Essay Assignment Sheets and Advice

As you know, you have to write two short essays in this section of Novels and Tales--an analytical essay and a comparative essay--each worth 15% of your final course grade. This page includes the assignment sheets, as well as requirements and advice, for each essay.

Analytical Essay: Assignment Sheet

Due: Rough draft due in class on Thursday, October 5, for Section 3, and on Friday, October 6, for Section 7. Final draft due Monday, October 9, no later than 5 pm, in my mailbox in the English department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton). Please attach your rough draft and your partner's comments to your final draft, and send me an email in which you assess how useful your partner's comments were to you and the process by which you addressed the issues and suggestions he or she brought to your attention by the end of the day. (If you missed class Thursday or Friday and hence didn't get a partner's feedback on your rough draft, I highly recommend seeking feedback from a roommate, a friend, or someone else you think could provide useful comments to you. Learning Center tutors are available for consultation between 6 and 9 pm Sunday, as well--call 673-3550 for an appointment. If after trying all avenues, you can't get peer feedback on the form I sent out over email, try doing a self-analysis on a rough draft and including the draft and the form with the final draft of your essay.)

Format: 3-6 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins. (Be warned that barely getting on to the third sheet of paper does not a three-page paper make!)

Options: Here are your options for the analytical essay. In each of these options, your job is to come up with an argument that you are trying to prove by using textual evidence to persuade your readers of your interpretation's validity. You will not have the option of choosing your own topic/question for this essay, as you will for the comparative essay; you must choose one of the following topics, and use migration narratives from at least one of the works we've read thus far--the Old Testament, A Way in the World, Crossing the River, or In an Antique Land--to address it. The options are organized in order of increasing complexity, so choose the option that you feel represents the most meaningful challenge to your reading and writing skills at this point in the semester.

• Themes/Issues: Legacies of Migration in Migration Narratives. Most migration narratives are actually "about" other things than the fact or process of migration--loss, oppression, hope, power, dreams, identity, tradition(s), and so on. Your task if you choose this option is EITHER to focus on one migration narrative in particular and make an argument about the most important issues it seems designed to make its readers consider OR focus on one issue in particular and compare how at least two migration narratives approach it.

  If you choose the "make an argument about the most important issues broached by one migration narrative" option, it's important to keep the following things in mind: (1) a single book can contain many migration narratives (as well as many stories that aren't migration narratives), so be thoughtful when choosing a particular story for your paper's focus (it must be a migration narrative, for instance!); (2) you will be graded less on what you choose as the "most important issues" elicited by the migration narrative than on how well you explain and justify your choice of issues, so emphasize explanations and justifications over assertions alone in the body of your paper; (3) hence, you should be striving to make an argument about why it matters that the particular migration narrative you chose to focus on is most centrally about the issues you have identified, what's at stake in its focus on those issues, what conclusions can be drawn from its emphasis on them.

  If you choose the "comparison of two or more migration narratives that revolve around the same issue" option, it's important to keep the following things in mind: (1) you must be thoughtful in terms of both the issue you choose to focus on and the migration narratives you choose for their responses to that issue--there should be some sort of interesting contrast in the way the stories approach or engage that issue that's worth analyzing; (2) you will be graded on how well you illustrate and develop your comparisons and contrasts of different migration narratives' approaches to the issue in question--simply listing similarities and differences is not enough; (3) hence, you should be trying to make an argument about the significance of the differences in the two migration narratives' approaches to the same issue--you should give your readers a sense of what's at stake in the different approaches, why it matters that the differences exist, what conclusions can be drawn from their existence.

• Patterns/Structure: The Significance of Form in Migration Narratives. The way a migration narrative is organized or structured can be as meaningful as the subject matter being dealt with in the plot of the narrative. Your task if you choose this option is to choose one migration narrative from one of the works we have read thus far and analyze its form/structure. In focusing on how the story is told, your job is to make a persuasive argument about what follows from that narrative structure--the consequences or effects of the form of the migration narrative.

  Remember, the point of this option is not to provide a plot summary or paraphrase of the migration narrative; rather, it is to analyze the specific way in which the story is told, in order to get at the ways those formal/structural choices are meaningful in and of themselves. In a sense, your job in this option is to relate the form of the migration narrative with its content, to explain how the experience of reading the story relates to what the story is about, to indicate what's at stake in the way the story is told. You will be graded on your choice of formal elements to focus your analysis on and how persuasive your conclusions about the consequences or effects of those formal elements are. This option is different from the next in that it asks you to focus on the way one particular migration narrative is told; it is similar in the sense that you should be examining the function of specific formal features within the individual migration narrative.

• Part-to-Whole/Function: The Work Migration Narratives Do. The previous option asks you to analyze a migration narrative on its own. This option asks you to relate a single migration narrative within one of the works we've read thus far to the work from which it comes, and make an argument about the "work" this migration narrative does within the larger work. Some questions you might consider responding to in your paper include: What does this "part" of the book contribute to the book's meaning as a "whole"? How does it contribute to larger patterns or structures in the book? What effect(s) on the reader might it have? What might it reveal about the author's intentions? These questions will help you generate ideas about the function or role of the migration narrative within the larger work from which it comes. Your job when writing the paper itself is to make a persuasive argument about the most important "work" the migration narrative does.

  Remember, the point of this option is not for you to provide your readers with a list of the functions performed by the migration narrative you've chosen to analyze, along with some explanation of your assertions to fill out individual body paragraphs; rather, it's for you to build a persuasive argument about the most important roles the narrative plays within the larger work from which it comes. You should be trying to convey why it matters that a given migration narrative does certain "work" within the book, what is significant about the functions it performs, what conclusions can be drawn from its playing the roles it does.

• Intention/Goals: The Ends of Migration Narratives. In class, I've kept repeating the question, "What do you think this text is meant to convey or accomplish?" This can be taken as a question about authorial intention--about an author's motivations, choices, priorities, goals, and projects. Your task if you choose this option is to make as specific and persuasive an argument about authorial intention in either V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World, Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River, or Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land. Your job is to go beyond obvious, general claims, and use evidence from the form, structure, and function of migration narratives in either one of these works to account for the choices Naipaul/Phillips made and what those choices reveal about his ends.

  As you can see, this essay option is not for the faint-hearted, given that the evidence in this option is the arguments you'd be making in each of the three previous options. Making a plausible argument about authorial intention is notoriously difficult--it requires a sensitivity to multiple forms of evidence, a willingness to qualify and specify one's arguments, and usually an appeal to an author's letters or journals--and, in fact, many professional literary critics hold that doing all this well is not just difficult, but impossible, given the all-too-human tendency to project our own assumptions, values, expectations, prejudices, and so on onto the figure of the author. Even if it is impossible in the end to identify the author's ends in writing a novel, it's still a useful exercise in learning to make an argument, support it with evidence, consider counter-evidence, and otherwise attempt to persuade your readers of the validity of your hypothesis. So in the spirit of the Olympics, those who choose this option, with its higher "degree of difficulty," will reap benefits beyond the "score" the "dive" itself gets.

• Synthesis: Migration Narrative Paradigms. Within the three works we've read thus far--the Old Testament, A Way in the World, and Crossing the River--we've actually encountered a multitude of migration narratives. At the same time, however, I'm sure you've noticed certain patterns these diverse narratives fall into--in class early on, we referred to these as "migration narrative paradigms." Identify the most important migration narrative paradigm we've encountered thus far and make a case for why this paradigm should be considered more important than all others.

  This is a more complex topic than it might appear at first glance: even before you begin writing this essay, you will have to be able to identify a range of migration narrative paradigms (typical patterns or models that the migration narratives we've read tend to follow) and illustrate them with examples of several narratives that fit the paradigms you've identified; consider various ways of interpreting what "most important" means in the sentence above, choose one of them and be able to explain and justify that choice; and then come up with reasons why one of the paradigms you've identified is the most important. So you actually have a double persuasive task in this option: you'll have to convince your readers to accept your definition of "most important migration narrative paradigm"--your criteria for determining what makes a migration narrative the "most important" one--and also convince them that the paradigm you've identified as "most important" really is, that it fits your criteria. So your readers will have to be persuaded of the validity of your criteria and the validity of your application of them to a set of migration narrative paradigms. Just as in the previous option, those who choose this higher "degree of difficulty" option will gain rewards beyond the actual "score" the "dive" itself actually gets.

Click here for Advice on the drafting process and the revision process for the analytical essay.

In general, then, think of the analytical essay as a much more formal reading response, in which you don't just make an observation or two and come up with some questions, but instead choose a specific question to focus on in some depth and think carefully about how you're going to go about answering it and persuading your audience of your answer's plausibility. No matter which option you choose for the analytical essay, I will be grading your paper in terms of how well you make your case for your argument or interpretation of a story or stories, how well you fulfill the requirements of the option you chose, and how well-organized and -written your paper is.

Comparative Essay: Assignment Sheet

Due Dates: Email to me describing and justifying your focus for the comparative essay due before the first class after we return from Thanksgiving Break. Rough draft due in class (for peer review/assessment workshop) on Thursday, November 30, for Section 3, and on Friday, December 1, for Section 7. Final draft due Monday, December 4, no later than 5 pm, in my mailbox in the English department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton). Please attach a copy of your draft and the sheet with comments from your partner from the peer review/assessment workshop, along with the "final" version of your analytical essay, to your comparative essay.

Format: 4-7 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins; 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 links page for explanations of this style of citation); proper quotation format ("..." (12). for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotes five lines or longer).

Options: Here are some options for your comparative essay. In each of these options, your job is to come up with an argument that you are trying to prove by using textual evidence to persuade your readers of your interpretation's validity. Remember, an argument isn't an argument unless it's debate-able: if you find yourself stating the obvious and coming up with an argument so vague nobody could possibly disagree with it, then it's most likely not an argument or an argument not worth making. You will be graded on the ambitiousness, validity, and persuasiveness of your main argument and the effectiveness of your use of supporting arguments and textual evidence in persuading your readers of your main argument's validity. For each of these options, you may choose any two migration narratives from any of the works we have read this semester (even if they are from the same work) to analyze for your comparative essay. However, it is strongly recommended that (1) you choose migration narratives from different authors and (2) you avoid analyzing a work you've already written on (unless your approach to it is so different from the approach in your analytical essay that you can justify going back to that work in your email to me).

• The first, and most recommended, option is for you to choose your own topic. If you choose this option, you must email me your plans before you return from Thanksgiving Break. When you do this you should not only explain why you want to compare the two migration narratives you've selected, but also what you hope to find out or prove by making the comparative analysis--in short, it should explain and justify the goal of your paper, in as specific and well-thought-out a form as possible. Remember, your paper must start from an interesting similarity or parallel between two works, and then make an argument about the significance of the most important similarities and differences between the two works. What is at stake in those similarities and differences? What conclusions should we draw from them? When thinking about similarities and differences, I will expect you to have learned from the previous assignment--particularly the range of options listed above and how to make analyses based on each of them. Let me explain.

  One approach you might take to generate an interesting paper would be to choose one of the previous options (say, theme/issue) and find an interesting parallel between two works that treat that theme; then, you look at other aspects of the works (form/structure, the function of various "parts" of it, authorial intention) for your observations on key similarities and differences (in doing this, you'll have to decide just which are the key ones). You can then use all that brainstorming as the raw material for your paper--but you need to come up with an argument for which the observations you've made can serve as evidence.

  See the other options listed below for other ideas that could be used to generate your own topic. Even if you choose one of the ones listed below, you must still send me your email explaining and justifying your topic before the first class after Thanksgiving Break meets.

• You might choose a comparative topic that's based on either the New World Migrations, Migrating Religions, or the Departures and Returns unit of the course (see your section's schedule of assignments or your syllabus for a reminder of which works fit in which units). In other words, there are built-in comparisons between works that I've grouped together in the syllabus. It's recommended, however, that you find a more specific connection between the two works than the title of the unit from which they come--in only 4-7 pages, the more focused your comparative analysis is, the better able you will be to support your point about what's at stake in the key similarities and differences between works from within the unit.

• You might choose to cross units, however. For instance, the impact and legacy of slavery is a theme that Phillips, Naipaul, and Sam share. Another line of comparison might be to consider two authors' representations of a diaspora--for instance, Phillips's take on the African diaspora versus Sebald's on the German-Jewish diaspora he seems interested in tracing in his book. Or take the impact and legacy of English colonialism--it just happens that every text in the course since the Bible has dealt with this issue in some way. I could imagine pairing many different kinds of writers here: contrasting how and to what ends Salih and Ghosh use the mysterious figure/inquiring narrator structure (Effendi and Mustafa, on the one hand, and Bomma and Amitav Ghosh himself, on the other) as a way of exploring their ideas about how the colonized world responds to European colonialism; education as a mode of colonization is a theme that links Salih and Sam and you could do a lot with the similarities and differences in how they deal with it; Naipaul and Ghosh seem worth comparing for their different modes of reimagining the moment of contact between non-European and European worlds (among many other things!); Salih and Phillips are worth comparing on their use of sexual relationships to make points about relationships between former colonizers and colonized; and on and on and on. These comparisons are meant to be suggestive, not definitive: I encourage you to come up with one of your own that crosses units that you want to explore in more depth. Just remember that while your brainstorming will involve lots of observations and descriptions, your paper itself must have a main argument in which you make the "interpretive leap" to a "debate-able" claim about the significance of those similarities and differences, about what's at stake in or what follow from them. The paper must set out to persuade your readers of the validity of that claim, and draw on arguments and evidence based on your observations while doing so.

• You might compare one of the works in the course with another that you've read outside the course (perhaps in another English course you're taking this semester?), if this doesn't involve too much extra work for you. For example, you might try to formulate an argument about the significance of Caryl Phillips's invocation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the first chapter of Crossing the River. What do the parallels between the two works suggest about Phillips's goals in his novel? Or you might explore the way in which Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North invokes and transforms Shakespeare (in class, we discussed Othello, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet as possible intertexts with the novel). What is at stake in Salih's revisions of this English classic, given the novel's key theme of British-Sudanese relations and conflicts?

• You might compare and contrast a text-based migration narrative that we've read in class to a movie like Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, Hanif Kureishi's My Son the Fanatic, or Anthony Minghella's The English Patient. The point of this option is for you to draw some larger conclusions (about the influence of medium on the telling of a migration narrative, or the differing effects on the audience of a textual versus filmic migration narrative, or different authorial perspectives on migration, or...) from your observations about significant connections and contrasts. If you choose this option, you should either attend the film series or rent one or more of these films over the break (and take good notes on it, in case you can't get access to it upon your return to campus). If you want to write on another film than the ones listed here, you must propose it to me over email before you leave for Thanksgiving break. In your proposal, you should describe the film and how it deals with migration, as well as how you want to compare it to one of the texts from the course. Any films I approve will be added to the above list.

• Another way of conceptualizing comparative analysis is to take one aspect of migration and compare/contrast the means and ends two different authors have for dealing with it. You might choose to focus on what's at stake in the ways in which two writers deal with the causes of migration, or the consequences of migration, or the legacies of migration, or the process of migration. Again, the point is not simply to make observations about similarities and differences, but to get at the significance of them, what's at stake in them, what follows from them.

Comparative Essay: Requirements and Advice

General Requirements

1. At the most general level, in your comparative essay you must present an argument about or offer an interpretation of at least one (and most typically two) of the texts we've read in class. You should have a central question that you are trying to answer in your essay, and you should be working to persuade your audience that your answer is plausible by offering whatever evidence seems most relevant to your argument and audience.

2. For the comparative essay, you will be asked to choose your own topic and generate your own question. When considering which question(s) to write on, keep in mind that your critical response essays should center on at least one of the following two subjects:

• Migrations: What different kinds of migration are there? What are the causes of a given migration? What reasons do characters have for migrating? What issues arise during the process of migration? What consequences does a given migration have--for the migrants themselves, for those left behind, for those in the migrants' destination? What are the legacies of a given migration? What connections and contrasts can we draw between different kinds of migrations, and their causes, processes, and legacies?
• Narratives: What is the story about? What does the story invite its readers to contemplate? How is the story told? What does how it is told have to do with what is being told? What seems to be the narrator's or author's purpose in telling the story? What effect on the audience does the author seem to be trying to have? Just what kind of audience(s) does the author seem to be writing to or for?

The best essays most likely will be those in which these two central subjects are linked in some way. Note that you don't have to answer all or even any of these questions in your paper. They are intended to get you started thinking about possible topics and approaches within the general subject of "migrations" and "narrative."

Click here for Advice on the drafting process for the comparative essay.

EN 209: Novels and Tales, Fall 2000
Created: 9/20/00, 9:07 pm
Last modified: 11/16/00, 1:56 pm