SUNY Fredonia
Division of Arts and Humanities
ENGL 395: Non-Western Literature
Spring 2008
TTh 11 am-12:20 pm
Fenton 176
Office: Fenton 265; TTh 3:30-4:30, W 9-12, F 1-4:30, and by appointment; 673-3856
E-mail: simon@fredonia.edu (work days); brucesimon18@yahoo.com (other)
Web Page: www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/
Course ANGEL Space: https://fredonia.sln.suny.edu

Critical Essay(s), Spring 2008

To develop your skills in literary analysis and critical thinking, you will have several options for more formal, persuasive argumentation in this course than in the in-class and ANGEL space discussion board writing/brainstorming and Group Research/Teaching Project learning analysis. Your critical essays are to be thesis-driven, analytical, and persuasive essays; you may instead write one longer (seven-to-ten-page) essay. It/They 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. In short, you are being asked to generate an original, creative argument that supports your own perspective on the text or texts you've chosen to write on and seeks to persuade your intended audience(s) of its validity, significance, and stakes.

You may choose to: write two 3-to-5-page critical essays on works different than the one you focused on for the group research/teaching project; write two 4-to-6-page critical essays, one of which may be on the same work that you focused on for the group research/teaching project; or write one 7-to-10-page critical essay on a work different than the one you focused on for the group research/teaching project. Due dates are flexible, although of course all work must be turned in before the end of exam week. If you choose to write two essays, you should choose one from the list of Migration-Related Options and one from the list of Place-Related Options; if you choose to write one longer essay, you should choose one of the comparative options from these lists or an of the options from the Unit-Crossing Options.

Migration-Related Options: These 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 one of the works wefve read this semester. 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 the author youfre focusing on made and what those choices reveal about his or her 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.

• Influence/Intertextuality: 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 one of the works we read this semester.

  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.

• 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 follows 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.

Place-Related Options: These options are modeled after the Migration-Related Options. Details forthcoming.

• Issues/Theme: Legacies of Settlement in Land Narratives.
• Patterns/Structure: The Significance of Form in Land Narratives.
• Part-to-Whole/Function: The Work Land Narratives Do.
• Intention/Goals: The Ends of Land Narratives.
• Influence/Intertextuality: The Significance of Allusion in Land Narratives.
• Comparison/Contrast: The Stakes of Land Narratives.

Unit-Crossing Options: These options are also modeled after the Migration-Related Options. Details forthcoming.

• Issues/Theme: The Legacies of Settlement and Migration.
• Patterns/Structure: The Significance of Form.
• Part-to-Whole/Function: The Work Migration/Land Narratives Do.
• Intention/Goals: The Ends of Migration/Land Narratives.
• Influence/Intertextuality: The Significance of Allusion.
• Comparison/Contrast: The Stakes of Migration/Land Narratives.

Grading Criteria

Your grade for this segment of the course will be determined by the coherence and validity of your papers' arguments, the effectiveness of their structures in conveying your ideas and convincing your audience, and the quality of their prose (including grammar, syntax, and punctuation).