Essay #2

TAKE HOME ESSAY #2—Secondary Sources: The Romantic,  The Grotesque, The Off-Limits & The Sometimes Deadly (Rough Draft Due 04.02, Final Draft Due 04.04)

As we progress through the course, one of our critical goals is to expand your competency as a reader and critic by actively entering into the literary discussion and debate.  You will begin to do this in this second assignment. Whether we engage in conversation about text on the page or in the classroom, effective argumentation about what we read and the significance of that reading depends on imagining how other readers have responded to the same text as us; it demands understanding and analyzing how and why we read.

Secondary Sources: Generally speaking, three types of secondary sources are used in essays about literature: literary criticism, biography, and history. The goal of a particular essay and the kinds of questions it raises will determine which kind of sources you use.

1. opinion (or debatable claims)—other readers’ views and interpretations of the text, author, or topic, which "you support, criticize, or develop"; 

2. information—facts (which "you interpret") about the author’s life; the text’s composition, publication, or reception; the era during, or about which, the author wrote; or the literary movement of which the author was a part; 

3. concept—general terms or theoretical frameworks that you borrow and apply to your author or text.

Literary Theories: Generally speaking, there are four types of literary theory. Remember that each type of scholarship and theory has a place, and if it deepens and improves your paper, it belongs in our classroom. Your choice of theory depends more on what you intend to analyze than on what our classis about.

1.      Mimetic Theories (interested in the relationship between the Work and the Universe)

2.      Pragmatic Theories (interested in the relationship between the Work and the Audience)

3.      Expressive Theories (interested in the relationship between the Work and the Artist)

4.      Objective Theories (interested in close reading of the Work)

Important Things to Know:

●       This paper makes up 15% of your overall grade.

●       Throughout this 4-5 page paper, you will continue to use close reading skills and your understanding of figurative language and rhetorical device to analyze something we have read during our third and fourth units of discussion, but with this essay, you are asked to enhance that work by referencing secondary sources.

o       It is critical that in this paper you find a way to strike a balance between your primary source, the text you are analyzing, and your secondary source, the opinions and reactions and understanding of your primary source as expressed by other people).

o       Advice: it is important that you have a good grasp of the primary source and have formed your own opinion about it before you turn to secondary sources. Although secondary sources can help support your view, I am still primarily interested in what you think about the work.

●       While prompts will be provided, you are expected to construct something unique and creative.

●       This essay is a huge component of your meeting our guaranteed SLOs. It centers upon your ability to generate critical arguments through the synthesis of material from various sources, including research sources.

●       On 04.02, an in-class workshop is required for each student;  missing said workshop will result in a 5% reduction of the essay’s overall grade as will turning it in late. Taking it to be work shopped in the campus writing center will result in a 5% extra-credit boost.

Prompts:

1. In many of the pieces we read, death and discovery were closely correlated. How is discovery of the self or insight into identity tied to the process of dying? What do we learn about characters as they face death and what to do they learn as well? What is the source of this marriage? Explain how authors use death and fear to build characterization and to show insight.

2. In the process of exploring death and its effects, many authors stumble upon a discussion of God, the afterlife, and the very philosophy and essence of human existence. While comparing two works with differing understandings of death, pay special attention to how authors change their approach and reveal their philosophies on the afterlife and the existence of a higher power.  For some, is death an escape? Is it something to feel anxious over? Excited for? At peace with? Extrapolate. Examine what the differences are, why they exist, and how they work as rhetorical choices.

3. M. H. Abrams, literary critic, argues that until the Romantics, literature was usually understood as a mirror, reflecting the real world, in some kind of mimesis, but for the Romantics, writing was more like a lamp: the light of the writer's inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world. Which understanding of literature is more in line with your own? The mirror or the lamp? While exploring how the literature we have read in the last two units does either, please explain.

4. How is science reshaped and included in literature? Literary Critic, Matthew Arnold, has theorized that literature works to reconcile science with the human experience. Do any of the stories in our last two units offer their readers this moment of explanation? Furthermore, is such a reconciliation even possible and what are the effects of trying? What are the moral needs of understanding life romantically, emotionally, scientifically, or morally? Can these ways co-exist?

5. Why do people like horror, sex, the dirty, the unallowed, the banned? These stories are all massively popular and have withstood the test of time. Looking at no more than three pieces of literature, consider what motivates the reader to engage with these pieces of art. Consider Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject and what Goth critic, Kate Ferguson explains as literature’s important job of “speak[ing] what in the polite world […] cannot be spoken.”