Critical Essay II Assignment Sheet

Due: Monday, March 15, 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 3/11 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 Erdrich: Style, Technique, Form, Structure, Strategy, Aesthetic: Consider the ways in which Erdrich's narrative strategies, literary techniques, and aesthetic choices changed from Tracks to The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in the most significant of these changes.
• Literary Erdrich: Allusion, Genre, Movement: Consider the range of Erdrich's literary allusions and her works' participation in a variety of genres and literary movements and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in one of them in Tracks or The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.
• Revisionist Erdrich: Rewriting Tracks: Consider the ways in which The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse offers a "re-vision" of key themes in Tracks and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in one of these "re-visions."
• Familial Erdrich: The Pillagers and Kashpaws: Consider the similarities and differences between Erdrich's representations of the Pillager and Kashpaw families in Tracks and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in the relationship between those representations.
• Historical Erdrich: Ojibwe History: Consider the different perspectives on the history of the Ojibwe people in Tracks and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and develop an argument about what's at stake in Erdrich's construction of that history.
• Political Erdrich: Consider the various political issues that Erdrich exposes us to in Tracks and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse--among them, land and property ownership, the legacies of famine, disease, missionary activities, and intra- and inter-group conflicts, the effects of cross-cultural exchange, the construction of race, class and gender in the Midwest, the politics of identities--and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in Erdrich's treatment of one of those issues in both of these works.
• Theological Erdrich: Consider the range of religious, spiritual, and theological issues that Erdrich raises in Tracks and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and develop and support and argument about what's at stake in one of those issues in both of these works.
• Comparative Erdrich: Consider the various relations between Faulkner's and Erdrich's works and develop and support an argument about what's at stake in some aspect of their intertextual relations. Alternatively, develop and support an argument about what's gained and what's lost by limiting one's comparativist efforts to the Faulkner-Erdrich relationship.

ENGL 426: Major American Writers, Spring 2004
Created: 3/4/04 4:55 pm
Last modified: 3/8/04 2:37 pm