Assignment

Critical Response Assignment

This is a short (4-5 page, approximately 1250 word) paper that responds to one ore more of the texts covered in the middle part of the course. You will receive a handout explaining this assignment in more detail. This assignment is due Wednesday November 15th.

Choose from Walt Whitman’s writing (any of the poems or prose extracts we read in the anthology), Frank Norris’s McTeague, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, or Nella Larsen’s Passing. You may choose to focus on only one of these, or you may choose to put two of these into relation. While you may include reference to secondary material, please stay focused on the primary text(s). Your response should be typed or word-processed, stapled, double-spaced, and in 12-point font.

Note, this critical response is not a research paper: you are not being asked to go to the library to find sources that either place the primary text in historical context, or give you some theoretical approach, or offer some other context for undertanding. You may include some secondary source material, but this assignment primarily asks you to pay close attention to the literary texts under discussion with a critical question in mind, and offer a coherent argument about (or meditation on) the text with this question as guide.

How do you come up with a good critical question? For this, I have a recommended process. First, choose which text you want to write about. Second, read over your notes on that text and jot down possible questions or problems that pique your interest (essentially, take notes on your notes). Third, read these over and formulate a critical question. This is the key part: write down your question as precisely as you can. If it doesn’t sound like a good question, it probably isn’t one, so reformulate it until you think it will work to guide your reading. Fourth, return to the text with your question in mind, and select the relevant passage or passages from the text. (I expect that you will have to go back and forth between your question and the text a few times.)

Only now should you write a first draft of the essay. Put it away for a day or two. Then return to it: does it make an argument? Does it make the argument you want it to make? Redraft it until it does, then edit it and hand it in.

Think of this as a chance to do a sustained bit of thinking and writing on some topic that has entered the classroom and that you want to unfold in more detail. I encourage you to run your question by me, once you have come up with one, or find someone else in the class who you can talk out your question with.