English 102 Fall 2015 Unit 3 Essay – Encountering the Thing to Be Known Short prompt: Reflect on your learning experiences this semester using Percy as your lens. How do his concepts help you to assess your experience? Explain how your experiences validate Percy’s observations and/or how they demonstrate the flaws in his argument. Part of the challenge of this assignment is to present your experiences in a meaningful way for you. After you have conducted this analysis, explain how your thinking has changed and explain how you see yourself moving forward as a sovereign knower. Feel free to narrow your discussion in any way appropriate for this assignment or to expand slightly beyond this semester if you wish.

Long prompt: We have read Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” which explores the ways the sovereign knower encounters the “thing to be known.” Percy questions the role that experts and planners play in our learning experiences, questions educational packaging, and warns us about a loss of sovereignty. In this last essay assignment, I am asking you to evaluate your learning experiences this semester using Percy as a lens. Engage with Percy's concepts directly. Consider some of the following questions:  How do Percy’s concepts inform your evaluation of your encounters with the “things to be known”?  Have you come to know and understand those things?  Why or why not? Did you “lose the creature” in your studies? How?  Did the creature become invisible to you? If not, why not?  When you reflect back now, how might you recover that creature (or that thing to be known)?

See the back of this sheet to consider several of Percy's concepts as you examine your learning experiences. Be sure that you quote directly from Percy's essay in your essay. You may find that you will frequently quote words or phrases rather than full sentences.

This assignment requires you to refer specifically to learning experiences you have had this semester. Provide the detail necessary, remembering that your reader has not had your experience. View your experience through the lens that Percy provides. What do you discover in that examination? How was this experience meaningful for you? (It may have been positive or negative). Choose any learning experiences—in school or out; feel free to examine the mundane and/or the profound. You may want to quote directly from your own essays that you have written in order to clarify your ideas.

The previous assignments in this class asked you to reach nuanced and perhaps complicated conclusions. I am asking the same here. Like your other English 102 assignments, this assignment asks you to consider the evidence (the learning experiences you have had this semester) and to draw conclusions. Enter this writing process the same way you entered the others. Draw conclusions based on what you observe. Engage with Percy's ideas to help you see those experiences in a new way. Focus mainly on these most recent experiences; "the best learning experiences of your life" may be very difficult for you to evaluate since you have already built a narrative around them.

One challenge of this assignment will be how you choose to give meaning to and present your Fall 2015 experience. This essay is not simply a collection of learning experiences. It is up to you to construct meaning from those experiences. Meaningful Engagement with Concepts

Your discussion should include meaningful engagement with Percy’s concepts. Be careful not to offer a reductive version. I have listed terms and concepts below which you may want to employ in your discussion. You do NOT need to include all of these, only the ones that apply to your discussion. Also, this list is not exhaustive; Percy offers many ideas which you can confront. Take your time and really come to terms with Percy. (Sorry for the excessive packaging here!)

 Sovereignty (and loss of sovereignty)  Preformed symbolic complex  The inability to “gaze directly” at the thing to be known  Confrontation of the thing  “The present is surrendered to the past and the future” (2)  Zoning  Ways of recovering the thing to be known  Overcoming the “opacity, the boredom, of the direct confrontation of the thing or creature in its citadel of symbolic investiture” (4) (citadel is a fortress, investiture is the conferring of rank)  Certified experience, “the acceptable experience” (5)  Consumer, layman, expert, planner  Loss of sovereignty can extend “even to oneself” (8)  Symbolic package  “fundamental placement of the student in the world” (9)  Specimen, or invisibility (9)  Loss of the creature  “radical devaluation” (10)  Ways to avoid the “educator’s direct presentation of the object as a lesson to be learned and restoring access to sonnet and dogfish as beings to be known” (10)  “genuine research man” (11)  “Platonic relation” (12)  The struggle

Please write an exploratory draft, due on Monday, November 30 (bring a hard copy to class). This draft should be about exploring various learning experiences, making sense of Percy's ideas, and posing interesting questions. This draft is about "what do I want to say, and NOT about how am I going to say it."

Exploratory draft: 4 pages approx. Format: 5 pages approx. (1,400-1,500 words)