SUNY Fredonia
Division of Arts and Humanities
ENGL 427-02/580-04: Major Writers: Postcolonial Hawthorne
Fall 2007
Dods 101, TTh 2-3:20
Office: Fenton 279; MW 10:30-12, TTh 9:30-11, and by appointment; 673-3125
E-mail: simon@fredonia.edu, brucesimon18@yahoo.com
Web Page: www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/
ANGEL space: https://angel.fredonia.edu/frames.aspx

Critical Response Essay

Assignment Sheet

Due: no later than 11 pm on Friday, November 7, 2007 in the Critical Essay dropbox in the "Lessons" area on the course ANGEL site. It is your responsibility to complete your papers on time in the proper format; late papers will be accepted, but they will lose a full grade for every day they are late and I will not provide comments on them.

Format: 4-6 pages (roughly 1000-1800 words) for undergraduates/7-10 pages (roughly 1750-3000 words) for graduate students, 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 the links page for explanations of this style of citation); the basic template is Author. Book Title. City of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication.); proper MLA format for quotations within a paragraph--"quotation" (12)--and blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer. [Please be aware that you'll get a better grade if you first develop your ideas fully, without feeling that you have to stop at a certain page or word limit, and then go back and condense, cut, and otherwise revise so as to be as concise, clear, and persuasive as possible. Don't let the page limit limit your exploration of ideas.]

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, 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 would be happy to offer brief comments on your drafts, so long as you get me them the class before the paper is due.

Assignment Options: You have several options for your critical essay; however, unlike the final research project, you will not have the option of making up your own topic or question for this first paper.

• 1. Develop and support your own definition of "postcolonial," using any combination of texts from the "Historicizing Hawthorne" unit of the course. (Graduate students: being in dialogue with the definitions offered by Buell, Kaplan, Sanborn, or Warner in the "Suggested Readings" folder on the course ANGEL space would be a definite plus.)
• 2. Offer a close reading of a particular Hawthorne text in which you develop and support an argument over one aspect of it that may be considered postcolonial. (Graduate students: being in dialogue with at least one scholar who has also written on your text and topic would be a definite plus.)
• 3. Offer a comparative reading of a text by Hawthorne and a text by either Devi or Chamoiseau in which you develop and support an argument over one aspect of the relation between them that is relevant to postcolonial studies. (Graduate students: being in dialogue with at least one scholar who has also written on your texts and topic would be a definite plus.)