Assignment: My Literary Life

Do you have a literary life?

Those who study English literature or the humanities typically do. Such a life goes beyond literacy, but it may not mean one is a professor or professional author. Having a literary life means one makes time to read and to write in order to enjoy, explore, understand, and express. It usually means having shelves of books, and a habit of rereading some of these and talking about books frequently. It usually means writing reflectively, and at times analytically, and not always within a classroom setting. It often involves memorizing and repeating to oneself (and others) favorite passages from plays, poems, and novels.

From one of my travel journals (India, 2004)

A literary life often involves an aspiration to write and to share or publish one's writing, whether formally or informally. I don't think it means being preoccupied with grammar and usage. But it always means a love of story and of ideas well expressed. A literary life means having a serious imagination -- enough so that we invest our minds and time in worlds of words, both those that others compose, and those that compose us as we write them.

I want my students to consider what constitutes their literary life, and to write a "personal literary essay" as described here and as modeled in this blog post. This can be anywhere from 500-1000 words. Rather than listing all the aspects of one's literary life, it may be best to focus on a telling anecdote or two, as the model post does.


Formatting:

• Title: Give a meaningful title to the blog post. Do not refer to this as an assignment or use the words "My literary life" 
• Image: Use at least one image, as modeled above or in the example post. An easy choice here is to do a "shelfie" -- an image of one's books on a shelf.  
• Break up the text -- Use the "Jump break" so that readers don't have to scroll to read past the first screen. Also, within the post in general, use shorter paragraphs, headings, block quotes, lists, or images to keep the essay from being a column of uninterrupted text.
• Labels: Students should use the label "my literary life" as well as "posted by Firstname Lastname" without the quotation marks, as I model in this post.
• Comments: Students should read and comment on five other students' posts for this assignment.