You need to choose some humanities topic, either historical (from chapters 9 through the end of the book) or related to a culture that you know through visiting or birth.
Topics
Examples:
Quechua language–a people group from the Andes in South America
Edward Hopper’s art, focusing on the late period
Music from the Swiss Alps
Carnival in Barbados (or Rio de Janeiro or wherever)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
This topic needs to be researchable. You have to write a paper using four sources (internet, paper, or interviews).
Paper
The historical/cultural paper should be at least three pages long, plus the Works Cited.
In the paper you should introduce your topic. This is where the research will be most helpful. Then:
Explain a) how a contemporary artist (whether painter, architect, writer, musician or other) creates works that draw on or comment on the culture and traditions of his/her society’s past or b)how a particular kind of art draws on or comments on the culture and traditions of the society’s past.
OR
Explain how a work (narrative, poem, song, sculpture, building, etc.) from a society’s past can give a new understanding of what it is like to live in a particular culture or society to an outsider.
AND
In addition, your purpose is to demonstrate how this particular cultural work explores the “human condition†within the context of its society. What questions about human life does this work attempt to deal with? What answers, if any, does it provide? How does it try to engage the senses and experience of its audience (viewer, reader, listener)?
Works Cited
For a formatting and style guide, see Purdue’s OWL. Use MLA in-text citations within your paper. For Works Cited of online sources see this page on MLA citations.
Evaluation of Sources
You also need a paragraph for each of your sources, articulating why they were appropriate and/or legitimate sources. For help in evaluating websites, this page offers lots of different perspectives.
Presentations
You need to have a four to six minute presentation on your topic prepared. It needs to include at least three visuals. It should be interesting.
You may create a video, so that you do not actually have to talk for your presentation, but I need to know that it is your video. So it either needs to have you in it or it needs to be you speaking.
When you do your presentation, you need about a page saying what you are going to present (what information you are covering). It could be an outline, notes, or your “speech.†You also need the URLs for your visuals. You may email this to me or give me a copy when you get up to speak. It is part of the presentation grade.