Due Nov 25

Short Essay

1000-word (3p-4p) essay to be written in class the evening of Tue, Nov 25.

In the early weeks of this course, we looked at the role the heavens played in the mindset of ancient and primitive peoples. Today the stars, made dimmer by light pollution and irrelevant by the atomic clock, are far less vital to daily life than they were to shepherds watching their flocks by night in the year 2 B.C.E. Yet they continue to stir the human imagination, as witness the works of science fiction, space art and space music we explored in the last five weeks of class.

For this essay, I invite you to draw on the fiction, art and music of the past century to achieve a deeper understanding of the role of cosmology in the mindset of the present day. How does it shape our understanding of humanity, of our place in the cosmos, of the meaning of life? Feel free to draw on cultural artifacts beyond those discussed in this class, so long as they date to the period 1900-2025.

Rather than explicating a single artifact, this essay aims to better understand a cultural trend or tendency. Use the first 1-3 sentences of the intro ¶ to establish what the trend you plan to focus on, then use the final few sentences to announce the deeper understanding you argue in the ¶s that follow.

Some of you may choose to focus on a single key text as evidence. That’s great: use the first body ¶ to establish some fairly obvious understanding, then use later ¶s to complicate and deepen that understanding.

Many of you will opt instead to focus on several texts as examples. In that case, try to avoid the easy but boring essay structure where each ¶ introduces a new text rather than introducing a new thought. The way to ensure this is to give careful thought to the role(s) that each text will play in your deepening analysis:

• One or more texts may serve to establish a preliminary trend in contemporary culture. If so, try to fit all of these texts into the first body ¶. Open the ¶ with a claim about the trend, then introduce each instance in rapid succession as an example of that trend. Try to be brief in your coverage so you can fit them all in one ¶—but also give vivid details for at least one of them, for the sake of evidence.
• One or more texts may serve to establish a contrary trend or an exception to the general rule. Use these examples in later body ¶s to complicate our understanding. As earlier, if two texts point to the same deeper insight, consider presenting them together in one ¶. On the other hand, if you can construe one of the two as offering a further complication, present it sequentially, in a separate ¶.

Essays will be graded on:

• Interpretive insights
• Evidence presented (evocative description of visual art, choice of quotations and evocative assessment of literary texts)
• Deepening of analysis from ¶ to ¶, communicated through ¶ transitions
• Clear sense of mission, communicated in the introduction and conclusion
• Documentation of sources, using MLA citation.