READ INSTRUCTION PART AND ANSWER THIS PROMPT: 700 words at least!!! (DUE TOMORROW MORNING) For this week’s blog post, make an argument about the way Amitav Ghosh’s characters establish and sustain community in The Hungry Tide. Do you see Robinson’s ideas reflected in the novel, or do you see different dynamics at work? How do these characters understand what it means to live well? How can thinking about community help us think about cli-fi in a new way? (Don’t feel that you have to answer all of these questions, but feel free to use one or more of them to get you thinking!)

In her essay, “Imagination and Community,” writer Marilynne Robinson argues for the importance of community. “As individuals and as a species,” she asserts, “we are unthinkinable without our communities” because it is in community that we live, and develop language, and tell our stories (22). Our communities help us understand who we are. Community, though, “consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly” (21). Whether it is in our home towns, our churches, or on a college campus, we cannot know everyone, but yet we will often think of ourselves as part of the same group. Robinson is a writer of fiction, at least in part, because of her belief in the power of community. “I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification” (21). When we read fiction, we imagine what it is like to be someone other than ourselves — perhaps someone of a different gender, or class, or race, or religion. In doing so, we develop our ability to do the same with the people we encounter in the world. Community, Robinson teaches, is “work of the imagination” and “he more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be” (29-30). FOLLOW TO EARN GOOD GRADE: Respond directly to the question I’ve asked in my Wednesday prompt for the Blog Post assignment. Have a thesis statement (that you format in bold) at the end of your first paragraph that makes an argument about our texts. Good arguments about literature usually do two things well: (1) They make an interesting observation about a text, and (2) they make an argument about why that interesting observation matters (the “so what?” element). The chapters we read in Schilb & Clifford’s A Brief Guide to Arguing about Literature will be our guide to succeeding in this assignment. Consult them regularly! Organize your ideas into well-developed paragraphs. Blog posts that consist of one giant block of words will always earn an Unsatisfactory grade. Support your argument with well-chosen evidence from our texts. Blog posts that do not quote from the text(s) they are discussing, or do not offer analysis/commentary about the quotations they include, will always earn an Unsatisfactory grade. Use the rules of MLA style for citation and documentation. This includes parenthetical citations to cite quotations — for example, (Blair 47) — and a Works Cited list at the end of the post. I recommend consulting the Purdue Online Writing Lab’s MLA Formatting and Style Guide regularly to learn and apply the rules of MLA style. Write clear, grammatically-correct prose that avoids distracting elements, such as errors in spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Be sure to proofread your work and edit carefully before submitting it. Writing Center tutors are available to you if you’d like their help. Please see the “Help from the Writing Center during Summer Term” section of our syllabus for details.