Critical Essay #1

This page includes the assignment sheet for the first critical essay along with suggestions for revisions. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms and suggestions. Thanks.

Assignment Sheet

Due: no later than 5 pm on Friday, February 23, 2001, either in my mailbox in the English department main office (Fenton 277), or in the envelope on the bulletin board outside my office door (Fenton 240).

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; bibliography and citations in MLA style (see links page for explanations of this style of citation); proper quotation format ("..." [12]. for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer).

Options: Here are your options for the first critical essay. In each of these options, your job is to come up with an argument that you are trying to support by using textual evidence to persuade your readers of your interpretation's validity. You will not have the option of choosing your own topic/question for this essay, as you will for future essays; instead, you must choose one of the following topics and use at least one of the works we've read thus far in the semester in developing your response to it.

• Consider the works we've read that involve the production of personae--the creation of an "I" that is representative in some way or form of a larger group--from the dramatic monologues among the poetry we read to the autobiographical works of Douglass and Wright. Compare and contrast how and to what ends two different authors construct different personae. Your job for this option is to craft an argument about what's at stake in the creation of representative "I"s, drawing on evidence from your readings of the two works.

• Consider the representations of rural life in Douglass's slave narrative and Wright's autobiography. Note similarities and differences in their perspectives on the influence oppressive structures (slavery, segregation) have on them and on those they know. Your job for this option is to generate an argument that analyzes what's at stake in similarities and differences in Douglass's and Wright's conceptions of the impact of rural life on African American people and culture.

• Consider the relations between the 1899-1903 and the 1922-1937 uses of the vernacular in the fiction and poetry we have read thus far in the semester--between poems and stories written before Johnson's famous preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry and those written after it. Choose two writers--one from each period--and analyze their uses of dialect in light of Johnson's arguments. How is the later writer using dialect differently from the earlier writer, and to what ends? You may instead choose to contrast a specific use of dialect with a poem or story that does not draw explicitly on the vernacular, so long as your main argument about the significance or stakes of the contrasts you observe is truly argue-able (non-obvious, non-trivial, yet not impossible to support, either).

• Consider the anti-slavery literature we have read thus far in the semester--Douglass's slave narrative, and Wheatley's and Harper's poetry, among other works available in the Norton anthology. Your job if you choose this option is to craft an argument about the significance of the similarities and differences you note between any two works. You might choose to focus your argument on (a) the authors' intentions and goals, (b) the likely effect on the audience at the time of the works' publication, or (c) the effectiveness of the literary devices or narrative strategies for helping the authors achieve their goals.

• Choose at least one of the various anti-lynching poems we read in the course and analyze its structure, its imagery, its sound, the way it addresses the reader, the kind of reading experience(s) it offers, and so on. Then craft an argument that uses evidence from your close reading to support a claim about either (a) the author's intentions and goals, (b) the likely effect on the audience at the time of the poem's publication, or (c) the effectiveness of the poetic devices for helping the author achieve his or her goals. If you choose more than one poem, then your job is to craft an argument about the significance of the formal/structural similarities and differences you note between the poems that draws on one of the above three modes of analysis. You may instead choose to contrast a lynching poem with a work in another genre, such as Wright's autobiography or Wells's journalism. If you choose this option, then your job is to focus on the significance/stakes of genre instead of form.

• Consider the various motivations for migration presented in the literature we have read thus far in the course--Douglass's slave narrative, Brown's migration-themed poems, the anti-lynching poems, Wright's autobiography, and others. Your job for this option is to choose any two works and craft an argument about the significance of the similarities and differences you note between them in terms of the understanding they each provide of the reasons for migration. What is at stake in different explanations for migration?

• Consider the central ambivalence toward the country in African American literature: on the one hand, it is often represented as the key repository of tradition, culture, and community, while on the other hand it is often represented as a site of intense violence, exploitation, and oppression (or as stagnant, primitive, and isolated). What are we to make of this ambivalence toward the country in African American literature and culture? View one of the following films (available either through the Black Student Union or through Blockbuster): Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1992, 113 min.); Black Is...Black Ain't (Marlon Riggs, 1995, 87 min.); Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998, 178 min.); Down in the Delta (Maya Angelou, 1998, 111 min.). As you watch the film, compare its representation of the country or of rural life with one of the literary works we've read in the "country" unit, compare how the film and the literary work comment on, subvert, or transform stereotypical images of or narratives about country life, and compare how the film and the literary work reflect upon the relation of the country to the city, the nation, or the world. In sum, your job when brainstorming for this option is to compare and contrast how the film and the literary work negotiate the ambivalence toward the country in African American culture.

  Your task for the paper itself is to generate an argument about the significance of the similarities and differences you note between the film and the literary work's ways of dealing with this ambivalence. For instance, you might argue that a given film is trying to correct an overly negative view of country life provided by an earlier literary work, or that a particular literary work presents a useful corrective to an overly romanticized view of the country in a recent African American film, or that taken together a work and a film do valuable work in bringing out complexities that simplified, stereotypical narratives flatten out (Down in the Delta vs. Black Boy are likely candidates for analysis on this topic). The possibilities are endless, so long as your main argument is truly argue-able (non-obvious, non-trivial, yet not impossible to support, either).

Suggestions for Revision

Your "re-vision" of the first critical essay is due before you leave for spring break; no revisions will be accepted after spring break. You must turn in your original paper along with your "re-vision" of it. The grade on your "re-vision" will completely replace your original grade; doing a "re-vision" will also count toward your preparation/participation grade.

Here's the grade breakdown on the first critical essay: A=0, A-=4, B+=2, B=6, B-=10, C+=5, C=3, C- or below=0. 18 people chose option #5, and grades ranged from A- to C; 6 people chose option #2, and grades ranged from B to C+; and 2 people each chose options #4, 6, and 7, with grades ranging on those options from B to C. After revisions, the grade distribution changed to: A=1, A-=4, B+=3, B=6, B-=10, C+=4, C=2, C- or below=0.

Here's what these grades mean. Generally, to get a B+ or higher, you had to have understood what the assignment was asking you to do, come up with a main argument that is argue-able, debate-able, and non-obvious, and done a good job persuading your readers to agree with it (the more ambitious your argument was and the better your support for it, the higher your grade rose). To get a between a B and a C+, you had to have raised doubts about your understanding of the assignment, had a main argument that was more descriptive than analytical, or had problems in the way you attempted to support it (the shakier your understanding of the assignment, the less analytical your thesis was, the more problems you had with supporting arguments, evidence, organization, and grammar, and the more clear misreadings of the text[s] in question, the lower your grade fell in this range). And to get a C or lower, you had to have had serious problems with your understanding of the assignment, had an incoherent, contradictory, or reductive main argument (or lacked one altogether), and had serious problems with your mode of supporting it (the more problems with the main argument, structure, and use of evidence, and with your understanding of the text[s] in the question, the lower your grade fell).

I write extensive comments on your papers. I recommend reading the closing statement first for my overall assessment of your essay and suggestions for revision. Only after reading that should you go through my marginal comments on each page. When doing this, be sure to distinguish between formatting suggestions, identifications of grammar/punctuation/citation errors, questions about your readings of a given passage, comments about structure and argument, and suggestions for revision. Oh, and check marks, underlined and/or starred passages are meant to identify important observations, arguments, or ideas worth developing further. If you have trouble reading my handwriting or deciding what to focus on for your "re-vision" of your essay, make an appointment with me. Hopefully what follows will help clear up ambiguities, but don't hesitate to talk things over with me--sometimes hearing something can help you understand a point differently than reading it!

Between what I wrote on your paper and what I'm writing here, I hope it's clear that I am more interested in how well your paper works on the persuasive/analytical level than in what specifically you are arguing for or against--so only worry about being "right" to the extent that you have considered other points of view and thought carefully about how best to support your own. Students always worry about "what the teacher wants," and I'm sure we all have had teachers for whom a good grade on their papers was dependent on your regurgitating their ideas to show you had done the reading and paid attention in class--well, I think you can see I am not one of those teachers (or at least that I believe I am not!). As I have emphasized in class and on the critical essay page, the critical essays are your chance to go beyond our class discussions and bring your understanding of the unit and certain texts in it to a new level--they require extra work and additional thinking and reading; they require you to make a critical, or analytical, or interpretive leap beyond making observations. The best papers stem from a question for which it's possible to give many plausible answers, because then you have to make a case for your answer being more plausible than other potentially plausible ones.

I say all this because as you approach the challenge of revising your essays, you need to set priorities and goals for yourself. Fixing all the punctuation and grammar errors when my comments indicate you had a fundamental misunderstanding of the assignment will not raise your grade one iota. Doing the kind of proofreading you should have done the first time around isn't a "re-vision" of your prior draft, but just a minor edit of it. Similarly, focusing only on reformatting quotations and citations when my comments suggest you need to revise the thesis and defend it better is a waste of your time. So is polishing the prose of a paragraph that may well be irrelevant to your main point. This is not to say that punctuation, grammar, formatting, and polished prose aren't important, but rather that you shouldn't let working on those things keep you from focusing on the larger questions of how well you understand the assignment, how well your main argument addresses the stakes or significance of the parallels and tensions you've observed in the texts you're analyzing, and how well you organize the paper and marshall evidence so as to persuade even the most skeptical readers to accept the validity of your argument. I think you'll find that as you consider these larger questions, and revise your introductory paragraph, the urge to include plot summary as filler, to repeatedly restate your claim rather than support it, and to multiply examples in support of a simple point will fade away. Because you have a much clearer sense of what you're trying to convince your readers to believe, you will be better able to organize your paper and decide what evidence best fits with which arguments, which in turn well help you make your sentence-level writing as precise and concise as possible.

Here are a few quick tips for checking over your revised essays after you've taken on the big questions discussed in the previous paragraph:

• examine your introductory paragraph: does it grab your readers' attention and make them want to read on? does it give them a sense of where your argument is headed or what your most provocative claim is without making it unnecessary to read the rest of the paper? does it establish your own voice and style?
• consider the order and function of your body paragraphs: if you can change their order without affecting the meaning of your essay, you have a problem; if so, note in the margin what each paragraph is for, what you want it to accomplish, and how it contributes to the larger goals of your paper--and consider what the most effective order for achieving your larger goals would be;
• examine the topic sentence of each paragraph: it should not just clarify what the subject of the paragraph is but help the reader connect that paragraph to your main argument; it should help your readers orient themselves and help you
• examine your transitions between paragraphs carefully: if you can't find a logical, syntactical, or rhetorical connection between adjacent paragraphs, you are running the risk of losing your reader in the gap between them;
• examine individual sentences for wordiness, repetition, diction, cliches, awkward syntax, and how they relates to patterns in the sentences around them (sometimes you might want to vary rhythm, sound, or length of a particular sentence to emphasize a key point);
• examine your conclusion: if you are restating your main points, do you do a better job of doing so here than in the original statement of them in the introduction? (if so, replace your intro with your conclusion or merge the two, and write a different conclusion that shifts gears in some way--discusses what follows from what you've just argued, brings up a text or issue related to your argument, shifts to another mode of analysis [say, from authorial goals to audience responses], and so on--while still providing a sense of closure.)

Specific suggestions for each option follow:

• option #5 (anti-lynching): Be sure to be making an argument and not simply describing a work or observing similarities and differences between works. Your argument should be evaluative or should otherwise assess some significant aspect of either the author's goals, the work's effect on the audience at the time, or the way the work works--if it's impossible to disagree with your thesis statement, it's probably not really doing this. It's always a good idea to try to generate a question to help guide your thinking after having made your observations. For instance, with Dunbar's "The Haunted Oak," you might ask yourself what's behind Dunbar's decision to use so many gothic/fantastic elements in his poem (a talking tree, hauntings) when writing about lynching? Or what's behind Johnson's decision to break with Wells's and Dunbar's emphasis on the innocence of the lynching victim in "Brothers"? In any case, you should be using the questions you generate to help you craft a thesis that addresses the stakes or significance of an author's or pair of authors' emphases and priorities.
• option #2 (slavery/segregation): As in option #5, the strategy of generating a question can help you come up with a thesis that's not simply descriptive. Many people wrote on the continuities between Douglass's critique of the oppressive effects of slavery and Wright's critique of the oppressive effects of segregation, but didn't consider the key question of the stakes or significance of these continuities. What can we conclude from--what follows from--Wright's appearing to model his critique of segregation after Douglass's critique of slavery? This would be one example of a question that could hep you formulate a thesis you'd have to work to convince your readers to agree with....
• option #4 (anti-slavery): See the advice for option #5; like that option, this option asks you to consider the pros and cons, risks and rewards, of various anti-slavery literary strategies.
• option #6 (migration): Again, the strategy of generating a question can help you come up with a thesis that's not simply descriptive. Remember to keep the focus of your essay on the writers' representations of black people's motivations for migration and what's at stake in similarities and differences between them. For instance, what difference does it make that one writer might emphasize what he's fleeing from while another might emphasize what her protagonist is seeking?
• option #7 (film/literature ambivalence toward country): When thinking about the stakes or significance of the similarities and differences you've noticed between a filmic and a literary representation of the country, you might consider taking your argument in the direction of what each work reveals about the time period, or in the direction of what's at stake in each "author"'s goals, or in the direction of what difference a textual vs. a visual/aural representation of the country makes....

ENGL 240: Intro to African American Lit and Culture, Spring 2001
Created: 3/8/01 7:41 pm
Last modified: 5/9/01 12:38 pm