DoctorSummerMonkey49
1. Read the following passages from Open City : “As I looked at…
1. Read the following passages from Open City:
“As I looked at the number [Dr. Maillotte] had written down for me, I thought about the Paris Métro, that expression of optimism and progress, and about the ancient city in Egypt that had also been known as Heliopolis, before Baron Empain built his version, and of underground travel, we millions moving around underneath cities, inhabitants of an age in which, for the first time, traveling great distances beneath the earth had become normal for humans. I thought, too, about the numberless dead, in forgotten cities, necropoli, catacombs. The pilot announced the final approach for landing, in English, French, and Flemish, and as we broke through the lower bank of clouds, I saw the city spread out across the low landscape.” (94 – last paragraph of Chapter 7)
“I looked outside the window, and in my mind’s eye, I began to rove into the landscape, recalling my overnight conversation with Dr. Maillotte. I saw her at fifteen, in September 1944, sitting on a rampart in the Brussels sun, delirious with happiness at the invaders’ retreat. I saw Junichiro Saito on the same day, aged thirty-one or thirty-two, unhappy, in internment, in an arid room in a fenced compound in Idaho, far away from his books. Out there on that day, also, were all four of my own grandparents: the Nigerians, the Germans. Three were by now gone, for sure. But what of the fourth, my oma? I saw them all, even the ones I had never seen in real life, saw all of them in the middle of that day in September sixty-two years ago, with their eyes open as if shut, mercifully seeing nothing of the brutal half-century ahead and, better yet, hardly anything at all of all that was happening in their world, the corpse-filled cities, camps, beaches, and fields, the unspeakable worldwide disorder of that very moment.” (96 – third paragraph of Chapter 8)
2. Write one brief (max. one hundred – one hundred fifty words) summary of ONE of these passages, using your own words. Be sure to provide some context about where the action of the passage occurs in relation to the rest of the novel.
3. Select three details from your summary that you think could be used to build an effective and convincing argument about the passage’s implied meaning, and explain your choice of details in approx. one hundred fifty – two hundreds words. Some questions you might consider at this stage of your response include: why you think these elements, in particular, are a good basis on which to build your argument? How your chosen details relate to one another? What might the (provisional and informal) thesis of your argument look like?
4. In approx. one hundred fifty – two hundreds words, reflect on the relationship between your argument and your summary. Some questions you might consider at this stage of your response include: what steps have you taken to turn your summary of the passage into an argument about the passage? Was writing out the summary helpful in generating an argument and, if so, how? What you understand about the passage, after focusing on specific details and working on your argument, that you didn’t notice when first reading the passage or writing out your summary?
An extremely effective answer will include the following:
Thoughtful and genuine engagement with the questions posed in the prompts
Specific examples that illustrate your points (rather than vague or general claims)
A demonstrable understanding of the distinction between summary and argument
A solid sense of structure, with full sentences that logically follow one another
Clear writing that is mostly grammatically sound
