Objective:
As a final assignment, you will create a self-guided project connecting with one of four fields: Rhetoric, Composition, Technical Writing, or Linguistics. This project should demonstrate engagement with course materials and personal reflection or exploration of a relevant theory, author, or concept.
Project Options (based entirely on your feedback at conferences):
Contact a Theorist: Compose a thoughtful, professional email to a theorist discussed in the course, inquiring about their work or sharing how their ideas impacted you. In this case, You'll submit screenshots of the email and confirmation that it has been sent.
Reflective Paper: Write a short reflective essay (750-1,500 words) on a specific reading or author from the course, integrating personal insights and academic concepts. The "rationale" section will be built into this option.
Concept Analysis: Conduct a deeper analysis of a specific theory or concept covered in class, exploring its implications or applications. This can be submitted as an essay or a presentation, using at least two more sources that we haven't read as a class.
Evaluation Criteria:
Engagement (25%): Depth of engagement with chosen field and course materials.
Creativity and Originality (25%): Innovativeness in approach, whether through the format, reflection, or analysis.
Execution (25%): Clarity, coherence, and polish of the final submission.
Reflection (25%): Depth of personal or academic reflection and connection to course themes.
Submission Guidelines:
Projects should be submitted by 5/9/25.
Include a brief rationale (300-500 words) explaining the choice of project and its connection to course content.
Eighteen months ago, I "sheepishly enrolled for a British literature class at UNO" (Lee 6) with the hesitancy of a middle-aged man who would be over twice the age of some of his classmates. My family and friends asked the same question I had for myself: would I be able to keep up with my younger peers? My experience that semester steeled my spine. My classmates were young and ambitious, but my unique background did offer me the ability to keep pace with even the brightest young people I met. After affirming to myself my abilities, I committed to pursuing a degree in English literature.
Two semesters later, I have no doubt in my abilities to pursue this degree, but I am confronted with another challenge: is this further pursuit of a liberal education at all beneficial in living a moral life? In particular, I am not enrolled in college to launch a career like the rest of my classmates. I only return to college to further develop myself in strictly non-economic ways. I only return to college to become what Quintilian might refer to as the perfect orator. Richard Lanham calls me smug if I argue that a liberal education will help in this endeavor without providing a strong defense. This personal attack hits much harder than one of my siblings telling me that I am too old to go to college. To defend myself from that attack, I could simply enroll in a course and prove everyone wrong. But Lanham's attack is much more difficult to riposte. Lanham demands that I "demonstrate a connection between specific reading and writing practices and the moral life" (173).
In Institutio oratoria, Quintilian insists, without evidence, that the perfect orator "cannot exist unless he is above all a good man" (6). In defining this perfect orator, Quintilian requires "not only consumate ability in speaking, but also every excellence of mind" (6). This excellence of mind is the entire pursuit of a liberal education, but Lanham correctly points out that Quintilian and the series of humanists who have followed fail to justify this construction of the good person.
Perhaps most infuriating for Lanham is every humanist attempts to argue their construction without any defense. Even in Institutio oratoria, Quintilian can easily cite the counter-argument to the humanist belief in a liberal education. Quintilian asks, "Of what service is it, say some people, for pleading a cause, or pronouncing a legal opinion, to know how equilateral triangles may be erected upon a given line?" (71). Quintilian, as Lanham more broadly points out, does not go on to answer the question.
Almost all the evidence, in fact, would seem to support Quintilian's imagined critics. There are virtually no lawyers today who could explain Euclid's first proposition -- how to construct an equilateral triangle from a given line. Despite the evidence bolstering the opposite view, Lanham cites a series of smug humanists who extol the virtue of the liberal education.
E.D. Hirsch, a leader of the standards movement and author of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, argues that individual and civic virtue can be achieved by Americans learning a list of 5000 phrases, dates, and concepts. Hirsch, like Quintilian before him, assumes the answer, explaining that "good readers" will possess a lot of diverse information, but "bad readers" will not possess this information. While Hirsch's list of required facts does lack Euclid's first proposition, the argument he makes is essentially the same as Quintilian's: "Of what service is it, say some people, for pleading a cause, or pronouncing a legal opinion, to know the Confederate general Robert E. Lee?" Hirsch argues that a good person should know these facts. Lanham ridicules his argument, concluding that "the world will be saved by the current events club" (171).
Allan Bloom, champion of the Great Books education movement, argues "wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied, [and] feel that they are doing something that is independent and fulfilling" (344). Lanham derisively summarizes this approach, identifying that "the answers are known, right there in the Great Books [and the] university exists to spell them out" (177). Everything outside of Bloom's idolized university is, according to Bloom, "primal slime" (245). Lanham emphasizes Bloom's smugness:
"The importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get him." (177, emphasis added by Lanham)
Bloom argues the importance of the liberal education by diminishing all other pursuits in life, providing a far more smug delivery than Quintilian and yet still not giving any defense for the connection between the Great Books and the good man.