Instructions for response papers.

From time to time throughout the semester I will be assigning short response papers, basically a 300- to 600-word response to one of the secondary sources.

What I will be looking for in these papers is:

1. evidence that you read the text: a brief summary (no longer than a paragraph) of what the text is about, with some attention to the author’s thesis and argument.
2. evidence that you thought about the text in relation to the art and concepts featured in the week’s readings and/or concepts that are raised in readings for another class. This should form the bulk of the paper.
3. good writing.

Within these parameters, you can go in any direction you want with these papers. If the text makes you think about women’s art or other cultural contributions, how society treated women artists or women in general, or how women artists were regarded by art historians, please write about it. I am hoping that these papers will stimulate your thinking about women artists in the period 1300–1750 and that this will deepen your understanding of their social roles and how they were regarded in various cultures. If you find the text confusing, it is fine to focus on one part of it.

Please refer to the notes in your syllabus about appropriate formats for written work and about plagiarism. You should be using information from the text in your paper, and thus you should be including parenthetical references or footnotes in Chicago-style citation in the body of the paper and a list of works cited at the end of the assignment.

If you have further questions about writing response papers, you might visit the HWS Writes website (http://www.hws.edu/academics/ctl/hws_writes.aspx).

Assignments.

1. Svetlana Alpers, “Art History and Its Exclusions: The Example of Dutch Art,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 183–99;
   -OR-
   Marsha Weidner, “Women in the History of Chinese Painting,” in Marsha Weidner et al., Views from Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300–1912 (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1988), 12–29; due Thursday, Jan. 31.
2. Mary D. Garrard, “Artemisia’s Hand,” in The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People, ed. Mieke Bal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1–32;
   -OR-
   Elena Ciletti, “‘Gran Macchina è Bellezza’: Looking at the Gentileschi Judiths,” in Bal, The Artemisia Files, 63–106; due Thursday, Mar. 7.
3. Stephen Addiss, “The Three Women of Gion,” in Flowering in the Shadows: Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, ed. Marsha Weidner (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 241–63; due Thursday, May 2.