citation and documentation of
sources. This handbook is required for all Core students. You will work throughout the quarter to
improve your analytical and interpretative thinking, reading, and writing skills, an aim that requires a
lot of writing, both informal and formal. So you should expect short writing exercises, quizzes, and
drafts and revisions of your essays: writing is a form of thinking, and varied, regular writing
assignments, shorter as well as longer, will improve the depth and polish of your writing.
More on what we will do in this course and why
In this course we will focus not only on the process and practice of writing, but also on the ways that
reading, thinking, and writing interact and complement each other. A premise guiding our approach
is that writing, reading, and thinking are all interconnected and you become better at these by
Venegas Fall 2013
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learning how to use one to improve on the otheras you become a better writer, you become a
better reader and a more a more careful and critical thinker.
In addition to the assigned course readings, the second type of primary text will be your writing and
the writing of your classmates. This is a class where your writingand how you can continue to
develop and hone your writing skillswill be taken seriously. We will therefore make use of a
writing workshop on a regular basis. Each week I will ask you to bring your writing or replicate
your essays and/or excerpts from your writing to allow us to focus on issues of writing. This is an
essential part of learning to return to your writing and beginning to create a language for talking
about writing. You will also, throughout the term, be responsible for responding to the work of your
peers in written format, and thus helping each other to write more engaging, complex, precise, and
reflective essays. This class’s success depends above all on the learning community we are able to
build as writers who respect and are interested in the work that individual writers are doing.
A last important point is that his course stresses revisionboth in terms of the work you will do and
in terms of how I grade. You can expect to practice writing and revising regularly. In other words,
this class is a place where you will practice writing but it is also a place where the writing is
expected to change. You will be writing regularly, but I will also be asking you to reviseto step
outside your writing to see what it might represent (not just what it says), and to make changes. I
will teach you how to read your own writing, how to pay close and critical attention to what you
have written, and I will teach you how to make this critical attention part of the cycle of production,
part of your work as a writer.
A Few Tips to Succeed: You will have reading or writing homework to do after each class. You
can expect to write regularly, at least one draft or essay per week. If you are not writing, you can
expect to be reading. You will need to develop the habits and the discipline of a writer/reader. You
will need a regular schedule, a regular place and time for reading and writing. There is nothing
fancy about this. You need to learn to organize your time so that there is time for
writing/readingso that it becomes part of a routine. Make sure once you schedule your
writing/reading time that you do nothing else during these sessions. You need to develop the
discipline (or kind of physical training) to focus on the writing/reading task at hand only, turn off the
phone, internet, etc. These are writing times, when you will be working closely with your words and
the words of your peers. If you begin to have a hard time with the routine of our course, you will
have to work on your time management and develop a time management plan. You can do this in
one of three ways: with the help of an academic/EOP advisor; with me during office hours; or on
your own by selecting the “Time Management” link under Resources on our course website.
Essential Merrill Core Information
BOOKS: The Merrill Core course readings include a variety of narratives, mostly in the first-person,
and a variety of genres. They include narrative journalism, fictionalized autobiography, and memoir,
and address from many angles the challenges and opportunities revealed when an individual, a
people, a minority culture seeks to define itself within or against a prevailing society.
We begin with Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, the story of three generations of women
whose ties to Cuba simultaneously draw them closer together and force them apart. This book’s
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young Cuban-American artist explores and critiques both American and Cuban ideologies and
identities. Our next book is Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which
explores the “collision of two cultures” occasioned when a Laotian Hmong refugee family in
Merced, CA, encounters the local medical establishment. In telling the story of Lia Lee and her
family, Fadiman simultaneously examines the challenges of reporting across cultures, putting her
own cultural identity into play while observing those of others. In The House at Sugar Beach,
Helene Cooper turns the lens on herself, a child of the Liberian elite in the decade before the
country’s first civil war, as a means of telling a story of privilege, inequity, and ethnic difference in
post-colonial West Africa, differences that are inverted when she and her family flee to the United
States. Our final book, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, scrupulously erases the
author from the tale she tells. The book follows the lives of residents of Annawadi, a Mumbai slum,
garbage-pickers whose economic enterprise and social and political striving reflect the aims of
individuals even as they are shaped by events that occur on the world stage.
SPEAKERS and FILMS. We will begin on Wednesday, September 25, with former Merrill
Provost Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal’s Honoring the Past, Building the Future, to introduce
students to Merrill College, and with Paul Haggis’s 2005 Academy-Award winning Best Picture
film, Crash, to begin our discussions about race and cultural identities. Other Merrill events, all on
Wednesday evenings, have been chosen to directly complement the Merrill Core books. Former
UCSC faculty member Conn Hallinan, a journalist and foreign policy specialist, will speak on the
importance of paying attention to foreign policy, a focus that will undergird all of the texts we read
this quarter. Taggart Siegel’s documentary The Split Horn will accompany The Spirit Catches You
and You Fall Down; it addresses the challenges faced by a Laotian Hmong shaman struggling with
the assimilation—religious and cultural—of his children in the U.S., tensions addressed as well in
Fadiman’s book. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is paired with a feature film, Danny Boyle’s
Slumdog Millionaire, which tackles some of the same themes—religious difference, the
microeconomies of slumdwellers, the possibility of economic and social mobility—in fictional form.
Finally, emeritus professors David Sweet and Mike Rotkin will address students and advertise their
own upcoming classes—tied to the themes of Core and recalling the Hallinan lecture—at an event
sponsored by Merrill advising. (An event tied to The House at Sugar Beach is pending.)
GENERAL EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS:
MERR 80A fulfills the C-1 (composition) requirement. MERR 80B satisfies the C-2 requirement.
The Core course also readies many students to retake the Analytical Writing Placement Examination
and to satisfy the Entry Level Writing Requirement.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
Student in this course will:
1. Write at least five relatively short essays (up to 1250 words) and read a variety of texts, including
a significant amount of nonfiction that employs argument and analysis.
2. Learn strategies for reading challenging texts -- that is, to understand a text’s purpose or purposes
and to follow its train of thought, to begin to be aware of nuance and emphasis, and to be able to
relate specific examples and statements to larger topics or claims.
3. Learn strategies for analyzing and criteria for evaluating opinions, interpretations, and arguments
(propositions about things that cannot be proved) and learn the academic uses of words such as
argument, hypothesis, theory, assumption, claim, etc.
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4. Learn to analyze their processes as writers, develop strategies for enhancing those processes, and
evaluate the results, all in relation to the particular demands of particular assignments. Students’
attention to process includes:
 Learning specific strategies for invention and revision in relation to the quality of content as
well as its clarity and accuracy.
 Learning the importance of a writer’s purpose and audience and relevant conventions in
relation to focus, coherence, and effectiveness.
 Learning to take charge of their proof reading and editing in standard professional English by
learning to see and track the patterns of “issues” in their own writing and developing a plan
for eliminating error.
5. Learn oral communication skills for effective participation in discussions as well as for formal
presentations.
ASSIGNMENTS
As we move through the quarter we will achieve the class goals through the following assignments:
Reading Assignments: Careful reading is crucial to your work in this class. You should plan to read
some of the assigned reading twice before we begin to discuss it in class (this is particularly true for
the theoretical work). The first time through you should read it quickly to get a sense of what the
writer is doing, what the reading is about. Then you should read through a second time, this time
working more closely and deliberately with the text, focusing on those sections that seem difficult,
puzzling, or mysterious. You should read with a pen or pencil in hand marking the text in a way that
will help you when you go back to it (particularly when you go back to it as a writer). If you can't
bring yourself to write in the book, there are post its and reading flags available that you can use for
this purpose. The readings become more challenging as the term progresses, and I expect the
assigned readings will give you much to think about as you shape and reshape your own responses,
and as you think about your own position as a reader, writer, and thinker. You will have time in the
course to build, modify, and rethink your writing about these texts in light of other readers’
responses, and as you gain a richer sense of context from the other assigned readings, your other
coursework, and outside (of the classroom) activities during the fall term.
Writing Assignments: I have designed several types of writing activities to help foster the learning
goals of our course. They include:
• 5 EssaysOver the course of our 10 weeks together you will write five separate essays, each one
informed by the assigned readings and class discussions. The sequence of the essays is designed to
reproduce, in a condensed period of time, the rhythm and texture of academic life. Each week you
will write one essay or revise one essay. You will be required to revise (multiple times, if you wish)
most of the writing you do in this course. NOTE: late papers will not be accepted.
I will read individual essays carefully each week and write comments on them. I spend a lot of time
on these comments and I will expect you to take the time to read what I have written. All of our
energy and attention—yours and mine—will be directed toward the revision process, a process most
successful writers, and virtually all professional writers, take very seriously. The best way to read
my comments is to start at the beginning of your essay, reread what you have written, and stop to
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read my comments along the way. This is how I write the marginal comments, while I am reading.
They show my reactions and suggestions at that moment. The final comment is where I make a
summary statement about your essay. As you read my comments know that my goal is to provide
you with comments designed to help you revise the work into a more effective piece of writing.
If your work seems thoughtless or quickly done, I will notice. I have taught writing for years and
know when writers are working hard and when they are fooling around. I will tell you if I think you
are fooling around.
• Critical reading Logs and Difficulty Essays: The introduction to Ways of Reading (which you will
read later today) encourages you to become “strong readers” of “strong texts” and to learn to read
both “with and against the grain.” I will ask you to work toward that by writing Critical Reading
Logs in which you respond in a variety of ways to the assigned readings. One of the primary ways
you will engage the texts in your Critical Reading Log is by writing a Difficulty Paper. A Difficulty
Paper assignment will help you pay greater attention to what your mind is doing as you read and will
allow you to explore a text in greater depth. Difficulty Papers help you develop a repertoire of
meaning construction strategies for reading and writing and to know both how and when to use
them. I will grade the Critical Reading Logs using a - (70%),  (80%), + (90%). These
correspond to an A excellent thoughtful work, B good completed work, and C incomplete work or
work that needs improvement. If you are absent, late or otherwise miss any of these assignments
you will receive a 0. There are no makeups.
• 3 “Substantial” Revisions. You will be required to submit 3 substantial revisions of earlier essays.
For each revision assignment I will give you a handout with specific instructions about how to revise
and what the focus of our revision is on each particular revision. By “substantial” revision I mean
that you will integrate new pages or rewrite your initial draft completely. The revisions I expect
from you should evidence deep re-thinking and re-seeing of previous drafts, not just surface-level
corrections. I will give you a revision assignment handout to guide your process and make sure you
meet my revision requirements. We will review the difference between revision and
proofreading/editing in class.
Use and misuse of sources: I will spend quite a bit of time with you discussing why and how we
use sources, and will provide instruction in how to cite sources appropriately. To avoid plagiarism
and other misuses of sources, you must quote exactly, paraphrase accurately, and credit and
accurately document your sources, including websites. Documentation (that is, acknowledgment and
citation) is also required for ideas, concepts, and paraphrases that you borrow from sources. Use
Easy Writer for guidance; I will discuss with you the various documentation styles available to you.
I may require that any essays that reference websites must include printouts submitted with your
papers.
MERRILL COLLEGE WRITING MATTERS AWARD:
One student from each section will be honored with a Merrill College Writing Matters Award.
Named for Core speaker Conn Hallinan’s 2012 call to students—“Don’t be ignorant; don’t be
cynical; write because it matters”—the college will recognize one student from each section for a
non-fiction paper written for Core that the instructor determines best epitomizes writing that matters:
writing that has a purpose the writer cares about and persuades a reader to care about, writing that
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provides evidence and analyzes it convincingly, writing that is carefully worded and edited.
Awardees will be recognized by the provost and on the Merrill College website.
DON ROTHMAN WRITING AWARD for 2013:
To honor the highest quality essay-writing achievements of first-year students at UCSC, up to five
students will be recognized at an awards ceremony in Fall 2014. Essays eligible for submission
must be the kinds of analytical, academic, nonfiction papers you will be writing in Core, must
originate in a C1 or C2 class during the 2013-14 academic year, and must demonstrate a serious
engagement with the issues raised in the class, including the importance and impact of other writers’
ideas. Length should be commensurate with the essay’s purpose, but no more than 2,500 words.
Merrill Core instructors will contact and advise students who have written entry-worthy essays. A
team of Writing Program faculty will determine the winning submissions, including honorable
mentions.
STUDENTS WITH A DISABILITY:
If you qualify for classroom accommodations because of a disability, you need to get an
Accommodation Authorization from the Disability Resource Center (DRC) and submit it to your
Core course instructor in person outside of class (e.g. during office hours) within the first two weeks
of the quarter. Contact the DRC at 459-2089 (voice), 459- 4806 (TTY), or http://drc.ucsc.edu for
more information on the requirements and/or process.
CIVILITY
You are expected to engage in the civil exchange of ideas, to exhibit respect for the diversity of
opinions expressed, and to demonstrate a general respect for others, including coming to your
seminar class and films on time, turning off cell phones and computers during class and film
screenings, and refraining from conversations with classmates during lectures and films.
Course Requirements
ATTENDANCE:
You are required to attend and participate in all seminar classes (with the exception of one seminar,
these all meet on MWF) and to attend all Wednesday evening events. Your seminar attendance will
be monitored by your instructor, and sign-in sheets will be provided for evening events. Be sure to
come on time to be counted present. You are also required to attend one Winter Enrollment advising
workshop. See the Course Schedule below for specific dates and times. ABSENCES: More than
three absences from MWF seminar classes or more than two from the TTh class will result in a
lowered grade for the course, and extensive absences from seminar classes and film screenings will
result in a grade of NP (NO PASS) or F. “Excused” absences are still absences, so plan to attend all
classes and films so that you can use any absences you need for illness or family and other
emergencies. Your instructor may require documentation for illness or emergency absences.
ASSIGNED READINGS and EVENTS:
You are required to read all the reading your Core instructor assigns and to attend all Core events
and films. Individual instructors may vary in the sections they assign you to focus on in specific
books. Use your instructor’s syllabus as a guide. Take notes as you read the books and view the
films so that you will be ready with specifics for class discussions and so you can include those
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specifics as evidence for your ideas in your essays. Your seminar instructor may also assign
supplemental readings or other sources that you can access on eCommons.
Do all the assigned readings on time, bring the book you are currently reading to class every day in
order to facilitate good discussions, and come prepared to your seminar classes ready to discuss
them.
Required Books (listed in alphabetical order) are available at UCSC’s Baytree Bookstore:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012)
Helene Cooper, The House at Sugar Beach (2008)
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1998)
Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban (1992)
Andrea Lunsford, Easy Writer
CORE NIGHT: Merrill will hold a Core Night celebration of end-of-quarter student projects during
exam week in lieu of a final examination. Details about Core Night and your projects will be shared
in your seminars. Expect to prepare a proposal, a project, and a statement about your project (artist’s
statement).
Course Schedule
IMPORTANT: Arrive promptly to each seminar class and each event or film showing.
Attendance will be recorded. This course schedule is subject to change to suit the needs of
the class. The syllabus, including the course schedule below, is our contract and you are
responsible for knowing what is on it from week to week. I will post your homework
assignment on eCommonsplease be sure to log in and check the site between classes. I
will have a “homework due” page that will tell you what you need to do before the next
class and what you need to bring to the next class. As a general rule, if there is reading or
writing due, bring it to class.
PLEASE NOTE that what follows here is a general schedule for Merrill Core, with dates and times
for the required Wednesday evening events, the one advising workshop, and the final Core Night
presentations. Only the main texts are listed here, you will also have supplemental readings posted
on eCommons as appropriate. You are encouraged to browse those readings at any time.
ORIENTATION WEEK, starting Monday, September 23
Weds., Sept. 25: An all-student Orientation 1-5 PM in Classroom Unit 2.
Welcome and introduction to Merrill Core by Provost Elizabeth Abrams.
Introductions: Core Course Instructors, Course Assistants, and Provost Assistant Esperanza Zamora.
Film: Honoring the Past, Building the Future (Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, 2008, 16 min).
Film: Crash (Paul Haggis, 2005, 1 hr. 45 min.)
Thurs., Sept. 26 or Friday, Sept. 27: Your first seminar class will begin this day.
Introduction to your seminar section: Expectations, Requirements, Course Outline
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Begin Discussion of the film Crash, and/or Honoring the Past, Building the Future and Merrill
student
Celeste Blau-Joki’s 1969 letter. Bring your reading/viewing notes and questions to your
section for discussion.
Homework: Read the Bartholomae and Petrosky Introduction to Ways of Reading and Gerster, “A
Crash Course on 21st-Century Race and Ethnic/Cultural Identity Issues.” You should also start
reading our first book Dreaming in Cuban.
WEEK 1, starting Monday, September 30.
Topics: Crash; Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
Event: Conn Hallinan, lecture, Wednesday, October 2, 7-9 PM, Classroom Unit 2.
Paper: Your first paper will be due by the end of this week.
WEEK 2, starting Monday, October 7
Topics: Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
No event this week.
WEEK 3, starting Monday, October 14
Topic: Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Film: Taggart Siegel, The Split Horn, Wednesday, October 16, 7-9:30 PM, Classroom Unit 2
Paper: Your second paper on Dreaming in Cuban will be due by the end of this week.
WEEK 4, starting Monday, October 21
Topic: Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
No event this week.
WEEK 5, starting Monday, October 28
Topic: Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Paper: Your third paper (Difficulty Essay) will be due by the end of this week.
No event this week.
WEEK 6, starting Monday, November 4
Topic: Cooper, The House at Sugar Beach
Event: Emeritus professors David Sweet and Mike Rotkin, & Winter Enrollment Advising
Presentation, Wednesday, November 6, 7-9:30 PM, Classroom Unit 2
WEEK 7, starting Tuesday, November 12
NO CLASS on Monday, November 11: it is Veterans Day
Topic: Cooper, The House at Sugar Beach
Event: TBA Wednesday, November 14, 7-9:30 PM, Classroom Unit 2
Paper: Your fourth paper (Core Proposal) will be due on Wed of this week.
WEEK 8, starting Monday, November 18
Topic: Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
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Film: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire Wednesday, November 20, 7-9:30 PM, Classroom Unit
2
Saturday, November 23, 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM: Analytical Writing Placement Exam, location
TBA
WEEK 9, starting Monday, November 25
NO CLASS on Thursday and Friday, November 22 and 23: Thanksgiving
Topic: Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
No event this week.
WEEK 10, starting Monday, December 2
Topic: Synthesis: Core Night, and the ideas of Core
Event: TBA Wednesday, December 4, 7:00-9:30 PM in Classroom
Unit 2
Paper: Your fifth paper will be due the end of this week.
MERRILL CORE NIGHT is Monday, December 9, 7:30-10:30 PM, various Merrill College
locations.
QUARTER ENDS DECEMBER 12TH
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ESSAY 1: Merrill Core 80A FALL 2013
Yolanda Santiago Venegas
Formatting requirements: Two double-spaced pages in 12 point Times New Roman font
with one inch margins all around. On the top right hand corner include your name and
date. Also include page numbers in a footer on the bottom right hand corner of the
document. Finally, your paper must be stapled.
Merrill Narrative: Where and how do you fit in?
Over the last week you’ve had the opportunity to learn about the history of Merrill in
Lourdes Martínez-Echazabal’s film Honoring the Past, Building the Future. I am also
asking you to read a letter written by Merrill alumna Celest Blau-Joki ca. 1968 or 1969. It
is a terrific letter written by a young woman (19 or 20) unself-consciously recounting the
projects she was engaged in and, while at it, commenting on some founding Merrill
faculty and her role in helping launch the college. Celeste was in the middle of important
events as they were happening and, as you learned from the film, Merrill College was
conceived in this exciting hopeful time of deep conviction about social change and our
role within it as individuals and as part of an emerging Merrill community. After you’ve
read the short letter, I’d like you to read the following two short paragraphs: visit the
Merrill website and read the Merrill Ethos (@ http://merrill.ucsc.edu/about/index.html)
then read the paragraph about The Nature of Merrill
(@http://merrill.ucsc.edu/about/nature-mer.html). When you are finished reading you
will have a better sense of the essence of Merrill and the kind of student Merrill College is
interested in shaping.
Once you have read I want you to write a short essay where you first recount how you
became a Merrill student and then reflect on how you fit into the Merrill College vision,
ethos, project? Please be honest, this is a non-graded reflection exercise. I am genuinely
curious about how you became a Merrill student. Was Merrill your first choice? Was it
your fourth or last choice? Was getting into Merrill an accident? Did you choose Merrill,
or perhaps, Merrill chose you! And now that you are here and you are beginning to have
a sense of what being a Merrill student means, what do you make of it? How do you see
yourself fitting into the Merrill ethos/vision/project?
For some of you making this connection will be relatively easy and for others it will be a
bit more difficult. Perhaps you have not thought about this before. If this is you, it is a
perfectly good place to be: take this assignment as the opportunity to begin to imagine
your place within Merrill, write about what is interesting, engaging, exciting to you from
what you have learned in the last week about Merrill. In other words, let this short essay
be part of how you establish your relationship to Merrill College and its mission.
Give it your best shot and have fun!
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ESSAY 2:Merrill Core 80A FALL 2013
Santiago Venegas
Yolanda
Essay 2:Dreaming in Cuban
Formatting requirements: Three to Four double-spaced pages in 12 point Times New
Roman font with one inch margins all around. On the top right hand corner include your
name and date. Also include page numbers in a footer on the bottom right hand corner of
the document. Finally, your paper must be stapled.
For this essay you will use Dreaming in Cuban as your primary source and two to three
secondary sources. For each option I have a list of secondary sources and I have outlined
the sources you are required to use. If you plan to use a source you find on your own (and
I encourage this), I will have to approve it beforehand. I am usually in my office half an
hour before class or we can do it after class.
1. Option A: Analysis of Alternative Histories
At the beginning of the novel, Pilar asks “Who chooses what we should know and what’s
important?” (28). For this option, you are to return to this and other moments in the text
and analyze how Dreaming in Cuban presents an alternative or perhaps silenced version
of Cuban history? In other words, what do you, the reader, come to understand about
Cuba’s history from your reading of the novel that is new or not in official versions of
Cuban history and how does the novel do thiswhat are the rhetorical strategies at work
in each of the sections of the book that you analyze.
Sources:
1. Zweig, “The Cuban Revolution and the cold War”
2. Wilhelm, “Changes in Cuba”
3. Your own research on The Spanish American Way, The Cuban Revolution, and the
Cuban Missile Crisis on Wikipedia or another resource
4. Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis
2. Option B: Reading as a Writer
For this option you will focus on one rhetorical strategy Garcia uses in the novel, discuss
what you think the “work” or function of the strategy is in the text and evaluate its
effectiveness. For example you could focus on the changing point of view, on the
insertion of Celia’s letters to Gustavo, on the way the novel carries the reader (makes the
reader travel) from Cuba to America from one chapter to another, or on how time
functions in the work; why, for example, start in 1972?
Source:
1. Prose “Reading Like a Writer”
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2. Male Powell’s handout “The Practice of Reading Rhetorically” (I recommend you read
this even if you don’t use it here)
3. Christina Garcia Talks About Magic, Reality, and Magical Realism (or find your own
interview with Garcia online)
4. Your own article (research) on a particular aspect or rhetorical strategy in the text, you
could for example go to the library and see if anyone has written an article analyzing
magical realism, or the use of metaphor, or the meaning of the color blue throughout the
piece. In other words, feel free to research your topic and find a source of your own. My
only requirement here is that it be a scholarly piece published in a refereed academic
journal.
3. Option C: Cultural Identity/ies
(Thank you Carol Gerster for this one)
In this option you will analyze how and why the cultural identities of various characters in
Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban: A Novel are very different even though they are all
Cuban born. Organize your essay by analyzing how and why these characters choose to
identify themselves differently: Celia stays in Cuba and identifies herself as Cuban,
Lourdes is a Cuban emigrant to America who identifies as an American, Rufino is a
Cuban emigrant to America who seems to have lost his cultural identity, and Pilar is a
Cuban emigrant whose return to Cuba helps her to choose her identity as a Cuban
America. While this is your analysis of how and why they each choose to identify
themselves differently, I want you to use Stuart Hall’s ideas to construct your analysis. In
other words, I want you try on Hall’s frameworksuse his terms as you construct your
own reading of the text.
Sources:
You are required to use one of the two Hall essays; select the one most relevant to your
own reading of the text.
1.Stuart Hall, “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference” Radical America (eCommons under General Course
Themes)
2. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”
3. For a more gendered discussion you can find the following on your own:
Fregoso, Rosa Linda and Angie Chabram. “Chicana/o Cultural Representations:
Reframing Alternative Critical Discourses.” Cultural Studies 4 no. 3 (October 1990):203216.
4. Option D: Intergenerational Relationships and the Geopolitics of Love
In his speech to you, the incoming cohort of Merrill College students Conn Hallinan said,
“Our wars are fought half a world away, but the consequences always come home. You
are part of the collateral damage of war. And since you represent the future of the country,
we are all collateral damage” (Hallinan, 2013 Merrill Core Speech). While the
consequences of our foreign policy and what happens “over there” may seen pretty distant
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or abstract, according to Hallinan, “in the end they always come home” (Ibid.). For this
option you will focus on one intergenerational relationship and analyze how it is affected
by geopolitics. You may for example, think about Pilar’s rebellion and how she resents
the politicians and general “who force events on us that structure our lives, that dictate the
memories we’ll have when we’re old” (138). Since this is a fairly short essay you will
have to focus on one relationship in order to have something substantive to say.
Sources:
1. Hallinan Merrill 2013 talk
2. Hallinan article on Cuba “Dispatches From the Edge”
3. Hallinan “Militarizing Latin America”
4. Another source you find on your own
As you write this essay remember that what matters is your own reading of the text, the
meaning you make out of it. As you read the secondary sources, try on the author’s way
of thinking, their framework and terms and see how it shaped your reading of the text. I
look forward to reading what you come up with so give it your best shot and have fun!
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ESSAY 3: Merrill Core 80B
Yolanda Santiago Venegas
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Difficulty Essay
Formatting requirements: One to two singled-spaced pages in 12 point Times New Roman font with one inch
margins all around
From our course syllabus and our class discussions you know about the generative power of difficultyyou know
that in this class difficulty is a good thing. This assignment is called a “difficulty essay:” it asks you to approach
moments in the text that are striking in their complexity and begin to work through them in order to get a better
idea of their purposes and work. Assignments of this nature allow you to learn what types of things are difficult
for you to understand and to begin to develop a methodology for figuring them out, as well as to practice
supporting the conclusions you come to with evidence from the text.
So, now that you’ve read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (perhaps some sections more than once),
please choose a passage to which you’d like to devote some time and thinking and do the following:
1. Locate a Passage to Work On; Articulate the Problem/Question
Name a place that was difficult or intriguing for you (confusing, striking, complex, out of place,
etc). It will probably help to pick something small or specific in the text: a particular image or
phrase, a conclusion or reflection, the use of any specific element or technique and why/how it
works. (Try to avoid easy stuff to figure out: definitions, references, etc. Pick something
genuinely challenging/intriguing.) Do your best to describe the trouble or question you’re having.
Why might this place or moment be proving difficult for you? Be as precise as you can be.
2. Generate Hypotheses
Begin to, in your writing, work through this place. Start small and work outward.
What hypotheses can you offer? What textual clues aid you? How might the writing around your
difficult spot provide insight? In general, suggest what might be happening and why.
3. Test your Findings
After offering some possibilities, re-read what you have written and go back to the text one more
time. What ideas that you came up with seem most plausible? Why? What evidence is there in
the larger text for your interpretation? How might this particular working through of the passage
connect to other aspects of the text? Move back and forth between your ideas and the text.
4. Make Further Connections
Now you can begin spiraling outward – to the rest of the surrounding scenes, to the rest of the
narrative or argument, to the piece as a whole. What connections can you make between the work
you’ve done and other issues or themes? Does the work you’ve done allow you to understand
anything new or differently? How might this moment of difficulty influence the project of the text
on a larger scale?
Your writing should take the form of an informal essay; you should not number the different aspects of this
assignment but just move to them as you see fit, trying to address the multiple levels (do use paragraphs,
though, to help your readers!) The purpose of this writing is less argument or answer driven and a bit
more exploratory or thinking-oriented. Although you may find yourself coming up with interesting
arguments regarding the text (this is great!) you shouldn’t feel you need an argument in order to begin.
Just writing through the process should help you generate some substantial ideas; stay with these ideas and
try to develop them fully through your writing.
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If you can, stay with one moment/passage for the entire single-spaced page and work with just this place
through the multiple steps; this will help you “go deep” and offer some substantial interpretations. If
there’s not quite enough to sustain your inquiry for a full page, you may choose a second place (I don’t
recommend addressing more than two “difficult” places). If you proceed with two places, try to also
create some connections between the two places, or perhaps suggest why there is not yet a clear
connection.
The Pedagogy Behind This Writing (or, Why Are We Doing This?)
The goal in using difficulty as a focus for writing, thinking, and exploration is to not only develop and heighten
critical thinking skills, but to be reflexive about what is difficult for us as individual readers and to develop
strategies for figuring things out on our own. This means that we change our relationship to difficulty from feeling
inadequate to feeling as though we can productively work through challenging texts. New texts make certain
demands of all readers; we must use what we already know in order to figure out how the text is asking us to read.
The writing process detailed above is one tool to help us do just that.
Accordingly, this model of engaging difficulty counters certain assumptions often present in educational systems.
Thinking about difficulty in this way and trying to write through difficulty to clarity challenges the assumptions
that:
1. Students (and all readers at any level) do not have difficulty, particularly
gifted students/readers or those who consistently perform well, and
2. Teachers “solve” difficulty “for” students.
Focusing in on our difficulties thus becomes a way for all readers to work with texts in a new way. By looking for
places where we had trouble, that we found confusing, that we resisted, or that just seemed not quite right, we can
engage these complexities instead of skipping over them or asking someone else for a single “right answer.”
Difficulty papers – essays that ask students to locate, describe, hypothesize, and reflect on moments of difficulty
through writing – can also serve as exercises in meta-cognition; we can develop the means of understanding and
working through patterns of difficulty that we notice in our own reading and writing practices. This is a type of
practice in advanced critical thinking.
Thus, re-positioning difficulty as an exciting place for discovery instead of as a place of lack or failure is the
necessary first step of this process (we don’t have difficulty because we’re “lacking” the answers or because we’re
inadequate). Instead, difficulties in reading and writing can be thought of as productive moments that all readers
and writers share.
I’ve found that this exercise in engaging difficulty can be very powerful and encouraging. Being able to think and
write through answers that you’ve generated yourself – your own ideas – instead of relying on or believing that
someone else holds the answers can be quite liberating. In this class especially, where we’ll be practicing our
critical reading skills, this approach foregrounds the practices of thinking and writing instead of just memorization
and regurgitation of information.
Give it your best shot, and good luck!
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ESSAY 4: Merrill Core 80B Fall 2013
Yolanda Santiago Venegas
CORE/ ENCORE* NIGHT Monday, Dec. 9 from 7:30 to 9:30 10:00 p.m.
(This assignment was adapted from Professor Carol Gerster’s Core Proposal for Fall 2013)
Poster Contest: All Merrill Core students are invited to create a poster announcing Core Night, with a
limit of one entry per student. Entries need to be on 8 ½ by 11inch paper, with an image but no text, and
with the student’s name on the back side only. All entries from our class are due to me in class or right
after class on November 20. I will take any entries to a meeting that afternoon where Core professors
will decide the winning poster. Consider creating a design, a drawing, a photo, or whatever can best
represent and announce Merrill Core Night, and our Provost will supply the text. Entries can serve as an
individual student’s Encore Night project, and the winning entry will be reproduced and displayed all
around Merrill College.
Core/ Encore Night as a Learning Experience: Encore Night is Merrill Core’s substitute for a final exam.
Since final exams are designed as comprehensive learning experiences, your Encore Night display or
presentation project needs to reflect a recurring topic or issue or theme of interest to you that you have
encountered in more than one of our texts, have thought about, and have ideas about.
(1) ENCORE NIGHT DISPLAY PROJECTS: You have lots and lots of choices.
You can create a display piece for exhibition in any medium that allows you to illustrate some recurring
topic or issue or theme that you find in one or more of our Core texts (including our book and film texts).
Your creation can take whatever form that can be displayed, including a collage of images that reflect a
recurring theme (perhaps the theme of Cultural Identities or the theme of Culture Clashes/ Multicultural
Solutions, or the theme of Global Consciousness), your own genealogy chart (similar to the genealogy of
characters in Garcia’s novel and in Cooper’s memoir), a revolutionary art drawing or painting (perhaps
your own version of Pilar’s Statue of Liberty painting and your own image of Liberian women’s
protests), a map of the world with the places we have visited in our texts appropriately illustrated, a
poster (perhaps of how the different religions we have read about compare), a mural of characters from
our texts interacting, a cartoon series illustrating scenes from some of our texts, a collage (perhaps of
redesigned book covers), newspaper headlines that you write about events in our texts, a crossword
puzzle of characters or ideas in our texts, a sculpture or mobile illustrating themes or characters from our
texts, important phrases or images from our texts printed on a tee shirt, or ….The theme you explore
could even be your own intellectual development in Core: how has your thinking evolved? What did our
Core work help you think about or how has your thinking shifted? How has your thinking about cultural
identity and global consciousness changed, if indeed it has?
NOTE: Group projects are welcome IF everyone can share in the planning and project creation equally.
OR
(2) ENCORE NIGHT PREFORMANCES: Again, you have lots and lots of choices.
You can create a live OR video-taped performance piece that allows you to demonstrate or dramatize a
recurring topic or issue or theme that you find in one or more of our Core texts (again including our book
and film texts). This performance can take whatever form you deem appropriate, including a video
(perhaps of clips from some of the films we have seen), a skit (perhaps a conversation between characters
in our books), a musical performance, a poem, a very very short story, a monologue (or dialogue or
debate if performed with others), an oral history (perhaps filling in details left out of our texts), an
interview (perhaps with characters from our texts), a dance, a puppet show, a very very short video game,
a Core version of Jeopardy, an interactive game, or . . . .
NOTE: Group performances are welcome IF everyone can share in the planning and performance
equally.
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Display guidelines/ Performance time limits/ Video Performance limits/ Group limit:
DISPLAYS: All paper product display pieces should be created on or attached to a poster board. All
stand-alone pieces need to be able to stand by themselves or be hooked up somehow.
PERFORMANCES: All individual (both live and video taped) performances are limited to three minutes
total; all group performances (both live and video taped) are limited to five minutes total.
Video-taped performances are limited to ONE per Core class.
GROUP WORK (for display projects and for performance projects) is limited to four students per project
No risk: If you know you enjoy a particular medium, feel free to work in it. If you have always wanted to
try your hand at some medium but just haven’t done it, now’s your chance. If you do not think of
yourself as an artist, let your creative juices flow to display or perform something you do not necessarily
consider an art piece.
The idea is to revisit (in an encore*) one or more of our Core texts in a meaningful way: to make the texts
relevant to your life; or to rewrite, revise, or update the texts in a meaningful way; or to show connections
between the texts; or simply to illustrate or illuminate the texts by recasting them in a different medium.
YOUR WRITTEN PROPOSAL (ESSAY 3):
Your written proposal (two pages typed max) needs to answer all of these questions. Do not use
numbers, instead let the proposal be 1.5 to 2 pages of text in response to these 10 questions.
1 Which have you chosen: a display piece? a live performance? a video performance? (limited to one per
class)
2 Your materials: Do you have the tools, the resources, and the time needed to complete your project?
What kind of equipment will you need at the site (Microphone? Projector? Extension Cord?)
3 Your goals: What topic or issue or theme have you chosen to illustrate or comment on in your project?
And how will your project express this topic or issue or theme and its relation to our Core texts?
4 Your audience: What is your title for your project, and how will this title help your audience to
understand your piece and its relationship to the recurring topic, issue, or theme in our Core texts?
5 Your individual plan of action: What are the steps you need to complete this project: (Develop a clear
plan with time lines and commit to it.)
OR Your group plan of action: How will you will you divide all the tasks? (Develop a clear plan for
each person participating and commit to it. Create timelines of who will do what and when each task will
be completed.)
6 Why do you want to do this particular project?
7 How will your project be informative to your audience of other Core students and Core instructors? In
other words, what contribution are you making?
8 How might this project help you to gain or refine a particular skill you see as important to your future
academic, personal, or professional interests? OR how will this project help you to think about an issue
important to you?
9 List the Core text/s your project references.
10 IF yours is a group project, include a list of the other participants (with a limit of four in each group).
DUE DATES: Your Proposal (draft and final revision)
• Your Proposal Draft (due on Friday November 8) is a feasibility check: a way for you to
get immediate approval and feedback. We will workshop your proposal in class on Friday so please
bring 2 drafts.
• Your final Revised Proposal (to be graded) is due on Wednesday November 13. This revised
proposal is the major means by which I will grade your project, plus seeing it in class and on Encore
Night.
Attach your Proposal Draft to the back, so I can see what you have revised.
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DUE DATE for the one video-taped performance our class can have: on or before Wednesday, Nov. 27.
Other Responsibilities:
• Students need to supply their own materials and equipment (musical instruments, amps, but not
microphones)
• Students in our class will have a trial run, displaying and performing their work in class during our last
two days of class: Wed. Dec. 4 & Friday Dec. 6. Be ready. Bring your display project or do your
performance piece.
• Students will need to bring their display pieces (with a title and creator name(s) on the front) to a
designated place (to be announced) at Merrill on Monday, December 9 (the time to be announced).
• Students will need to view the art and performances of other Core students from 7:30 to 9:30-10:00.
• Students will need to retrieve their own work and help with cleanup probably beginning between 9 and
9:30.
While your Encore Night project will take some work, the idea is to have fun revisiting your texts.
To get a good grade for Encore Night, you simply need to do a project following the guidelines above.
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