Critical Essay, Summer 2005

This page includes the assignment sheet for the critical 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. Thanks.

Assignment Sheet

Due: in class on Friday, June 24, 2005.

Format: 4-6 pages (undergraduates); 7-10 pages (graduate students), double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins (be warned that barely getting on to the fifth sheet of paper does not a five-page paper make!); title that indicates main argument of paper; heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; format, bibliography, and citations in MLA style (see the links page for explanations and examples of MLA style; the basic template is Author. "Title of Poem, or Essay, or Story." Title of Book from which It Comes. Editor of Book (if any), ed. Place of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. Page Numbers.); proper quotation format in body of paper: "..." (Robinson 618). for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer.

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, formatting, and punctuation). Graduate students will also be graded on the quality of their engagement with articles and chapters relevant to their research and topic.

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.

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.

• What do Dick and Robinson in their novels in the first half of the course have to teach us about making and changing history? How can we use their fiction to help us clarify such historiographical issues as (choose one or come up with one of your own) whether history has a direction or shape or end; whether the future is predictable; whether ideas, 'great men,' civilizations, social forces, social movements, or something else entirely accounts for major historical shifts; whether objectivity is possible or desirable in the writing of history; the relation between histories and stories?

• How and to what ends do Dick and/or Robinson in their novels in the second half of the course offer their readers not so much a prediction of the future or an extrapolation of present trends as what Samuel Delany has called a "significant distortion of the present"? What is at stake in one or both of these significant distortions?

• Robinson and Dick make very different choices about both characterization and form in their novels in this course. While brainstorming for this option, consider the strengths and weaknesses of the angles on the pasts or futures they have invented that their characters and narrative strategies provide their readers. In your paper, you must choose any pair of novels in order to develop and support an argument about what is at stake in their authors' choices with respect to characterization and form.