Twitter Bildungsroman Assignment Sheet

Salter: ENGL/WMNST 194

Spring 2014

Purpose. Your Twitter-feed narrative represents a space to think more experimentally, and in an obviously digital medium, about developmental narratives. For several months of spring semester 2014, you will create a narrative on Twitter that loosely follows a developmental (or Bildungsroman) structure. There are many ways to understand or represent development, including: change over historical/chronological time; increasing sophistication/complexity; expanding awareness/knowledge; increasing skill/ability. The goal of this feed is to encourage thinking about and expressing a trajectory of development that you find interesting, important, entertaining, or relevant.

Assignment details: Proposal. On Tuesday, April 8, you will post a link to your Bildungsroman Twitter feed and a proposal/rationale document. In this explanatory text, you must describe the organizing idea or principle of your feed, what you think it has to do with the idea of development or the genre of Bildungsroman, and any other specific details you think will help your followers understand your purpose and approach.

Assignment details: Overall. At the time of final assessment, yourfeed must include no fewer than 20 original tweets: if you are re-tweeting content from around the interwebs, you must also provide some supplementary content to help contextualize or interpret your re-tweeted material. By the time of your proposal, you need to have at least 10 tweets associated with your Bildungsroman. You MUST include the hashtag #WW194in every tweet for which you hope to receive course credit. You are welcome to use an already existent Twitter account, or initiate a new, possibly short-lived account for this assignment. Your Twitter Bildungsroman will be graded according to your meeting of all minimal assignment criteria, your attempt to engage with the concept of development/Bildungsroman, your ability to explain and follow through on your proposed theme/approach, and your creation of a coherent feed connected through theme, topic, purpose, form, or another unifying concept.

Possible topics/concepts. This list is by no means exhaustive. As long as you are making an effort to engage with the ideas of Bildungsroman, development, maturation, coming-of-age or progress, you are encouraged to experiment with topics, content, forms, etc.

  • Tracing women’s historical progress as writers
  • Using and developing themes/topics/readings from class
  • Telling a personal narrative
  • Reading along with another text by a woman writer
  • Tale of individual or collective maturation: yours or someone else’s (with permission)
  • A topic or area-of-interest with which you are becoming better/more aware/more skilled

If you anticipate any problems or have any particular questions about this assignment, please see me!