23 June. Home is the Future.
Hornback, Todd. Aerial photo of flooding at Smithland, KY.
Today’s Videos
- Part One: Key ideas in bell hooks’ “Kentucky is my Fate.”
- Part Two: video, Review/Overview of key elements of an academic paragraph
Close Analysis. bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
- 1. How does hooks look to her past to envision or reinvent a sustainable and/or equitable futures?
- 2. What sorts of rhetorical devices does hooks use to illustrate her futures past for readers?
- Passage 1: “All my childhood and into my first year of being grown up and living away from family, Baba lived secure in a two-story wood frame house that was her sanctuary on this earth, her homeplace. She did not drive. No need to drive if you want your place on earth to be a world you can encompass walking. There were other folks like her in the world of my growing up, folks who preferred their feet waking solidly on the earth to being behind the wheel of an automobile. In childhood we were fascinated by the walkers, by the swinging arms and wide strides they made to swiftly move forward, covering miles in a day but always walking a known terrain, leaving, always coming back to the known reality, walking with clear intent—the will to remain rooted to familiar ground and the certainty of knowing one’s place” (2).
- Passage 2: “This is the way I imagine ‘the end’: I close my eyes and see hands holding a Chinese red lacquer bowl, walking to the top of the Kentucky hill I call my own, scattering my remains as though they are seeds and not ash, a burnt offering on solid ground vulnerable to the wind and rain—all that is left of my body gone, being shifted, passed away, moving forward on and into eternity. I imagine this farewell scene and it solaces me; Kentucky hills were where my life began. They represent the place of promise and possibility and the location of all my terrors, the monsters that follow me and haunt my dreams” (6).
- Passage 3: “In our home we were surrounded by hills. Only the front windows of our house looked out on the solitary road constructed for the men seeking to find oil, all other windows faced hills. In our childhood, the rarely traveled road held no interest. The hills in the back of our house were the place of magic and possibility, a lush green frontier, where nothing man made could run us down, where we could freely seek adventure” (7).
Guide to writing an Academic Paragraph
I cover the following in the video–use this outline as a template for your PD2: Theoretical Analysis.
- 1. Topic sentence(s): draft a topic sentence or two that responds to the assignment prompt: According to one or more of the authors we have read so far this semester (Cohen, Nixon, hooks), how do our ideas about the future shape society, technology, and/or ecology?
- 2. Transition: write 2-3 couple sentences that develop your topic sentence and also set up (announce, contextualize) the citation you will include from the essay you are analyzing.
- 3. Citation: choose a couple of sentences from Cohen, Nixon, hooks’s articles and then cite those sentences in your paragraph.
- 4. Close Analysis: write 2-4 sentence “close read”/analyze the citation you included from Cohen, Nixon, hooks’s articles. What’s the main idea of the passage you cited & how do you know? That is, what phrases, rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos), metaphors, or structure in the passage suggests to you what you say the passage means?
- 5. Conclusion:write 2-3 sentences that tie your analysis back into the larger goal of the paragraph. Now that you have responded to the question with your claim and developed you claim through an analysis of a passage from Cohen, Nixon, hooks’s articles, you need to write 2-3 more sentences that put the pieces together for your reader.
