Hebdomadal topic (week 8)

This hebdomadal is due before the midterm on Thursday.

This week's topic is, I feel, the height of practicality.

1. Find a classmate with whom to write this heb (if you want a classmate's email address, let me know, or post a comment letting people know that you're looking for a partner)
   
2. Pick a passage from one of the two practice exams posted below (and handed out on Friday)
3. Write out the full ID
4. Exchange your answer with your classmate
5. Read over your classmate's ID and point out exactly how he or she could have written an even stronger answer; pay particular attention to
1. Whether the answer to the context
1. identifies characters who aren't named by the text (I'm not so interested in anonymous narrators or characters whose names are right there in the passage), and
   
2. would lead a casual reader directly to the right page (of Middlemarch) or the right line (of a poem)
2. Whether the answer to the thematic significance
1. identifies a specific thematic question posed by the text of which this passage is a part (by specific I mean something like this: "How does gossip shape the social relevance of truth?")
   
2. suggests the specific answer to that question posed by this specific passage (e.g. "In this passage, Bulstrode suggests that gossip promotes emotional convenience above factual accuracy -- the fact that his behavior has changed in the past ten years would be less significant to Middlemarchers than a conveniently ugly detail from two decades earlier")
   
3. connects that specific answer to a textual detail from the passage -- a word, a phrase, or a formal feature ("Bulstrode himself echoes this lazy, rationalizing judgmentalism by quietly renaming his cruel behavior as a kind of 'questionable conformity to lax customs' rather than as a simple, and nominally 'forgiven,' 'sin'")
   
6. Email the whole caboodle back to your classmate and to me

Since I'm drowning in grading, I can't promise that I'll get an answer back to this hebdomadal before the midterm (although I will try to -- right now I'm ahead in my grading, though that might not last). However, by having worked through your answer with a classmate you will have already gotten some good feedback.