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Final Exam Project: Judging a Book By Its Cover (due May 4th!)

Eng 2653: British Lit from 1800

Final Exam Project: Judging a Book By Its Cover

“A book cover demands our initial engagement with a work. You may not think a cover reflects your own thoughts of a book, but it evokes a response and inspires a reader’s imagination to begin building the world within the pages created by the author…A book cover is a key with which we open a world of storytelling…one page at a time, cover to cover.” (Elda Rotor, Classic Penguins: Cover to Cover)

This final exam is very simple: I want you to find new cover art for each of the 6 books in our class. The art can be come from the artists we discussed in class (or ones you wrote about in 3 of your papers), or can be something completely different, whether ancient or modern (or your own). However, instead of writing a paper about it, I want you to make a six-slide Powerpoint (or whatever visual aid you choose) that shows the work of art, lists the book and author, and contains a “book blurb” quote from the book that you think is especially significant. You don’t have to explain the quote, just find one that you think expresses the theme of the book and/or some aspect of the image. And that’s it!

Please e-mail these presentations to me no later than Thursday, May 4th by midnight. I need to start grading immediately so I can get grades in by the weekend, since I have another class that starts the following Monday! So late presentations will not be accepted since I won’t have time to accept them!

This short project is worth 15 points (out of 100), so it should be an easy but enjoyable assignment. The only way you will lose points is if you don’t do all 6 books, show a certain laziness in your approach (in other words, you just use the exact same paintings we wrote about in class—go a little beyond that!), or you leave out the quotations from each book. So try to have fun and think about what art would not only help tell the story of the book, but also would help sell books! After all, we do judge a book by its cover—and why shouldn’t we?

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