This homework will count as two homeworks. The written portion will be due in class on Wednesday, March 5

This homework deals with the book by Hannas:

William Hannas. 2003. The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

We are assigning each of you a chapter of Hannas' book to read and report on. Obviously there are more people than chapters, so each chapter will be covered by between three and four people. We are expecting you to read the whole book so you can get the context for the whole discussion, but to concentrate on the section we assign and prepare a 5 page discussion of:

• The main points that Hannas makes
• Supporting arguments
• Opposing arguments

Please pay attention to your writing. We are expecting a clearly written, clearly argued analysis. As a model, you may use the review of Hannas' book that I wrote for Language, which you can find here. Obviously you should not just repeat my arguments: you may use some of them, or you may use arguments from other sources, but in all such cases you must of course cite your sources. But since my review was short, there are many more detailed arguments that you could give. Your report should demonstrate clearly that you have read the chapter, thought about the issues, and given a cogent analysis of the arguments. You will not be graded on whether you agree with Hannas or not, or whether you agree with my critique, but on how you state the points and your analysis, in addition to your writing. Specifically, your written work will be graded according to this grading scheme (PDF).

There will be an in-class discussion of the book on March 10 and 12. You should be prepared with your arguments for the discussion: we will go over the whole book in class. We will have read over the reports that you turned in on March 5, and we will use these to call on people to discuss issues relevant to each section. Obviously people are encouraged to bring up and discuss other relevant issues at any point during the general discussion.

We will try to limit discussion to about 15 minutes per chapter, maximum.

The assignments are as follows. Figure we will probably cover the first half of the book (Chs. 1-5) on March 10 and the remainder on March 12:

• 03/10 -- Chapter 1: Japan's Creative Imitations. Kang, Fineberg, Liberman
• 03/10 -- Chapter 2: Sources of Chinese Innovation. Connolly, Vitkauskas, Hinsdale
• 03/10 -- Chapter 3: Korean Technology Transfer. Barcus, Correa, Martini
• 03/10 -- Chapter 4: Asia's Creativity Problem. Hinkhouse, Bossu, Pennington
• 03/10 -- Chapter 5: The Anatomy of Creativity. Gerdes, Swenson, Gore
• 03/12 -- Chapter 6: Creativity and the Alphabet. Brice, Kane, Marsh
• 03/12 -- Chapter 7: Asia's Orthographic Tradition. Haile, Perkins, Kim
• 03/12 -- Chapter 8: The Concrete Nature of Asian Writing. Mui, Lawrence, Keats
• 03/12 -- Chapter 9: The Impact of Language on Creativity. Tinley, O'Gorman, Treptow
• 03/12 -- Chapter 10: Chinese Characters and Creativity. Storms, Ries, Porebski
• 03/12 -- Chapter 11: Creativity and East Asian Society. Wise, Wojda, Penalber

Again, we are assuming you will read the whole book, but pay special attention to your assigned section. We won't explicitly discuss the Introduction, so make sure you read that since it sets up the premise of the whole book. The Conclusion mostly deals with common questions that people would ask of Hannas: these will likely come up in discussion, so we don't need to go over that specifically. You will probably find the Conclusion useful in formulating your own analysis.

We are expecting that you will attend class on March 10 and 12. If for some valid reason you cannot make it, we will expect you to inform us in advance, or else you will forfeit half of the credit for this homework.