Lesson on Using Sources (adapted from The Arlington Reader, fourth edition)
We use sources to establish credibility and to provide evidence for our claim. Because we want to establish credibility, the sources have to be credible as well.
To be credible, the sources must be
Current or up to date: to verify that the material is still relevant and has all the latest and possibly revised research and statistical data.
Authoritative: to insure that your sources represent experts in the field of study. Their studies are peer-reviewed and represent the gold standard, meaning they are the sources of record that will be referred to in academic debate and conversation.
Depth: The source should be detailed to give a comprehensive grasp of the subject.
Objectivity: The study is relatively free of agenda and bias or the writer is upfront about his or her agenda so that there are no hidden objectives. If you’re consulting a Web site that is larded with ads or a sponsor, then there may be commercial interests that compromise the objectivity.
Integrating Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism
Summarizing Sources
“A summary restates the main idea of a passage in concise terms” (314).
A typical summary is one or two sentences.
A summary does not contain your opinions or analysis.
Paraphrasing Sources
A paraphrase, which is longer than a summary, contains more details and examples. Sometimes you need to be more specific than a summary to make sure your reader understands you.
A paraphrase does not include your opinions or analysis.
Quoting Sources
Quoting sources means you are quoting exactly what you are referring to in the text with no modifications, which might twist the author’s meaning.
You should avoid long quotations as much as possible.
Quote only when necessary. Rely on summary and paraphrase before resorting to direct quotes.
A good time to use a specific quote is when it’s an opposing point that you want to refute.
Using Signal Phrases or Identifying Tag to Introduce Summary, Paraphrase, and Quoted Material
According to Jeff McMahon, the grading rubric in English classes is used in such a way by instructors that soon there will be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” professor. They’ll all be the same.
Jeff McMahon notes that the grading rubric in English classes is used in such a way by instructors that soon there will be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” professor. They’ll all be the same.
The grading rubric in English classes is used in such a way by instructors, Jeff McMahon observes, that soon there will be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” professor.
The grading rubric in English classes is used in such a way by instructors that soon there will be no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” professor, Jeff McMahon points out.
Common identifying tags (put link here)
Essay 1: Back in the World by Tobias Wolff, 150 points
Option One
We read in Judith Shulvit's Slate book review of Our Story Begins the following:
To read a collection of Wolff's work that spans the years is to realize that he is obsessed with the act of lying. Asked in an interview why so many of his characters lie, Wolff replied, "The world is not enough, maybe? … To lie is to say the thing that is not, so there's obviously an unhappiness with what is, a discontent." A recent outbreak of faked memoirs has set off a storm of outraged pontification about why people pass off false histories as their own, so it's satisfying to read about liars who lie for interesting reasons rather than the usual despicable ones. Wolff is, in fact, a genius at locating the truths revealed by lies—the ancient and holy tongues, you might say, the otherwise inexpressible inner realities that lies give voice to.
In a 5-page paper, typed and double-spaced, develop a thesis that analyzes the characters' need to lie in Tobias Wolff's collection Back in the World. Address at least 4 stories in your essay. For your Works Cited, use Wolff's collection, my blog, and a book review.
Option 2
In one of his darker moods, our instructor McMahon said this about the human race:
"We are a lost and sorry lot, hopelessly imprisoned by self-deception: false narratives we rely on to define our identities; tantalizing chimeras that assuage the boredom of our banal existence, and willed ignorance that prevents us from seeing the grotesqueries roiling just underneath the facade that we present to the world and to ourselves. As a result, we are crazed and deformed creatures forever lost in a world of solipsism."
In a 5-page essay, analyze McMahon's remarks in the context of no fewer than 4 stories from Tobias Wolff's collection Back in the World.
For your Works Cited, use Wolff's collection, my blog, and a book review.
Option 3
One camp of readers argue that Wolff's fiction is redemptive in that its characters are delivered from their delusions through life-changing epiphanies that propel them back into the world of reality and personal accountability. Another camp of readers say the epiphanies come too little too late and only serve to speak to the characters' lives, which can be defined by endless cycles of futility and as such Wolff's stories are not redemptive but nihilistic.
What camp are you in? Develop an argumentative thesis that defends your position in a 5-page essay. For your Works Cited, use Wolff's collection, my blog, and a book review.
By "lies" in Tobias Wolff's fiction, what do we mean?
direct lies
creating a parallel universe (what does that mean?)
delusions
narrative and counternarrative (the story people have about us and the story we tell ourselves)
chimera (the mirage that becomes our obsession)
All of the above are forms of escape.
What are the characters escaping?
learned helplessness
feeling beaten down
feeling threatened by the narratives people tell about ourselves and then we want to control the narrative
monotony and boredom with life: the existential vacuum
social conformity feels like a prison and we need escape
What patterns do we see in the characters?
Escape is alternated by a crash landing to reality.
Look at centrifugal and centripetal character development for the last essay option.
Review of Irony
McMahon's definition:
Irony is a reversal of expectations that penetrate through our typical superficial grasp of reality so that we can comprehend life's often grotesque contradictions, which defy tragedy, comedy, pathos, laughter, tears, etc.
Irony creates a sort of mystical detachment, a Third Eye, looking wryly at life's bitter-sweet paradoxes.
Research Links for Irony
3 Types of Irony and What Irony Is Not
Irony of the Story's Title
Pete is not rich at all. He is impoverished and emaciated by an ongoing sibling rivalry with his brother that has evolved into a symbiosis, a mutual dependence, rendering both brothers morally bankrupt.
Pete is also poor in another regard: He cannot change. He is a centripetal character (circle goes inward) as opposed to a centrifugal character (circle goes outward).
Irony in the Story
Pete is rich but he's poor in many ways.
Pete hates his brother Donald for stealing Mom's attention and ends up having to be Donald's mother.
Pete thinks he hates Donald's dependence on him, but in reality Pete is dependent on Donald's dependence on him. He is so poor that he has little else to fill his void. We can call this symbiotic irony.
Donald hates Pete for being strong than him but Donald makes himself weaker to be dependent on Pete and Donald knows this dependence torments Pete. In other words, Donald bites his nose to spite his face.
Donald sees himself as a generous person but in reality he only "shares" his brother's money.
Irony in "The Missing Person": Corruptive irony, plot irony, narcissistic irony.
Irony in "Say Yes": Jungian irony: the more the wife becomes submissive to the husband, the more she takes control over him; Marital irony: the longer the married couple lives together, the less they know each other until they are strangers.
Sample Thesis
"Say Yes," "The Missing Person," and "The Rich Brother" explore ironies that reveal the deepest and darkest secrets of the character's souls. These ironies include Jungian, marital, symbiotic, corruptive, and narcissistic versions, all of which give us merciless, unscathing character studies.
Part Two. Lexicon
1. Decrepitude (weakened, broken down, the condition of both brothers)
2. hubris "Grow up. Buy a Mercedes."
3. braggadocio
4. culpability
5. symbiosis: two people who have developed a sick mutual dependence on the other until they become emotional cripples.
6. passive-aggressive: showing your anger in cowardly, back-handed, insidious ways.
7. scapegoat
8. sibling rivalry
9. stagnation
10. status quo
11. spite—an impulse for revenge that hurts you more than the person you hate.
12. Insanity— doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)
13. centrifugal
14. centripetal
Part Three. Pete’s 6 Moral Flaws
1. He worships money, seeing it as a solution for everything.
2. He suffers from a brand of obnoxious smug pride rooted in his wealth. (“Grow up and get a Mercedes.”) In fact, Pete is not rich at all as evidenced by the story’s ironic title “The Rich Brother.” Pete in fact is anything but “rich.” He is impoverished by his condition of helplessness and moral decrepitude. Pete covers his flaws with a pose of hubris and braggadocio.
3. He sees things only at face value without digging deeper because he is afraid of what he will find.
4. He is afraid to confront his culpability for the past, namely, his role in hating on his brother Donald through his rivalry and blind ambition.
5. Pete is a liar to his brother and to himself. For example on page 197 he lies about his dreams, claiming he only dreams about sex and money when in fact he is haunted by guilt for the sins he once committed against Donald. On 199 and 200 we find that Pete tried to kill his brother after an operation because he was jealous of the way his mother doted on Donald. Ironically, now it’s Pete who dotes on Donald and in doing so he assures that he keeps Donald crippled, which is to his advantage, or so he seeks.
6. He is afraid to confront his current role as Donald’s “mother,” which is ironic since he in a way attempted to steal Donald’s mother from him. In other words, Pete is dependent on Donald being dependent on him. What we have here, then, are two brothers trapped in a snake grip of hatred from which they can never let go. In psychology this is called “symbiosis.”
Part Four. Donald’s 6 Moral Flaws.
1. Driven by spite and cowardice, Donald sabotages his own life in order to make Pete bail him out again and again and again. This is Donald’s cowardly and passive-aggressive way of punishing Pete for what he did to him during childhood. Donald embodies the saying, “Bite my nose to spite your face.”
2. He uses religion to judge others while ignoring his own egregious flaws. In other words, Donald is a pompous ass.
3. Donald is stuck in a life of stagnation though he deludes himself with clichés that he is “breaking his pattern” (192)
4. Donald is stuck on a sense of lugubrious identity known as “victimization.” He is both overcome by spite and self-pity. As a result of seeing himself as a victim, he has reached a point of no return in which he is both undateable and unemployable.
5. As long as Donald can scapegoat Pete for all his problems, he never has to grow up and take accountability for his own actions.
6. Donald is big on generosity but only with his brother’s money, not his own.
Part Five. The 7 Qualities of Symbiosis
1. Two weak people merge to hide and reinforce their flaws.
2. Two people become mutually dependent on the other in order to stop changing, growing, maturing, and fulfilling their potential.
3. Two people use each other as a crutch and an excuse for their stagnation in life.
4. One person gets stronger and stronger or so he thinks while the other gets weaker and weaker. In truth, both get weaker and weaker because bother are more and more dependent on the other.
5. Two people stay together, not because of love, but because of weakness, hatred, and fear.
6. In a symbiosis, both people are blind or fail to admit how dependent they are on the other. On page 201 we see that Pete has a dream about Donald in which Pete is blind.
7. To use a psychological cliché, both parties of the symbiosis are called “enablers,” that is they perpetuate each other’s dysfunctions.
Defining Irony for Your Thesis
"The Missing Person" and "The Rich Brother" affirm that irony is ______________ evidenced by __________, _____________, ______________, and ___________________.
inverted forms of self-discovery
symbiotic stagnation to fill the void
impoverishment through substitution
law of spite
Irony is part of the Third Eye that explains the title “Back in the World”: Irony brings us back into the world from our intoxicating illusions.
To go "back in the world" means to leave one's delusions and re-connect with reality, often a shocking experience.
Often a crisis makes us go back in the world. Sometimes the back in the world is sudden like an epiphany or a brilliant vision. Other times, it is gradual.
We see a photo of ourselves and realize we've gained weight.
Our wife tape-records our sleeping and we realize we have a lethal case of snoring.
Our credit card is taken from a merchant and we realize we have self-destructive spending habits.
Large men with scary dogs show up at our house demanding money and we realize we have a gambling problem.
You see a video of a news report of you,a skeletal girl, being taken on a stretcher to a hospital and you realize you have an eating disorder.
Women no longer return your calls and you realize your life as a Pompous Ass Playboy have caught up with you.
You see your wife having animated and engaging conversation with other people, both men and women, and this conversation has far more depth and energy than exists when you talk to her and you realize you need to get stop watching ESPN and start paying attention to your wife.
You make a hyped-up production about leaving Cleveland to play basketball for the Miami Heat and now most everyone in the world wants to see you fail. You overplayed your popularity card and it backfired.
Out of sibling rivalry and jealousy, you tried to kill your brother when he was little and even though your whole life is committed to hiding your guilt and sense of failure by being filthy rich, you realize your are forever responsible for the damage you've done to him and you must forever share his burdens.
Seeing the irony behind a situation is another way of going back into the world.
Links for Parallelism
Part One: 3 Traps of Life As They Are Embodied in the Story's Characters
Trap One: Hopeless Despair: The doctor who wouldn't let go of his divorce pain and walked around an empty house.
In a similar trap, Charlie feels like a nonentity, a cipher, a nobody. He is looking for a sense of place, purpose, distinction, and belonging. He is looking for hope yet he feels like an outsider, a young man whose writing aspirations evidence a life of futility and vanity. As a result, he is overcome by the paralysis of self-pity. His hope lies in his passion and hunger for literature and writing in general. By the story's end, he identifies with the ship moving through the fog, an act of faith and desire kept alive.
Trap Two: Vainglorious Pride: A woman died because she wouldn't take off her body-length mink coat in Buenos Aries, an an outdoor bazaar.
Hipsters say "we're educated, hip, cosmopolitans, not like those close-minded provincial tribalists," and in doing so these hipsters become the very tribalists they claim to despise.
Pride always results in blindness.
Audrey and George, the two illicit lovers embody pride and vanity. They feel morally and spiritually superior to the man they’ve betrayed, Truman. They are in fact blinded by their vanity, which is ironic in the context of Miguel whose passions make him blind.
Audrey and George think they're better educated than most; they think they're special; as a result, they are blind to their vanity.
Trap Three: Self-Satisfied Mediocrity and Complacency: The couple in Torrance who have separate TVs and pills and fast-food refuse on their porch.
Truman is a man who evidences a lack of curiosity regarding anything beyond his small circle of interest; he shows a certain philistinism (disdain for arts) and is so lax and self-satisfied with his current station in life that he is blind to the fact that his wife Audrey his having an affair with his “friend” George.
Part Two. Thematic Elements
Fog is pervasive in the story. Fog appears to represent blindness, a struggle to see.
All the characters are blind in some fashion or other and this blindess brings them to one of Life's 3 Traps. Like a typical college student, Charlie is blind to his identity, his niche, his sense of belonging; Audrey and George are blind to their vanity that makes them repulsive and obnoxious; Truman is blind to his complacency that stagnates him and makes him fail to see his wife is venturing into adulterous waters; Miguel is blinded by fanatical love.
Irony
Story’s irony is that in the midst of all this blindness and fog there is hope: All the characters are starting their lives over. A new start suggests rebirth and the possibility of seeing things again.
Jahiliyya, this is the Arabic term for a long, protracted period of ignorance, the dark ages, if you will. Every character is stuck in the Jahiliyya, as we all are at one period in our lives.
Charlie is blind to his own life but he becomes the Third Eye of the love triangle, witnessing in an almost voyeuristic fashion the sad truth that Truman is about to confront.
Final paragraph shows a lobster flailing its pincers, perhaps a sign of desire. Perhaps our “salvation” is staying hungry, keeping our passion, as a sort of antidote from complacency and vanity and despair.
Part Three. Class Activity for Reviewing Irony in the Stories and Developing Your Thesis
Explain specific, distinguishing characteristics for irony for the following stories and then develop a thesis that allows you to put ALL the distinguishing characteristics for your research paper:
"Rich Brother" (example: The more assured Pete is in his identity as the "rich brother" the more he remains blind to his essential weakness: He is an emotional cripple, incapable of change, incapable of maturity and humility, and incapable of freeing himself from his sick addiction to playing the role of Mother to his brother Donald.)
"The Missing Person"
"Say Yes"
"Desert Breakdown, 1968"
"Our Story Begins"
Review of Essay Assignment
In a 6-page research paper, use no fewer than 3 stories from the book to write an extended definition of the word irony. You must chronicle an ironic experience you had in a personal narrative for the first 2 pages.
Some thesis statements to avoid:
Wolff's stories are rich in irony.
Irony really hits the characters with a wallop.
I really like all the irony in Wolff's stories.
We learned that irony is part of seeing the world in a new way and that once you see irony, really see it, you can't go back to your pre-ironic existence.
I feel better about myself now that I learned the definition of irony and have decided to change my major.
Understanding irony in Wolff's stories really opens your eyes to life's deeper truths and now that I've read this book I'm a better person. Thank you, McMahon.
Understanding irony makes me feel special, like I'm a member of an elite club, but the downside is now I feel lonely because so few people understand life the way I do. McMahon, you ruined my life.
I've studied irony in McMahon's class and read all the stories but now I'm more confused about irony more than ever and will probably drop McMahon's class and take 1A from another instructor.
Irony is not really that big of a deal. I see it everywhere. I don't see why McMahon has to make a big production of it. Frankly, I'm bored with the subject of irony and am ready to give up on McMahon.
Studying irony makes you a better person so spend a lot of time studying it and you'll see how much better your life is.
I don't believe in irony. It doesn't exist. It's just a cynical attitude McMahon has about life and he's trying to infect us with his cynical attitude. I resent him and I resent the class. At the end of the semester I'm filing a complaint.
Signal Phrases to Integrate Quotations into Your Essay
Essential and Nonessential Clauses
McMahon Grammar Exercise: Essential and Nonessential Clauses
Circle the relative clause and indicate if it’s essential with a capital E or nonessential with a capital N. Then use commas where necessary.
One. I’m looking for a sugar substitute that doesn’t have dangerous side effects.
Two. Sugar substitutes which often contain additives can wreak havoc on the digestive and nervous system.
Three. The man who trains in the gym every day for five hours is setting himself up for a serious muscle injury.
Four. Cars that operate on small turbo engines don’t last as long as non-turbo automobiles.
Five. Tuna which contains high amounts of mercury should only be eaten once or twice a week.
Six. The store manager who took your order has been arrested for fraud.
Seven. The store manager Ron Cousins who is now seventy-five years old is contemplating retirement.
Eight. Magnus Mills’ Restraint of Beasts which is my favorite novel was runner up for the Booker Prize.
Nine. Parenthood which is a sort of priesthood for which there is no pay or appreciation raises stress and cortisol levels.
Ten. I need to find a college that specializes in my actuarial math major.
Eleven. UCLA which has a strong actuarial math program is my first choice.
Twelve. My first choice of car is the Lexus which was awarded top overall quality honors from Consumer Reports.
Thirteen. Mangoes which sometimes cause a rash on my lips and chin area are my favorite fruit.
Fourteen. A strange man whom I’ve never known came up to me and offered to give me his brand new Mercedes.
Fifteen. My girlfriend who was showing off her brand new red dress arrived two hours late to the birthday party.
Sixteen. Students who meticulously follow the MLA format rules have a greater chance at success.
Seventeen. The student who tormented himself with the thesis lesson for six hours found himself more confused than before he started.
Eighteen. There are several distinctions between an analytical and argumentative thesis which we need to familiarize ourselves with before we embark on the essay assignment.
Nineteen. The peach that has a worm burrowing through its rotted skin should probably be tossed in the garbage.
Twenty. Peaches, which I love to eat by the bucketful are on sale at the farmer’s market.
Twenty-one. Baseball which used to be America’s pastime is declining in popularity.
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