Critical Essay II

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

Assignment Sheet

Due: Monday, October 13, 2003, at 5 pm, either in the envelope outside my office door (Fenton 240) 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. Ed., Editor of Book [if any]. Place of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. Page Range Covered by Poem, Essay, or Story.); proper quotation format in body of paper: "quote" (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 (grammar, syntax, and punctuation).

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 read the texts you're writing on and you don't have to include the kind of background that someone not taking this course would need.

Rewrite Policy: I will not grade rewrites of the second critical essay; rather, students who are dissatisfied with their grade will have a chance to write an extra essay (assuming they did the first critical essay), the grade on which will replace their lowest previous critical essay 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 Early Americas I: American Dreams and American Realities [analytical/persuasive/personal essay]. Consider the ways in which the readings from the "Early Americas" unit relate to those from the "Americas" unit (particularly Week 3's "Visions" section) and identify for yourself some of the tensions between American ideals and American realities that arise when looking into the histories of conquest and enslavement in early America. Then choose one of these tensions and write an essay in which you carefully identify it, thoughtfully argue for its meaning, significance, and stakes through an analysis of at least two works we've read from the first two units of the course (preferably one from each unit), and persuasively lay out your sense of how we ought to be dealing with it. How should Americans understand and respond to tensions between the American dream and American historical realities of conquest and enslavement?
• Reading Early Americas II: Manifest Destiny and Its Discontents [analytical/persuasive essay]. Consider the various visions of manifest destiny that have been offered and criticized in the "Early Americas" unit. Then choose one proponent and one critic of manifest destiny and write an essay in which you make an argument about what is at stake in their debate, in terms of both their time period and our own. How should we understand the meaning, significance, and stakes of past debates over manifest destiny?
• Reading Early Americas III: Exchange vs. Conflict in Early American History and Literature [application/persuasion essay]. Consider the tensions between Richard White's and Robert Berkhofer's approaches to analyzing early American history and the different methodologies they propose and enact in their writings. Then choose which methodology you think works better for analyzing a primary text or cluster of texts from the early American period and write an essay in which you apply that methodology to the texts you have chosen and justify it by showing how it works better than the other. What critical lens provides the best view of early American history?
• Reading Migration/Mobility I: The Plantation and the Frontier [analysis/synthesis/persuasion essay]. Consider the meaning, significance, and stakes of social and spatial mobility within American society and culture in light of the histories and legacies of conquest and enslavement we've been exploring in the "Early Americas" unit. Consider particularly how and to what ends writers like Turner and Du Bois argue that the history/legacy of the frontier or slavery are paradigmatic American stories, as significant to the U.S. national identity as legacies of Puritan origins or multiple waves of immigration or cultural pluralism or economic and social opportunity. Then choose one writer whose take on the history and legacy of the frontier you find particularly significant and one writer whose take on the history and legacy of the plantation you find particularly significant and write an essay in which you propose a new synthesis of early American history by showing how to integrate their visions of the histories/legacies of the frontier and the plantation into earlier narratives of early American history. How ought we to reenvision the history of social and spatial mobility in early America?
• Reading Migration/Mobility II: Re-Visions of Forced Migrations [analytical essay]. Consider the imaginative responses of twentieth-century writers to nineteenth-century and earlier histories of forced migration and their legacies. Then choose one or two such works and write an essay in which you analyze how and to what ends it offers (or they offer) a re-vision of early American histories/legacies of forced migration. What is at stake in these re-visions of forced migration in early America?
• Reading Migration/Mobility III: Histories of the Present [comparative/persuasive essay]. Consider the arguments we have examined in the "Early Americas" unit about the histories, legacies, stakes, and contemporary relevance of conquest and enslavement. Then choose one work or cluster of works that you want to analyze and respond to and write an essay in which you draw a parallel between that work (or works) and a contemporary event or issue and make an argument about the significance, stakes, and contemporary relevance of that work (or works) for Americans today. What is the relevance of early America today? How can knowing early American history help Americans gain a new perspective on their own time period?

ENGL 200/AMST 202: Introduction to American Studies, Fall 2003
Created: 10/1/03 3:29 pm
Last modified: 10/1/03 3:31 pm