Critical Essay II, Fall 2005

If you've come from the critical essays overview page, you'll know what the critical essays are and what they're for. This page gives the assignment sheet for the first critical essay.

Assignment Sheet

Due: Monday, October 24, 2005, at 5 pm, either in the mailbox outside my office door (Fenton 265) or in my mailbox in the English Department office (Fenton 277).

Format: 4-6 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins (be warned that barely getting on to the fourth sheet of paper does not a four-page paper make!); title that indicates main argument of paper; heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; format, bibliography, and citations in MLA style (see the links page for explanations and examples of MLA style; the basic template is Author. "Title of Poem, or Essay, or Story." Title of Book from which It Comes. Editor of Book (if any), ed. Place of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. Page Numbers.); proper quotation format in body of paper: "..." (Stephanson 12). for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer.

Criteria for Evaluation: No matter which option you choose for the critical essay, I will be grading your paper in terms of how well you make your case for your argument, how well you base your argument on textual and other analysis and interpretation, 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 in advancing your arguments, and the quality of your paper's prose (including grammar, syntax, punctuation, and formatting).

Audience: In general, think of your immediate audience as those who have taken and are taking this class; hence, you can assume that your readers have worked with the texts you're writing on and you don't have to include the kind of detailed background that someone not taking this course would need.

Draft/Rewrite Policy: I will not grade rewrites of the second critical essay, but I will comment on drafts if you get them to me a reasonable time before the essay is due and I will comment on rewrites and count them as extra credit toward your preparation/participation/team work grade.

Options: Here are your options for the second critical essay. In each of these options, your job is to come up with an argument that you seek to support by using textual and other evidence to persuade your readers of your position's validity.

• Reading America: Contesting American Missions. Consider the ways in which the readings from Weeks 4 through 9 offer a selective history from colonial America to the emergence of the United States as a world power by the beginning of the twentieth century, using the concepts of freedom and manifest destiny to organize our selections. Is America's sense of mission as it evolved between 1776 and 1898 best characterized as a flawed but praiseworthy commitment to political and economic freedom, a hypocritical but effective deployment of the rhetoric of freedom and manifest destiny to justify territorial expansion, or something else entirely? Develop and justify your argument, using evidence from the readings to help explain and support your points.
• Reading American Mission: Your Mission for America. Should America and Americans try to cultivate a sense of national mission? If not, why? If so, what do you think that sense of American mission should include and entail? Lay out your vision for America's mission, as creatively and persuasively as possible. Be sure to anticipate and forestall objections based on past and current debates over American mission.
• Reading American History: Connecting Past and Present. Consider the perspectives and debates we have examined thus far this semester on Indian removals and Indian wars, the Revolutionary War, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. Which of these debates provides the best framework for helping us gain a better understanding of what is at stake in the current debates over the war on and occupation of Iraq? If you think the whole project of making historical analogies is flawed, make an argument as to how and why by critiquing what you see as the best candidate(s) for comparison with the present. Develop and justify your argument, using evidence from the readings to help explain and support your points.

AMST 202: Introduction to American Studies, Fall 2005
Created: 10/4/05 3:19 pm
Last modified: 10/17/05 11:03 am
For earlier versions of this course, please go to the Fall 2004 and Fall 2003 web sites.
Webmaster: Bruce Simon, Associate Professor of English, SUNY Fredonia