Portfolio proposal

Memorandum

Date: September 7, 2006

To: English 840: Writing Center

From: Gordon Sauer

Subject: Portfolio proposal

I have chosen the café as my governing metaphor; however, in not limiting myself to the cafés in America I can utilize cafés from around the world to further my objective. The café is a cultural icon. All cafés are constructed under the same premise, and still, each seeks to become a product of the culture it inhabits. The café is literature. The romantic aura that bleeds from its walls draws the greatest of the greats to its tables. It is composition and creativity, scholarship and intelligence, caffeine and bagels. Literature of the South and Irish drama are both products of the mind and pen, and still each is wholly different in its thematic composition and stylistic format.

I want my portfolio to take on a creative stance as well as an academic one. I want to utilize my love of prose for the tutoring journal. The stylistic aspects of my journal will coincide with the stylistic aspects of my fiction. I want to reflect on my experiences as they become building blocks for my academic career and scholarship. I want to emphasize how working at the writing center will have helped my own writing, and how the tutoring process will have strengthened my interest in teaching.

I want the narrative to demonstrate the qualities of my writing that will have improved. While I cannot foresee any drastic alteration in my writing, especially its style, I must admit that I expect my writing to undergo a change for the better. Grammatically, my writing should increase ten fold, and this should become apparent in my narrative. Aside from this, I want my narrative to express my growth as an individual, as a tutor, and finally as a scholar. It should indicate my persistence and internal desire in becoming what I hope to become, and should point to the external aspects that shall mold the finished product. I am, after all, fashionable, and cannot imagine coming out of this experience unchanged.

I want the seminar paper to become the metaphor I have chosen. Not in the literal sense as I do not expect it to relate to a café, but it should function as a trope. It will examine a work of literature, or an author, or a body of literature (or any amalgamation of the three) in a cultural context. As I am attracted to Southern literature, I can say that I would like to write it on piece of that genre. I can relate to the works encompassed in the term “Southern literature.” I do not deny that I am a product of Southern culture, and I cannot deny that I let my own works draw influence from this. All I can do is bask in the knowledge that it in someway, somewhere, somehow enhances my work, and my scholarship. I do not like Southern literature because I feel some invisible thread somehow connecting me with it, but I like Southern literature because of the invisible, and not so invisible, threads that link it to Southern culture. It is literature unlike any other, a product of a culture unlike any other, and that is something worth looking at. To be honest, I do not know if the constraints of my seminar paper will allow me to do this; though, I can say that regardless of what elements I can and cannot examine, there is culture in everything.