Critical Essay

This page takes on two important questions about the critical essay you will write this semester in this course: what and what for; it also includes an assignment sheet. 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 essay is to be thesis-driven, analytical, and persuasiveseven-to-ten-page paper. That is, it 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. The general form of the question should be, "What is at stake in the 'historical re-vision' performed by either Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, or Samuel Delany's Atlantis: Model 1924?"

Now, when I wrote my dissertation and did a specific version of this kind of question--"What's at stake in the relation between the coat of arms that Tom Sawyer insists Jim must have during the Phelps Farm episode of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the ending of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter?"--I wrote more than 40 pages analyzing two pages of Twain and two pages of Hawthorne. And when other critics analyze (say) Toni Morrison's Beloved as a response to the slave narrative tradition, or to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, or to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (think of Sethe and Amy Denver as a "re-vision" of Jim and Huck), they also write essays that are two to five times as long as this one needs to be. Part of the reason these kinds of essays are so long, of course, is that they are in dialogue with other critics' arguments and do original historical research--neither of which are required for the critical essay. It's quite enough to come up with your own question and to develop a plausible answer to it for the critical essay. In short, it is incredibly important that you choose a focus for your argument and limit the scope of your paper. Much better to follow through on a small idea and pursue the implications and stakes of a manageable claim as far as you can than try to say a little bit about a lot of things, and end up just saying very little.

What For

So far this semester you've already done a good deal of writing--ranging from the informal free writing on specific topics in class to your weekly reading responses. 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 chance 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 concept of "historical re-vision." As we've discussed in class several times, it's worth distinguishing between different kinds of "historical re-visions" and the different historical perspectives they offer.

• One kind of "historical re-vision" involves a reimagining or reenvisioning of a prior literary period by a poet, dramatist, or novelist whose text is published after the recognized end of that period. Good examples of works that do this sort of thing would be Toni Morrison's Jazz and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, which both propose to rethink conventional images and associations of "The Jazz Age" by refocusing our attention on black working class life and black cultural influences, respectively (and rather reductively). Instead of The Great Gatsby and the Cotton Club solely defining the 1920s, Morrison and Reed seek to offer a different view of what was happening in American culture and in black America between the world wars. Even though they do this in literary form, what they're doing is not too different from what historians and cultural critics like Ann Douglas in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s or George Hutchinson in The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White do--provide a new interpretation of a historical era by taking seriously stories that have been ignored or misinterpreted. Of course, the differences between a novel and a scholarly work are important, and worth exploring. But I would save a large-scale endeavor like that for the final project! For this paper, it's enough to focus on one specific aspect of one writer's reenvisioning of a literary period or historical era.
• Another kind of "historical re-vision" similarly examines a later's writer's response to a prior period, but does so with the focus on "revision" rather than "reenvisioning." This is the kind of emphasis that I described in the previous section. Rather than asking "How does this work help us reimagine the American Renaissance or the Harlem Renaissance, and what's at stake in that reenvisioning of the period/era?" people who choose this emphasis would more likely ask, "What is at stake in X's revision of Y?" where X is a later writer and Y is an earlier work. This kind of "historical re-vision," in other words, focuses closely on the relation between two writers from different periods and specific aspects of their works, in order to figure out what's significant about the later writer's revisions of the earlier writer's works, to figure out why it matters that the later writer made these revisions.
• Another kind of "historical re-vision" would have us focus less on the implicit commentary being made by a later writer on a prior period or work, and more on the implicit commentary the later writer is making on hisor her own time. Rather than the "historical re-vision" offering a new historical perspective on the writer's past, in other words, it would offer a historical perspective on the writer's present. A good example of this kind of critical approach, or at least the seeds of it, can be found in Ralph Ellison's comments in Shadow and Act on American Renaissance writings, Mark Twain's and other later writers' relations to them, and the limitations of what he calls the "hard-boiled" school of modernist writing epitomized by one of his own major influences, Ernest Hemingway. Ellison reads Herman Melville's Mody-Dick and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as commenting on their own times, even when they are most directly in dialogue with other places and times. (This would be an interesting way to read Ellison's own masterpiece, Invisible Man--as a commentary on American Cold War culture. I'm sure it's been done already, but it would be worth following through on in the final project, since Ellison is responding to both the American and Harlem Renaissances in his novel!)
• I'm sure there are other ways of interpreting "historical re-vision." Feel free to pursue them as you go from the very open-ended question proposed in the previous section to the very specific question you want to pursue in your critical essay.

Assignment Sheet

Due: at the beginning of class on Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Format: 7-10 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 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: 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 W 3/12 if you want comments on it via e-mail.

Rewrite Policy: I will accept rewrites of the critical essay, so long as you get them to me within two weeks of receiving comments on your previous draft from me. Those who turned in the original paper on the original due date (3/12/03) and who get their rewrites in on time can have their original grade replaced by the new grade. Those who turned in the original paper on the new due date (3/26/03) and who get their rewrites in on time will have their original grade and new grade averaged.

ENGL 512: Historical Perspectives in Literature, Spring 2003
Created: 2/26/03 1:56 pm
Last modified: 3/7/03 6:01 pm
Click here for the assignment sheet for the critical essay in my undergraduate course on American Romanticism, and here for the assignment sheet for the critical essay in my undergraduate course on the Harlem Renaissance; both assignment sheets may give you useful ideas about themes or issues central to the American and Harlem Renaissances that Twain, Dove, and Wilson may have been working with.