Critical Essay I Assignment Sheet

Due: Monday, February 23, 2004, at 5 pm

Format: 4-6 pages (undergraduates), 6-9 pages (graduate students); 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 the 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.

Criteria for Evaluation: No matter which topic you invent or 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 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, 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'd be happy to read and comment on rough drafts; please give me a draft no later than the beginning of class on Th 2/19 if you want comments on it via e-mail.

Rewrite Policy: I will not accept rewrites of this critical essay; the extra credit policy is that those who desire may do all three critical essays and have the lowest grade dropped.

Options: Here are your options for the 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.

• Develop your own topic or question (it's a good idea to run these by me well before the paper is due).
• Formalist Faulkner: Style, Technique, Form, Structure, Strategy, Aesthetic: Consider the ways in which Faulkner's narrative strategies, literary techniques, and aesthetic choices changed from The Sound and the Fury to Go Down, Moses and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in the most significant of these changes.
• Literary Faulkner: Allusion, Genre, Movement: Consider the range of Faulkner's literary allusions and his works' participation in a variety of genres and literary movements--from the Bible to Shakespeare, from Southern vernacular culture and the plantation tradition to modernism and existentialism--and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in one of them in The Sound and the Fury or Go Down, Moses.
• Revisionist Faulkner: Rewriting The Sound and the Fury: Consider the ways in which Go Down, Moses offers a "re-vision" of key themes in The Sound and the Fury and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in one of these "re-visions."
• Familial Faulkner: The Compsons and the McCaslins: Consider the similarities and differences between Faulkner's representations of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury and the McCaslin family in Go Down, Moses and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in the relationship between those representations.
• Historical Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha County History: Consider the different perspectives on the history of Yoknapatawpha County offered by The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses and develop an argument about what's at stake in Faulkner's construction of that history.
• Political Faulkner: Consider the various political issues that Faulkner exposes us to in The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses--among them, land and property ownership, the legacies of slavery, the effects of segregation, the construction of race, class and gender in the South, the politics of identities--and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in Faulkner's treatment of one of those issues in both of these works.

ENGL 426: Major American Writers, Spring 2004
Created: 2/11/04 2:46 pm
Last modified: 2/11/04 2:46 pm