Critical Essay III

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 third critical essay.

Assignment Sheet

Due: Monday, December 1, 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). It is strongly recommended, however, that you turn in your critical essay before you leave for Thanksgiving Break.

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" (Herr 128). 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.

Draft Policy: I would be happy to look at a draft of this paper if you get it to me by Monday, November 17, 2003.

Options: Here are your options for the third 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 Modern Americas I: Inclusion and Exclusion [analytical/persuasive essay]. Consider the ways in which writers and filmmakers in the "Modern Americas" unit have represented the process of establishing criteria for inclusion in and exclusion from America. Your job if you choose this option is to select one work from the unit and craft and support an argument that addresses the stakes or significance of its exploration of the causes, consequences, and legacies of inclusion in and exclusion from America. What can--and should--we learn from the ways in which issues of inclusion and exclusion were represented or analyzed in twentieth century America?
• Reading Modern Americas II: Questioning Identity [analytical/persuasive essay]. Consider how authors in the "Modern Americas" unit represent their own and their characters' or subjects' identities--and how discussions and conceptions of identity in twentieth-century America relate to earlier discussions and conceptions. Your job if you choose this option is to select one work from the "Modern Americas" unit and one work from an earlier unit and period and craft and support an argument that addresses the stakes or significance of the similarities and differences between the ways identity is claimed, asserted, questioned, conceptualized, or discussed in these works. One common way a modern society is distinguished from a pre-modern society is to identify modernity with the questioning of taken-for-granted assumptions about traditional identities--do you see that happening when you compare and contrast a work from twentieth-century America with an earlier work? How have American conceptions of identity changed over time?
• Reading Migration/Mobility I: Class in America [analytical/persuasive essay]. Consider the ways in which class is understood, represented, and discussed in the contemporary United States as well as in works from the "Modern Americas" unit. Your job if you choose this option is to assess the common American move to understand class in terms of individual opportunities for social mobility, using at least one work from the "Modern Americas" unit to help you develop and support your main argument. How ought we to understand class in America? Is the "social mobility" model the most effective way to understand phenomena like the Great Depression, homelessness, or intersections of race, gender, and class? Why or why not? How would you improve on it, if you believe it requires improving?
• Reading Migration/Mobility II: American Modernity and Resonances of the Past [analytical/persuasive essay]. Consider how and to what ends works from the "Modern Americas" unit as different as the film Grapes of Wrath and the novel Dispatches (and many others besides) link migrations in or from the twentieth-century U.S. to earlier moments in American migration history. Your job if you choose this option is to select any two works from the "Modern Americas" unit that make this kind of move and craft and support an argument that addresses the stakes or significance of the similarities and differences between how and to what ends each links a modern American migration with an earlier one. What is gained and what is risked by linking experiences of such groups as Okies during the Great Depression, Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II, and soldiers and reporters during the Vietnam War to past experiences and legacies of other groups' migrations?

ENGL 200/AMST 202: Introduction to American Studies, Fall 2003
Created: 11/4/03 9:26 pm
Last modified: 11/4/03 9:26 pm