CCWP06: Writers, Audiences, & Authority

Essay #2: Audience and Perspective: Who Knows the Truth?

General Description of the 2^nd Essay Assignment:

Have you ever noticed how differently you tell the same story when you speak to different people? Imagine telling the story of your first kiss to your best friend...and then to your grandparents. Most people would tell the same story in very different ways! The point is that the audience, as well as the writer, in a certain sense "writes" the story. The second essay will be more concerned than the first with the ways in which the form of the writing has been determined by the audience for whom the writer is shaping his or her message.

For Unit II you may write about the stories and essays we read in class, or you may work on other materials entirely: the essay should be driven, as much as possible, by your own developing interests. In class we will look at this "variation-within-truth" problem from two fairly different angles, since we are considering the matter both as an intellectual problem addressed by philosophers (such as Richard Rorty), but we are also looking at examples from popular culture (such as the film The Handmaid's Tale). For your paper, you might want to examine a novel that have inspired a film, or you might want to consider a film that has been remade at a later time or for a different audience. Please speak to me sooner rather than later if you'd like to discuss possible topics.

In writing this essay, we will continue to practice strategies for asking good questions, critically analysing texts, and working with evidence to explain your position. In addition, we will focus on strategies for forming arguments and counterarguments to support your position. But most importantly, we will complicate our responses to truth claims so that we are able to recognize as many valid choices as possible when assessing what a given writer (or speaker, or thinker, or director) has done with his or her material. In short, we want to get beyond the kind of "black/white" or "either/or" thinking that has afflicted many early drafts.

2^nd Essay Question: How and why is a message changed in order to fit various audiences? (This is a general, open-ended question to get you going. Do NOT think I have some cryptic exact answer in mind-the point of the question is to get you started.) For this assignment you are asked to pick a message of some sort that is expressed in at least two different forms in order to ask why the message has been changed to fit the differing audiences of the two statements. You might discuss a film in relation to a novel on which it was based. You might discuss a film which is a remake of a prior film. You might discuss an adaptation of, say, a Shakespeare play for a Singaporean audience. In class, we will look at the novel The Handmaid's Tale an adaptation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and we will look at the film version of the story as an adaptation of the novel. You may want to develop an idea from the discussions we have about Orwell and Atwood for your paper, but you may select any other similar matter for your paper project. Let's discuss.