On the Analytical Essay

As you know, your analytical essay must perform a close reading of a particular story in either Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men or N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, considering both its internal structure and its contributions to the meaning of the work as a whole. This page includes the assignment sheet for the analytical essay, sandwiched between an explanation of the goals and purposes of the assignment and advice on how to do it. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms. Thanks.

What For

Why have an assignment that requires you to develop your close reading skills? First off, reading attentively and critically is a core skill that is of value beyond your becoming better able to analyze the poems, short stories, novels, and autobiographies we will be reading in this course. My hope is that you will find yourself using close reading strategies not just in your other courses and on assigned readings, but also when reading newspapers and magazines, watching TV and movies, and even when "reading" people around you and their interactions.

A less expansive purpose of the analytical essay is to help you become more conscious of what interpretive moves you make when you read a text, to practice and get feedback on moves that you may not normally make, and to give you an opportunity to add some interpretive skills to your critical repertoire. When you learn any activity, it helps to practice the things that you will do most often, so that they become so natural to you they become part of your "muscle memory"; think back to when you first learned to play a sport or learned to drive (particularly on a vehicle with manual transmission!). Learning to read actively and critically is exactly the same kind of process: it helps if you add some interpretive skills to your "mental muscle memory," so to speak. Sometimes, this can be as simple as becoming aware of what you already do when you read a text; other times, this can be as difficult as learning to make a lefty layup is for a righty, or learning to hit a golf ball out of a sand trap is for anyone who can stand to play the game. Throughout this course, you should be striving to become a more self-conscious reader, to become aware of what interpretive moves you make when you read, and to push yourself to move beyond reading comprehension and appreciation, toward a "critical literacy." This paper is one of the best ways of demonstrating the importance and the difficulty of doing this.

This assignment also gives you the opportunity to develop your writing skills. The short length of the assignment (2-3 pages) forces you to distill your ideas into a concise, carefully worded, well-organized, and far-reaching argument about the form and function of a particular migration narrative. To do that, you will need to learn a lot about what writing process works best for you. See below for advice on this.

There's one other important reason for having you pay attention to the form, structure, and function of a particular migration narrative: it helps prepare you for the larger writing assignments in the course, the research project and the comparative essay. Being able to do a close reading is the building block for more ambitious critical essays, such as the comparative essay. Also, by analyzing how a writer structures his or her work and the migration narratives within it, you get a valuable model for doing your own migration narrative in the research project.

What It Is

Due: Monday, 2/25/02, in the envelope outside my office door (Fenton 240) by 5:00 pm.

Format: 2-3 pages (roughly 600-900 words), with a title and a heading that includes the course number or title, your name, and the date; word-processed; double-spaced; font Times 12 point or similar; preferably laser-printed.

Assignment: Your analytical essay must perform a close reading of a particular story in either Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men or N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, considering both its internal structure and its contributions to the meaning of the work as a whole.

One key goal of a close reading is to make as explicit as possible what is implicit in the language and structure of the story. In particular, you should be looking for all the kinds of figurative uses of language at play in the story--similes, metaphors, symbols, ironies--and for nuances of tone and connotation. Beyond analyzing elements of characterization and plot, that is, close readings should engage such literary techniques as point-of-view/narrator, imagery/symbolism, structure, and voice/tone (among others)--not in a mechanical way, but in order to help make explicit what is implicit in the story. In short, doing a close reading means that you identify not just what the story means, but how it means--the work the literary techniques and narrative strategies accomplish, the kind of experience the reader has in making sense of the story.

Another key goal of a close reading is to relate what happens in the story (in terms of its language as well as the events it describes) to the work as a whole. You can think about this in several ways: 1) what is the "context" of this story? (what do we need to know to make sense of the story? does it refer back to an earlier passage or anticipate a later passage? what readerly expectations does it set up or frustrate?); 2) what is the "function" of this story? (does it introduce a character or problem or image, reveal something about a character or relationship, resolve a conflict, or raise/develop an issue, theme, or motif [among other possibilities]?); 3) how does this story make me understand the work differently? In short, doing a close reading also means moving from treating the story in isolation to considering it as part of a larger work--and figuring out what "work" it does, what its "function" is, how it contributes to the meaning and significance of the story or novel from which it comes.

Thus, one key task in this essay is to explain (or "explicate") as fully as you can what is happening in the story in question. A second key task in this essay is to identify as specifically as possible what this passage contributes to your understanding of the work as a whole. An excellent close reading links the meaning and significance of the passage in question with its form, structure, and function--in it, you should be able to show how a passage is written contributes both to the meaning and significance of the story itself and the larger work of which it is a part.

How To

Your first decision involves choosing a particular migration narrative to analyze from within either Kingston's or Momaday's works. This could be something as short as an interlude from China Men or one of the roman numeral sections from The Way to Rainy Mountain or as long as a chapter from Kingston's book or a section of Momaday's. It should be something that allows you to go beyond what we discussed in class or observed on the listserv--something that will bear sustained analysis and a developed argument.

The next step is to go about analyzing the story and writing your essay. Between this page, the advice on the reading responses, and the practice we've been doing in class, you should have a good sense of what it means to analyze the story in general, and in the way required by this assignment--if not, please ask me (in class, in my office, over email)! As for the writing, it's very important to understand a little about the writing process before you start this essay. In general, people who study the writing process tend to break it down into three parts: pre-writing, drafting/composing, and editing/revising. The pre-writing stage should be as simple or as involved as works best for you--it could consist of underlining relevant passages from the text, making notes in the margins of the text, taking notes in a notebook or on notecards, mapping out the connections between ideas (starting with a phrase or idea in the middle of the page and drawing lines off of it that branch off it it to related ideas--and eventually, after generating enough connections, looking back to see if you can make other connections between the different branches you've created), free writing to generate ideas (writing non-stop for 1 or 2 minutes on a particular idea, taking the best ideas that come out of that free write and doing free writes on them, etc.), and/or making an outline for the paper. The drafting/composing stage is the actual writing of a first draft of the essay. The editing/revising stage involves identifying your main idea, improving the way in which you support it or argue for it, looking at the opening and closing of paragraphs for good transitions, looking at sentence length, complexity, and vocabulary for how well they convey your ideas and persuade your readers, and trying to develop a distinctive "voice" for your paper. In practice, many people don't go through these stages step-by-step; it might be more helpful to think of the stages as "modes" of writing. If, for instance, while drafting, you realize you have no idea what to write in the next sentence, you might find yourself shifting into another mode: you might go back and revise what you've already written to build up some momentum and clarify what you're trying to achieve in that paragraph, or you might open up another document or get a pad of paper and do a free write on the question, "what's keeping me from writing the next sentence?" To give another example, while revising the first draft, you may realize you didn't come to your central idea until the conclusion, so that you have to completely reorganize your paper to support that closing claim rather than the one you started out with--this might mean, actually drafting new arguments as well as rearranging and condensing what you've already written, so you go back to drafting mode.

I hope this overview and examples show that the process you go through before turning in your essay is absolutely crucial. You should be striving this semester to figure out what process works best from you! The key thing to keep in mind is that will end up writing a lot more than you turn in. Rather than getting onto the third page and stopping as quickly as possible after that, you're much better off if you first develop your ideas fully and then go back and condense, cut, and otherwise revise to be as concise and clear as possible.

I'll close with a "don't" and a "do": don't let the page limit limit your exploration of ideas on the first draft; do, however, strive to get no further than the fourth page--it's part of the challenge of the assignment to pack as much analysis into as small a space as possible!

Revision Policy

If you choose to do a serious "re-vision" of your analytical essay and turn it in before you leave for spring break, the new grade on that "re-vision" will replace the original grade. See me if you have any questions about this policy.

HON 203/208/228: American Migration Narratives, Spring 2002
Created: 2/13/02 3:30 pm
Last modified: 3/13/02 6:39 pm