General Guidelines for Oral Presentations
1. Practice the presentation beforehand in order that you feel more familiar with the material, and so that you can time yourself. It is important to stay within the designated time limit.
2. Avoid reading your notes verbatim. While it’s certainly fine to refer to your written materials, “talking” your presentation will make for a much lively and more interesting experience for all.
3. Do not apologize; you are the expert on your subject for the duration of your presentation and should behave as though you are (good practice for you who plan to be future teachers!).
4. Be sure to have a handout (see below for details).
5. Before you begin your presentation, take a few deep breaths to relax. Don’t race through your material; take sufficient time to be certain that everyone is following you.
Group Presentations
These presentations are designed to provide us with a socio-historical context for the literary works we read over the course of the semester. You should try to make your presentation as informative as possible, without overloading the class with too much material. Feel free to bring in whatever you think will help to make the presentation more lively and interesting. Some of the topics may connect more explicitly than others to the text we are reading at the time,; ideally, you should be able to establish some connections to the work(s) we have been discussing.
While you do not need to write a formal essay as part of this assignment, you will be required to have a handout to distribute to the class with an outline of your presentation, a bibliography, and anything else that you think might be useful to those who decide to do further research on this topic. You should plan on allowing about 15-20 minutes for the presentation itself (this will depend in part on how large your group is), and another 10 minutes or so for questions and discussion.
Critical Crux Presentations
A critical crux is usually some contested feature of a novel that offers itself for interpretation—a character or relationship between characters, an event, a process, a particular symbol, or sometimes even the meaning of a whole novel. For this assignment, you should pick such a “crux,” state what the issue of contention is, then line up the various critics into “warring” groups (at least two, sometimes several), each with their different interpretation and their arguments supporting their specific position. Finally, you need to take a stance of your own, saying which (if any) critic—or group of critics—you find most persuasive and why. The other option is to come up with your own alternative interpretation, perhaps by synthesizing a number of the ideas of the various critics into a new coherent position. As with the group presentations, you will need to distribute a handout. In this case, it should lay out the various critical positions in some kind of clearly intelligible form and provide a brief summary of each critics’ views. The presentation itself should run about 15-20 minutes, with an additional 10 minutes for discussion.