3-5 pages describing and analyzing the significance of one or more of the women and men in dark times discussed in class
An excellent paper will be similar to the kinds of essays Arendt presents in Men in Dark Times; that is, they will: present both the person and his/her accomplishment, paying particular attention to the ways that their actions provide illumination for our own dark times
For the third of these papers you may, if you so choose, select another person who brings light in dark times – one not discussed in our course – as the subject of your paper
These papers may be submitted for publication in Public Seminar

Professor's advices:
A couple of you have said that a model for your essays would be helpful. That makes sense to me. But, since this is the first time this class has been taught at the New School, I don't have any past student essay examples to give you. Instead, I have taken a couple of chapters from Arendt's "Men in Dark Times" and added them to the "Files" section of the class. You can take a look through those and get a sense for the kind of writing that Profs. Goldfarb and Matynia have in mind. What I am seeing is that Arendt is writing (1) biographical essays that focus on the way that a given person's (2) thought and (3) actions were particular examples of creating light in dark times. So, from this you might take those three numbered clues and add them to what I've told you in class to come up with a list of five or six things. I will put them all here for you just in case:

(1) Focus on the life of the person you are writing about. Tell their story. In other words, your essay can be in narrative form.
(2) As you do so, be sure to describe the intellectual work of the individual. How is/did the thinking they undertook flow from their context? How was it an effort to shed light?
(3) Similarly, focus on the actions they took. How did their actions shed light? You may try to show how their actions and the thought were interrelated in key ways as well.

To answer those questions you will need to make clear, as beautifully as you are able to (see how lovely Arendt's writing is, for example, or Baldwin's)...

(4) How they understand the times they are living in to be "dark"? What does darkness mean for them? How did they understand this because of the context of their own life? It may be helpful in light of this to remember what Prof. Goldfarb said last time, about how he views Melvin Rogers as shedding light precisely because Rogers gives us a way to speak about something -- in this case race in America -- that can be almost unspeakable.
(5) How do they understand their work/actions as shedding light? (Sorry, yes, this is similar to 1-3).
(6) Offer your own response/evaluation of the short intellectual biography you have written. Do you agree that darkness is what s/he says it is? Why? Offer critical or laudatory assessments.
(7) At this point you might close with something about how this is shaping your own vision for how you hope your own life, thought and action will shed light in the dark times we may or may not be facing today.