Kurt Vonnegut Term Paper Assignment

A dear friend of mine that teaches at a boy's school in Baltimore sent this link to me today. I was never much for Vonnegut's work; not that I didn't appreciate his entries and influence over the entire canon, I just never felt an affinity to his work that others have. Regardless, I had a professor in my undergrad philosophy department that gave us take home mid-terms and finals that read a bit like this, which I always appreciated. The creative effort put forth by the professor tended to, at least personally, bring a bit of joy to an otherwise dreary piece of the semester. It also forced me to be more creative which meant I really had to know the material. There was an onus placed on us students to go above and beyond the normal test-taking mentality and create something worth reading.

David Foster Wallace (a favorite of mine) also had fun with his classes. His syllabi can be found HERE.

I think if more professors were able (or willing, really) to present these kinds of fun/creative educational hurdles to climb, we would find ourselves with a vastly different kind of educated graduate being flung out into the world. I also think it would be to the world's benefit.

from The Slate:

and ultimately, from Dan Wakefield's book Kurt Vonnegut: Letters

FORM OF FICTION TERM PAPER ASSIGNMENT

November 30, 1965

Beloved:

This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”

As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all ...”

I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children ...”

Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.

Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.

Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.

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And should you be curious about the stories contained in the book discussed, you can find the list below. A couple friends thought this was a cool enough idea to actually do it on our own time, so...looks like I've got a little project to get into during the next few weeks.

John Galsworthy "The Apple-Tree" 39

Saki (H. H. Munro "The Seventh Pullet 104

W. Somerset Maugham "Lord Mountdrago" 112

A. E. Coppard "Arabesque: The Mouse" 141

E. M. Forster "The Celestial Omnibus" 150

James Joyce "A Little Cloud" 170

Virginia Woolf "The New Dress" 187

D. H. Lawrence "The Rocking-Horse Winner" 197

Katherine Mansfield "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" 216

Stella Benson "The Desert Islander" 242

Aldous Huxley "The Claxtons" 266

Edith Wharton "The Debt" 300

Sherwood Anderson "Brother Death" 318

Ring Lardner "Harmony" 338

Conrad Aiken "Mr. Arcularis" 361

Wilbur Daniel Steele "For They Do Not Know What They Do" 385

Katherine Anne Porter "Maria Concepción" 409

William Faulkner "The Bear" 433

Stephen Vincent Benét "Too Early Spring" 453

Ernest Hemingway "My Old Man" 470

John Steinbeck "Flight" 487

William Saroyan "The Pomegranate Trees" 511

Eudora Welty "Old Mr. Marblehall" 526

(22,704)