Philosophy Project - You're Such a Character!

Today's goal focuses on identifying the piece(s) of literature you will use for section 2 of your project. All year we've raised philosophical questions about the characters in the plays, novels, and books we've read: What motivates them? Why do they do what they do? How are they shaped / changed? How do they shape / change others? And many more.

Your goal is to identify a character who speaks to your question in some way. It may not be a direct connection, and it may be that the character completely disagrees with your perspective on the issue. In any case, their experiences and actions and thoughts will be a different lens for you to use to explore your question. Think of the ways in which your question appears in the text and how it is similar to or different from what you've already named.

In this section you will walk your reader through the text, closely examining various parts of the story and linking it back to your question. Note that you may find it useful to use a variety of characters from one text to get to your point. Also, many people who have worked on this project in my previous classes have found it to be helpful to compare / contrast characters from two or more texts in order to give a more complete look at the issue.

Feel free to return to your previous essays and writings to help you with this section.

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By today you should have a good sense of the variety of ideas, issues, and sub-questions involved in answering your question. This will help you to break it down into pieces to write about in each section, and help you to organize them into a clear flow of ideas.

For tomorrow, the flow will be a little different as we engage in written partner dialogues. These will take the entire period - and will complete that section of your assignment - so do not plan on having other writing time during class tomorrow.