Due Thursday 6/25
The method of this assignment is an inversion of the previous one. You will work in groups of two or three to study a theme as it is impacted by the Great War across all of the magazines listed below. Some suggested themes are Nationality, Imperialism, Gender, Race, Advertising, Commerce, Art, or Literature, though you should feel free to cover a subject that falls outside of these. Each group will decide on one theme to cover between the years 1914 and 1919, and no two groups may cover the same theme.
Blast
The New Age
The Owl
Poetry
Scribner's
Wheels
Each person should aim to enter into the timeline twelve or more items from your topic (i.e. a minimum of two or more from each magazine). The written portion of the assignment will consist of a collaborative blog post of seven or more paragraphs that gives a concrete sense of how your topic is impacted by the War. You might find that the War is conspicuously absent from a magazine, or else not apparently pertinent to your theme. If you find that to be true, you should think critically about why that's the case and work it into your essay.
The blog post should be structured and unified like a paper, with an introductory paragraph containing a thesis statement and some sort of conclusion. It should cover all six magazines. Be sure to use specific examples by way of quotation and/or linking to the image file of the item you're discussing. Also please place each group member's name at the top of the post (i.e. “By Jane Doe, Harley Davidson, and Anony Mouse”).
For the sake of proper indexing, each post should be tagged in the Category field with: World War I, all magazine titles from the list above, your theme and any other themes that relate to it, plus the names of all authors and genres that you discuss in your essay. You should also include tags in the Keywords field if you encounter any specific details or topics that might be of interest to other readers (i.e. Dead Bodies, Soap, Alcohol, etc.). Also, be sure to tag your timeline entries with World War I, your theme and all other pertinent categories, and include a link to the page image in the {image:url} field.
Though you have two full weeks to complete this assignment, you are strongly encouraged to take advantage of our fewer meetings in Week 3 to get a good start. You might wish to meet with your partner(s) in the library or a computer lab during our class time or at other times that are mutually convenient.
Here is the list of groups and their essays:
- Tanya, Charlie, Nickeisha: Advertising Hostilities: The Effects of the Great War on Modernist Magazines
- Calgary, Elsie, Abra: Gender and the Great War
- Jenny, Maja, Anna: The Conflicted Role of Women During World War I
- Angela, Rosanna: Poetry During WWI
- Nicholas: "The War To End All Wars"
- Noelle, Michaela, Kimberly: Nationalism, Race and WWI
