you should respond to two posts written by your peers.
Completing your online discussion forum post involves two steps:
- First, you should write a post of at least 500 words in response to the prompt, which will be different each week. (Scroll down to find this week’s prompt.) Please note that you will usually need to do the assigned reading BEFORE writing your post. A successful post will reference specific examples from our readings and discussions as applicable. However, rather than just summarize the readings, the prompts will ask you to contribute original reactions, ideas, and questions to our conversations. Your post needs to be up by 11:30PM in order to be considered on time.
- Second, you should respond to two posts written by your peers. (Please note that you will only be able to see other posts after you submit your own.) Your responses should each be at least 150 words and should follow the guidelines for productive classroom dialogue and “netiquette” that are outlined in our syllabus. Some suggested strategies you may use in your response include providing a personal reaction, bringing up a point of agreement or disagreement, asking a clarifying question, or thinking of an additional example that further proves or complicates what your peer has said. The purpose of this step is to allow our forums to be an interactive space where we talk to each other rather than at each other and are able to meet our learning outcome of building knowledge collaboratively. Your responses need to be up by 9AM the morning after your post is due in order to be considered on time.
Please note that you must complete steps 1 and 2 in order for your assignment to be considered complete. You can find more information on how to write successful online discussion forum posts at the links below. Please look at these resources carefully, as they provide very useful strategies you can use to improve your grade:
Your online discussion forum posts are worth 50 points each (out of a total 1000 points for the course). They will be assessed according to the attached rubric. Please submit your posts on time so that we can use them as launching pads for our class discussions. Two points will be deducted for each day of lateness. Please note that I only grade these once, meaning you may not resubmit these for a better grade and you may not ask me to change your grade to accommodate late responses to other posts.
PROMPT FOR ONLINE DISCUSSION POST #4:
The purpose of this post is to find evidence in the outside world of some of the issues we have been discussing this week. Using “Publishing in the West: Problems and Prospects for Arab Women Writers” by Amal Amireh (link: http://www.aljadid.com/content/publishing-west-problems-and-prospects-arab-women-writers#sthash.TD0U5El0.dpuf)and “Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha’rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment” by Mohja Kahf as a point of departure, we have been exploring the problems in how novels written by Arab writers (especially Arab women writers) are often “packaged” and “received” in translation. (For example, Amireh argues these novels are often “packaged” with paratext that reinforces stereotypical views of the Arab world, and that they are often “received” as “sociological and anthropological texts that ‘reflect’ the reality of Islam and the Arab world.” Kahf argues that works written by Arab women are often “packaged” and “received” in the U.S. in ways that reinforce three stereotypes of the Arab woman as either a “victim of gender oppression,” “an escapee” from her culture, or a “pawn of Arab male power.”)
Your job is to find examples that support Amireh and Kahf’s arguments for ONE of the four novels we’re reading in this class (Season of Migration to the North, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Girls of Riyadh, and Always Coca Cola). You can look at how the book is “packaged” by closely examining its paratext. (Paratext refers to anything added on to the book that is not the direct words of the author herself. For example, the images on the cover, the blurb on the back of the book jacket, and the praise from reviewers often included on the first few pages are all considered paratext.) You can also look at how the book has been “received” by examining readers’ reactions online. (For example, you can look at reviews written by readers on sites such as Amazon.) In your post, you should discuss the following questions:
- Share the example you found. (Include a link if you found something online.)
- Analyze your example and discuss how it connects to the themes presented in the readings and discussed in class regarding how novels by Arab writers are “packaged” and “received” by English-speaking audiences.
