Critical Essay Assignment Sheet

As you know, you are required to write a five-to-seven-page analysis of the narrative strategies of a particular writer and work from the first half of the semester. This page gives the assignment sheet for the critical essay; click here for advice on the critical essay and "re-vision" guidelines and suggestions.

Due: Rough draft due in class on Friday, October 12, for mandatory peer review/editing session. Final draft due Monday, October 15, 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).

Format: 5-7 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 for quotations within a paragraph: "..." (12); blockquote format for quotes five lines or longer. Please attach your rough draft and your partner's comments on the peer review/editing form to your final draft, along with a paragraph 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. (If you miss class Friday and hence don'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. If, after trying all avenues, you can't get peer feedback, do a self-analysis of a rough draft and including the draft and the form with the final draft of your essay.)

Criteria for Evaluation: No matter which option you choose for the analytical essay, I will be grading your paper in terms of how well you fulfill the requirements of the option you chose, how well you make your case for your interpretation of a story or stories, 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).

Options: Here are your six options for the critical 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 must choose one of these options, and use migration narratives from no more than two of the works we've read thus far--the Old Testament, Jesus Is Indian, Season of Migration to the North, In an Antique Land, or Crossing the River--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 and that is most interesting to you.

• Issues/Theme: 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), culture(s), religion(s), colonialism, slavery, and so on. Your task if you choose this option is to focus on one migration narrative in particular and make an argument identifying and analyzing what's at stake in the most important issues it seems designed to make its readers consider.

  If you choose this 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) in short, 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.

  There are many directions you could take with this option: you might consider what the story of Ben Yiju and his slave Bomma in Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land is really "about" and what's at stake in it being about this; you might consider what any of the stories in Agnes Sam's Jesus Is Indian or any of the chapters in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River is really "about" and what's at stake in it being about this; you might consider what the story of Mustafa's migrations in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North is really "about" and what's at stake in it being about this.

• 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. 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.

  There are many directions you could take with this option: you might choose to focus on one or more of the aspects of literary form we've been focusing on thus far this semester (point-of-view/narrator's perspective[s] [for instance, the choice of a child's or mother's perspective in Sam, the use of two narrators in Salih, or the use of multiple narrators in Phillips], symbolism, allegory, metaphor, and metonymy) to get across what's at stake in their function in the migration narrative; you might choose to examine the relation between a work's beginning and its ending and what's at stake in the closure the work achieves; you might choose to examine a particularly revealing temporal or geographic shift in the migration narrative and what follows from it (for instance, the shifts between time periods and modes of writing in Ghosh); you might choose to examine the use of language and dialect and what's follows from it.

• 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, which focuses on why the roles you claim are the most important really are. 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.

  There are many directions you could take with this option: you might consider what work one of the chapters within Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River or within Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land does and what's at stake in or significant about its role or function in the larger work; you might consider a particular migration narrative within a chapter or short story and craft an argument about how it contributes to the larger meaning of the chapter or short story in which it is embedded.

• Intention/Goals: The Ends of Migration Narratives. Consider the question, "What do you think this story 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 as possible about authorial intention in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land, or Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River. 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 Salih/Ghosh/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.

• Comparison/Contrast: The Stakes of Migration Narratives. You might choose to focus on one issue or theme in particular, compare how two migration narratives approach it, and make an argument about what is at stake in their similarities and differences. 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.

  If you choose this 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.

  There are many directions you could take with this option. For instance, the impact and legacy of English colonialism is a prominent theme in the readings in the first half of the semester. 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 Amitav Ghosh himself and Bomma, 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; 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 you want to explore in more depth.

• Influence/Intertexuality: The Significance of Allusion in Migration Narratives. When one writer alludes to another literary work, that allusion often reveals much about prominent themes or concerns of the new work, or about the more recent author's goals and intentions. Your task for this paper would be to analyze and make a convincing argument about the significance of a specific literary allusion in Agnes Sam's Jesus Is Indian, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, or Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River.

  Think of this option as an opportunity to do a variation on the previous options--to identify a major theme in, analyze the form/structure of, consider the function of, or discern the author's intentions in a given migration narrative--by focusing on a particular literary allusion and its significance. Your job is not just to identify a literary allusion or list reasons why it might have been made, but to develop a focused argument aimed at convincing your reader that your conclusions are valid.

  There are many directions you could take with this option. For instance, you might explore the way in which Salih's Season of Migration to the North invokes and transforms Shakespeare (Othello, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet are possible intertexts with the novel). What is the function of and at stake in Salih's revisions of this classic English writer, given the novel's key theme of British-Sudanese relations and conflicts? Or you might try to formulate an argument about the significance of 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 try to find a particular Biblical allusion or pattern of allusions in either Salih's or Phillips's novel or one of Sam's short stories and make an argument aimed at persuading us how to understand their meaning and significance. Or you might consider how and to what ends Salih or Phillips or Sam respond not to another literary work, but to a specific metanarrative (such as "the civilizing mission" or the idea of "progress," "development," or "modernization") in their fiction. These examples are meant to be suggestive, not definitive: I encourage you to come up with one of your own that you want to explore in more depth.

ENGL 209: Novels and Tales, Fall 2001
Created: 9/20/00 9:07 pm
Last modified: 11/16/01 8:45 am