Reader Responses/Tacitus, Germania.
The aim of these exercises is to help you sharpen your writing and analytic skills, and to help you develop your own contributions to the class discussions. Of course, one page is an impossibly confined space, too small to fully critique the primary sources and secondary studies we will be discussing. Your aim in these weekly responses is not to summarize the reading, but instead to locate one or more of the major questions and issues of that these readings may present to you—issues such as authorship, audience, intent, context, method, argument, analysis, writing strategies, content etc. Thus, your response must pose one or more questions drawn from the reading and then discuss that question or questions. Remember, if yourquestion(s) can be answered with a “yes” or a “no,” then it/thesis/are not really appropriate question(s) for discussion, whether in your response or in class. Your identification of these questions and issues will help generate and direct our seminar discussion. Indeed, you may be asked in class to use the question(s) generated in your weekly response as part of our class discussion.
