Great Expectations & Ideology/Aesthetics

Sent as email on 4/5 @ 10am

Before the Great Expectations post, I was more concerned about how you handled the overwhelming amount of material in doing our archival work. The grades reflected your ability to describe and summarize. With this last post, I looked more closely at your writing and have provided extensive feedback on a micro-level with sentence structure and word choice. I also, as we discussed in class, looked very closely at the final 600-900 word analysis of the marriage between aesthetics and ideology. Some of you were successful in pushing towards that analysis (see Kiersten and Sharon's posts). However, most did not achieve an analysis or did not get much further than about 300 words. This is insufficient.

REQUIRED: REVISED VERSION DUE 4/10, 12PM (see instructions below)

The concepts in that last section are the basis for our entire digital project. As such, before we move any further into the digital project, I really need to know that you can handle a complex analysis (intellectually) of these archival materials. If you earned anything lower than an 8 on this post, you need to revise and resubmit by Mon, 4/10, 12pm.

With a re-submit, I will then re-grade the post.

To revise:

• open up that post for editing
• skip a line
• type REVISION
• insert your revised version

Don't delete anything from the post. I'd like to be able to compare the old final section to the new final section.

We can't move onto the digital project until everyone demonstrates that they have a handle on this complex skill. (If you didn't submit this post, here's your chance.) Email me with questions.

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ORIGINAL INSTRUCTIONS

We've had a chance to discuss the materiality of the text using Hard Times. We've also delved into Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" concepts and its pitfalls. In the early part of the semester, we also had a chance to read through some of the prevalent influences on Dickens' writing:

• Darwin, Origin of Species ("Natural Selection Links to an external site." section)
• Dickens, “A Visit to Newgate Links to an external site.”

With Great Expectations, most of us are much more familiar with the novel's plot, but not necessarily in its serialized form (remember the different endings!). Great Expectations was published in 18 issues compared to Hard Times' 10 issues. Great Expectations was serialized in the weekly magazine, All the Year Round, from December 1, 1860 to August 1861 and is an example of a classic Bildungsroman among other novel sub-genres Links to an external site..

In his article, "When is a Book Not a Book?," Robert Patten discusses the implications of ideology (e.g., social control of readers) and aesthetics (or materiality of the text, as we've been discussing) (363-65).

For this post, begin with a description of the issue number of Great Expectations that you are working on -- include elements such as type, white space, column length, etc. If it's helpful, simply cut and paste all of those elements that we discussed for Hard Times & Materiality of the Text post. Embed images into your post here to demonstrate that materiality in the description.

Skip a line in your post to continue.

In 600-900 words (for this portion only), discuss the marriage between ideology and aesthetics according to Patten for a single number of Great Expectations.

As always, stick to the formal voice (Writing Tips) and use MLA style for in-text citation.