Critical Essay

This page takes on two important questions about the critical essay (essays if you're a graduate student) you will write this semester in this course: what and what for; it also includes links to the assignment sheets for each essay. 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. Ditto for any questions you may have about any of the options listed below. Thanks.

What

Your critical essays are to be thesis-driven, analytical, and persuasive three-to-five-page papers. That is, they should not be simply a personal response to what you have read, or simply a statement of your opinions or assertion of your views, but should instead be organized to convince your readers to accept an argument you have developed in response to a specific question. You do not need to do outside research for these papers, although there's nothing stopping you from doing some. For graduate students, critical essays must be 4 to 6 pages and draw on outside research.

What For

So far this semester you've gotten good practice at noticing things about literary texts and asking questions of them; we've focused a lot in class on making connections between texts and identifying tensions within and between them, interpreting significant passages and image patterns, and considering various answers to questions that you all have posed as well as I. What you haven't had a chance to do yet is develop a sustained argument on a specific topic. The critical essay is your chances to do just that: to focus in on a particular topic or question that most interests you (this involves reviewing your notes and memories of the readings, as well as listserv contributions), to delve more deeply into specific readings (this involves choosing the readings that best allow you to address the topic or question you have chosen and focusing on those parts that seem most relevant to the topic), and to develop and support a sustained argument about the relation between the readings and the topic or question (this involves both critically analyzing the texts you have chosen to focus on and crafting a valid, persuasive argument). Doing these things will not only improve your skills in active, critical reading and analytical, persuasive writing, but it will also prepare you for the final research project.

The other major purpose of the critical essay is for me to indicate clearly what I see as the major questions or issues raised by the each unit in the course. The assignment sheets should provide you with something of a framework for understanding and reviewing each unit as a whole. Hence, it is highly recommended that you consider carefully each of the options given before settling on one on which to focus your critical essay. It's easy to miss the forest for the trees, especially when there were so many different "trees" we were analyzing each day, so seeing the range of questions I think are most important to consider when looking back on the unit can give you a new, better perspective on what we've read, as well as lay out possible directions for the final research project.

Assignment Sheet(s)

Remember, undergraduates only have to do one of the following two essays (graduate students have to do both); however, those undergraduates who do both can have their lowest grade dropped.

Critical Essay I Assignment Sheet

Due: Monday, July 19, 2004, at 5 pm

Format: 3-5 pages (undergraduates), 5-8 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.

Rewrite Policy: I will not accept rewrites of this critical essay; the extra credit policy for undergraduates is that those who desire may do both 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, Summer 2004
Created: 6/29/04 11:30 am
Last modified: 7/2/04 12:29 pm