On the Comparative Essay

As you know, you will be given several options for your eight-to-twelve-page comparative essay. The purpose of this assignment is to give you an opportunity to make a sustained comparative analysis that engages the major goals of the course.

Due: Rough draft due Wednesday, May 15, for peer review session. Final draft due Friday, May 17, no later than 5 pm, in my mailbox in the English department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton).

Format: 8-12 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins; title that indicates main argument of paper; heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; bibliography and citations in MLA style (see the links page for explanations of this style of citation); proper quotation format for quotations within a paragraph: "..." (12); blockquote format for quotes five lines or longer.

Criteria for Evaluation: No matter which direction you take for the comparative essay, I will be grading your paper in terms of how well you make your case for your interpretation of a story or stories and how well-organized and well-written your paper is. Hence I will be evaluating the coherence, validity, and persuasiveness of your paper's argument, the effectiveness of your paper's structure, and the quality of your paper's prose (grammar, syntax, and punctuation).

Possibilities: What follows is a list of modes of comparative analysis and potential topics for the critical essay. You are free to choose one of the topics listed, or (with my approval) generate a topic of your own.

• Historical: changing representation of particular migration by writers from different time periods; development of a literary or cultural tradition; different works' representations of migration in same time period; historical "re-visions."
  • Sample essay topic [overlapping representations of time period]: Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir China Men, Mary Antin's autobiography The Promised Land, and Toni Morrison's novel Jazz each considers migrations that took place during the same time period, 1880-1920. Choose two of these works and analyze what's at stake in their representations of migrations during this time period.
  • Sample essay topic [historical "re-visions"]: Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir China Men, N. Scott Momaday's memoir The Way to Rainy Mountain, Gloria Anzaldua's essay collection Borderlands/La Frontera, Toni Morrison's novel Jazz, and Bharati Mukherjee's novel The Holder of the World each attempts to reimagine, from the perspective of the late twentieth century, the legacies of migrations that took place during an earlier time period or periods. Choose two of these works and compare how and to what ends the writers performed their historical "re-visions" of earlier migrations and their legacies.
  • Sample essay topic [historical development]: Sui Sin Far's short story "In the Land of the Free," Carlos Bulosan's autobiography America Is in the Heart, Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir China Men, and Bharati Mukherjee's novel The Holder of the World are examples of Asian American writing on migration from the first, second, third, and fourth quarters of the twentieth century, respectively. Write an essay in which you trace the development of Asian American writing on migration using these texts as your evidence.
• Thematic: utopia; community; borders; identity; family.
  • Sample essay topic [family]: Migration clearly affects family relations--but how? Do some research on major social scientific claims about the effect on migration on families, and compare and contrast these claims with the representation of this subject in two of the works we've read this semester. How and two what ends are the writers you've chosen responding to classic understandings from the social sciences on how migration affects families?
  • Sample essay topic [identity]: Compare and contrast how two writers from the course represent the effect of migrations on identity and identifications.
• Structural: genre; narrative strategies; point-of-view; symbolism; allusion.
  • Sample essay topic [narrative strategies]: Consider Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir China Men, N. Scott Momaday's memoir The Way to Rainy Mountain, Gloria Anzaldua's essay collection Borderlands/La Frontera, and Toni Morrison's novel Jazz as attempts to experiment with the conventions of their chosen genre in order to open up a new perspective on a particular migration. Then write an essay in which you compare and contrast the formal experimentations of two of these writers and works. What kind of argument you're trying to prove is up to you. You could argue that one kind of experimentation is more successful at getting its audience to reconsider their assumptions about the migration being re-examined, for instance.
  • Sample essay topic [genre/historical development]: Consider Mary Antin's The Promised Land, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, and Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men as three examples of twentieth-century immigrant autobiography and write an essay in which you trace the development of twentieth-century immigrant autobiography using these texts as your evidence.
• Conceptual: the meaning of "America"; Puritan origins, influences, and legacies; the frontier or borderlands; immigration; internal migration; race and/or ethnicity; voluntary vs. forced migration.
  • Sample essay topic [American identities]: There have been many narratives that have defined American identity and the self-conception of the people of United States that European migrants to North America have subscribed to over time, including "the chosen people," "manifest destiny," "the melting pot," "a nation of immigrants," "cultural pluralism," and "multiculturalism." Choose one of these concepts and evaluate its validity, using evidence from two or three works we have read this semester to support your arguments.
  • Sample essay topic: more to come

HON 203/208/228: American Migration Narratives, Spring 2002
Created: 2/13/02 3:38 pm
Last modified: 4/24/02 4:36 pm