ENGL 2101 Pathways in English - Konkle: Your Assignment

The Scenario: You are a board member of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in downtown Savannah. At a recent event, guests were eager to discuss O’Connor’s treatment of race in her fiction, which, as you know, was written in the 1950s and 1960s. The board would like to meaningfully engage with the public’s interest in addressing this topic; however, they are also aware that O’Connor was recently “cancelled” when her name was removed from a dormitory on the campus of Loyola University, Maryland in response to Paul Elie’s New Yorker article, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?”

You, as board members, will investigate and evaluate potential ways to engage with the debate. Luckily, you are equipped to explore this issue from the same variety of angles that you have learned about through your introduction to the English major:

• Creative writing
• Linguistics
• Literature
• Professional and technical writing
• Rhetoric 

You will work in teams to further investigate the issue and propose a response to the rest of the board. Remember that although your proposal’s immediate audience is the board, your solution should keep in mind a more general audience of community members interested in learning more about O’Connor and/or her context. Your proposal should include:

• a summary of your research into how others have engaged with this problem;
• a list of questions that your given perspective would explore to solve this problem (think back to our lessons about the kind of work done in these disciplines);
• a summary of the relevant context that you would apply to solve this problem;
• an example or mock-up of how your team would respond. For example, if you propose a social media campaign, you will develop some examples of the content for that campaign. If you propose a discussion group, you will develop an introduction to the discussion and some example questions.