Critical Essay II

As you know, you are required to write a 4-to-6-page analysis of the narrative strategies of a particular writer and work from the second unit of the semester. This page gives the assignment sheet for the second critical essay; click here for an overview of the critical essay assignment.

Assignment Sheet

Due: Your first critical essay is due Friday, 11/19/04, no later than 5 pm, either in the envelope outside my office door (Fenton 240) or in my mail box in the English Department mailroom (Fenton 277). It is your responsibility to complete your papers on time in the proper format; late papers will be accepted, but they will lose one-third of a grade for every day they are late and I will not provide comments on them.

Format: 4-6 pages (roughly 1000-1800 words), 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); the basic template is Author. Book Title. City of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication.); proper MLA format for quotations within a paragraph: "quotation" (12); and blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer. See Appendix 4 in The Story and Its Writer for other useful formatting advice (SIW 1752-1779). [Please be aware that you'll get a better grade if you first develop your ideas fully, without feeling that you have to stop at a certain page or word limit, and then go back and condense, cut, and otherwise revise so as to be as concise, clear, and persuasive as possible. Don't let the page limit limit your exploration of ideas.]

Criteria for Evaluation: Your grade for the critical essay will be determined by the coherence and validity of the paper's arguments, the effectiveness of the paper's structure in conveying your ideas and convincing your audience, and the quality of the paper's prose (including 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 offer brief comments on your drafts, so long as you get me them soon after Fall Break.

Rewrite Policy: I will not grade rewrites of the critical essay, although I will give comments on any rewrite(s) you choose to do (which will improve your preparation/participation grade and better prepare for the final project).

Assignment Options: You have multiple options for your second critical essay; you do not have the option of inventing your own topic for this assignment, but must instead choose one (1) of the following options. Extra research is not required for any of the critical options, although it is permissible, so long as the argument you are making is your own and the evidence you draw on to support it--including, of course, relevant and important passages from the text(s) you are analyzing--supports the goals of your essay.

• Option #1: What is the key purpose of storytelling? Use one of the following as your test case: The Arabian Nights; Gaiman's "Ramadan"; or Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Try to generalize based on the storytelling in the text you choose to focus on; do not limit your argument strictly to the ways stories work for the readers of that text. When considering how to generate and support a central argument, try finding particular passages that suggest what the purpose of storytelling is and/or using at least one specific story-within-a-story to support your claims. The point of this option is for you to back up some general claims about the ends of storytelling using pertinent examples drawn from the "The Scheherazade Situation" unit. Many of the stories and novels in this unit are "about" loss, trauma, disaster, and death--how and why do writers and storytellers respond to these realities through the act and art of storytelling?

• Option #2: What are the key powers of narrative? Use one of the following as your test case: The Arabian Nights; Gaiman's "Ramadan"; or Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Try to generalize based on the ways storytelling affects listeners/readers, for good and ill, in the text you choose to focus on; do not limit your argument strictly to the ways stories work for the readers of that text. When considering how to generate and support a central argument, try finding particular passages that suggest what the powers of narrative are and/or using at least one specific story-within-a-story to discuss how storytelling affects listeners or readers. The point of this option is for you to back up some general claims about the effects of storytelling using pertinent examples drawn from the "The Scheherazade Situation" unit. Many of the stories and novels in this unit are "about" loss, trauma, disaster, and death--how is the telling or writing of a story an adequate response to these realities?

• Option #3: How, and to what ends, do contemporary writers revise The Arabian Nights in their criticism and/or fiction? Use one or two of the following as your test case: Gaiman's "Ramadan"; Mernissi's Scheherazade Goes West; or Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Try to speculate convincingly about the later author's intentions for revising The Arabian Nights, based on the similarities and differences you note between the later writer's text and The Arabian Nights. When considering how to generate and support a central argument, first try finding particular passages from the later work that allude to The Arabian Nights, characters or names from The Arabian Nights, or parallel situations, themes, narrative strategies, or imagery, and then try figuring out why the later writer did these things. The point of this option is for you to back up some general claims about the re-vision of classic stories using examples drawn from the "The Scheherazade Situation" unit.

Rationale: The critical essay is your chance to practice developing a critical argument that stems from your response to the assigned texts and our class discussions of them. Treat it as an opportunity to move beyond what we do on the listserv--making observations, asking questions--and in class discussions--developing hypotheses, opinions, and possible answers to key questions--by trying to support a hypothesis, convince someone else to accept your opinion, or persuade your audience that your answer is not only possible but is also highly plausible. The critical essay is a place to pursue some of the key issues of the course in more depth, at greater length, and with more textual support than we are typically able to do in an 80-minute class period.