Assessments

Assessment

Intermediate Year students:

1 x 1,000 creative response essay (10%) (Term 1)
1 x 2,000-word essay (40%) (Term 1)
1 x Group presentation and 1,000-word reflective write-up (10%) (Term 2)
1 x Short essay exam (online) (40%) (Term 3)

Final Year students:

1 x 1,000-word creative response essay (10%) (Term 1)
1 x 2,500-word essay (40%) (Term 1)
1 x Group presentation and 1,000-word reflective write-up (10%) (Term 2)
1 x Short essay exam (online) (40%) (Term 3)

Creative Response Essay (Term 1, Finalists and Non-finalists) (10%):

Due Week 5.

The goal of this assignment is for you, in an enjoyable way, to consolidate some of ideas and themes of the module in the first half of the term. Normally, you will pick one piece of critical or literary writing that we have read so far to analyze. There are many ways to approach this assignment. You could, for instance, imagine that you are writing a letter about your chosen piece to a friend or relative (1,000 words). You could write a poem, dramatic scene, short story, etc. reacting to and critiquing your selected reading. (Normally, this would take the form of a 500-word creative piece and a 500-word commentary, totaling 1,000). Or a creative piece imitating the style and/or content of an assigned literary text. You could draw an image/take a photograph and then discuss that image/photograph in relation to the selected reading. You could record a 1,000-word verbal response to the chosen material. These are just indicative possibilities; you may have other creative ideas for how to accomplish this task that you wish to clear with me before embarking on the assignment..

Most of all, I hope you will make this assignment fun!

Note: You will not be marked on your creative skills, but on your engagement with the assigned material that you have chosen to work with.

Essay (Term 1, 40%):

Intermediate and finalist students are both asked to develop their own topic for their essay. I encourage you to speak with me in office hours or over email about your proposed topic. The essay for Term 1 is relatively short, and it is meant for you to write an aspect of one or at most two of the literary texts we have studied. (If you want to write a wholly theoretical essay, please discuss this with me in advance. It is expected that you will engage with the criticism and theory on the Term 1 syllabus in your essay. You may wish to do additional research on your topic, but because of the low word count, this is not a requirement for this assignment.

We will devote time in seminars to ways to approach the essay and how to develop a topic.

Group Presentation and Write-up (Term 2, 10%):

The group presentation should be 10- 15 minutes in length and will normally take place during your seminar (unless a medical/Disability Services exemption applies). You will work in groups of approximately three. Your group will present on the material assigned for the week in which you present.

Taking the set literary text for that week, your group will use prompts to generate a 3,000-word AI essay on the text. (Do keep a record of your prompts). I recommend that "Anglophone"; "postcolonial" and other concepts/terminology covered by the module be incorporated in some way into your prompts.

You will then present AI-produced material and analyze some or all of these aspects:

Ethics (of the assignment, of the AI response)
The Nature of the Content Produced
Authorship (What might it mean to cede control over analysis in this way? What particular challenges might AI have in analyzing "non-Western" texts or texts written in "non-standard" English?)
Any limitations you have noticed.
AI biases that you notice.
Accuracy (Did GenAI misrepresent/employ stereotypes/hallucinate critical responses/etc.
Quality

50% of the overall mark for this assessment is awarded for the group presentation and 50% of the overall mark is for the reflective write-up, the overall mark being the mean of these, which will be broken down in the written feedback.

In the write-up, you should discuss such topics as:

what you learned from developing the presentation with your peers and from the delivery of the presentation in seminar;
what obstacles you might have faced;
how the presentation made you think about the content and/or structure of the module differently;
how the presentation made you reflect on the changing nature of literary study in the AI era;
how the seminar group reacted to the presentation (gauged, e.g. through a feedback form).

Exam (40%):

The exam is a timed, open-book writing exercise (2 hours). It is a summative exam, meaning that although it will primarily cover material from Term 2, you will also be asked to reflect across the material studied in Terms 1 and 2. It will consist of short essays, with choices of topics and/or texts in each section.

You will be invited to attend an exam preparation session in Term 3.