Final Essay Guidelines from the Professor
**THE ESSAY SHOULD HAVE PLENTYYYYYY DIRECT QUOTES FROM THE TEXT YOU CHOOSE**
In a very real and important
sense, this assignment builds on the skills of evidence-based analysis and
interpretation you’ve been practicing with your online journal entries all
semester long. To get started here re-read the rules for that assignment, and
take the time to review all of your own entries.
More specifically, this
assignment calls for a medium-length critical essay in which you are to present
and defend an original interpretive
argument, focusing on text(s) and themes we have been treating in class
throughout the semester. ** (I WILL ATTACH THE SELECTION OF TESTS WE HAVE READ IN CLASS TO THIS ORDER. I PREFER FOR YOU TO CHOOSE ONLY ONE TEXT. IT SHOULD BE ONE OF THE LONGER TEXTS)** The minimum
requirement of this paper is 7-8 pages, typed, and double-spaced. If you choose to write a paper longer than
this, that’s fine, but keep in mind that longer papers are not necessarily
better. So choose your topic carefully.
This essay represents the single most important opportunity for you to
consolidate and focus your thinking about the issues of the course. As
is the case for the shorter essays, the topic you choose is entirely up to you,
but you may want to think about some of these topics to get started in your
thinking: individualism and the nature of social experience; the myth of
American self-reinvention; discourses of race, gender, and class, and their
relation to issues of representation and literary form; Puritan theology and
typologies of mission; the Enlightenment and legacies of the Revolution;
constructions of U.S. citizenship; artistic innovation and literary tradition;
the ever-changing concept of nature and the frontier; the complexities of the
relationships between literature and politics, and so on.
For this essay, I am requiring
that you perform some outside research on your topic/text/writer. For many of you, this work will be comprised
of research into published critical opinion on the writer(s) and text(s) you’ve
chosen to undertake for your investigation.
I’m not asking you to document the whole history of critical opinion on,
for example, The Scarlet Letter. That would be tedious for both of us, and not
especially useful. Instead, I want you
to approach your research instrumentally,
with the larger goal of your own argument in mind. In other words, how can you put your reading
of the criticism to work for
you? What arguments & discussions
have you found that seem especially interesting or insightful? What makes those opinions valuable? How can you build on them? Or challenge them? Others of you may wish to pursue more
theoretically-tuned approaches—performing a reading that is assisted and
problematized by, say, texts from political philosophy, deconstruction,
semiotics, psychoanalysis, sociology, and so on. That’s fine, too. I’m open to arguments devised according to
any theoretical program, from Butlerian theories of performance and
performativity to Baudrillardian theorizations of simulations and
simulacra. But keep in mind here, too,
that highly theoretical papers are not necessarily better, or more sophisticated,
than papers grounded in more traditional textual criticism. What I’m looking for is a balanced, well-crafted
argument of serious intellectual interest—one that is grounded strongly in
exercises of close reading (and keep in mind that you
should read your critical/theoretical sources just as carefully as you do your
primary literary texts). You must cite
and quote from at least one
critical/secondary text in this paper.
A few words of advice: Don’t bite off more than you can chew. There is simply no way you can “explain” The Scarlet Letter in 8 pages—or even,
perhaps, a single short story or poem.
In general, it is always better to develop your thinking on the basis of
a few key observations & claims, and then proceed by fleshing out their
deeper implications. If you have too
many examples, you will not be able to treat any of them with the subtlety and
complexity they deserve. Avoid
generalities, excessive plot description, and extended summary. The best way to do this is to define your
topic narrowly, even as you also attempt to fashion an argument that is
sophisticated and multi-faceted. Instead
of approaching something as broad as, say, “gender” in The Scarlet Letter, try to focus your thinking through a single,
key component within that larger problem.
Examining the relationship between Hester’s labor (as a seamstress, and
nurse, as unseen labor prior to Pearl’s birth in prison, to name a few
possibilities) and her position of social marginality, for example, might
provide a helpful means of thinking about the correlation of masculinity and
political authority in the novel; so might an in-depth discussion of group
psychology (consider the crowd of hectoring women at the first scaffold scene);
so might a focused critique of the controversial end of the novel.
However
you approach your topic, keep in mind that good research isn’t simply a matter
of entering your author’s name into an internet search engine; instead, spend
some time in the library canvassing for what different critics have said about
your topic. Find a source that seems
especially smart? Good: cherry-pick that
person’s bibliography. Keep in mind,
too, that books are not the only (or even always the best) sources. Use scholarly databases like JSTOR and Project
Muse (both accessible from the “Databases” link on the library home page) to
perform specific searches of scholarly articles published in academic journals—peer-reviewed
journals comprise the place where the intellectual “life” of the discipline
lies, and if you limit yourself to what you can find on “Nugget” (the online
library catalogue) you’re tying one hand behind your back.
This essay presents your most
significant opportunity to realize your personal investment in the topics of
the course, and in closing I just want to reiterate that point. This is a survey class, and by design it’s—well,
a survey. That is, a measuring a great
deal of ground. Consequently so we’ve
been moving very quickly, never pausing on any one text for long. Here’s your chance to pause, to investigate
and inhabit one particular piece of that very large expanse of textual ground
we’ve been measuring all along. What
writers have moved you? What questions
do you keep returning to, again and again?
What has impacted you the most in your experience of this
literature? Trust your own intellectual
instincts, and help me (and by extension, your larger academic audience) see
what you see. If you find something
interesting and important, it undoubtedly is—the challenge is to convey the what,
the why, and the how. But it’s a worthy challenge,
and I look forward to seeing how each of you responds to it. Good luck.
N.b. MLA parenthetical documentation and a
properly formatted “Works Cited” list are required. I recommend you consult The MLA Handbook directly (there are multiple copies in the
library), but most of your questions are likely to be answered here:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
