Essay #1

Essays Due: October 21st by midnight.

Your essay should be submitted to me as a Google Doc.  Please share it with [email protected]. While your essay itself should have an engaging title, please give the file the generic title: Your Name. ENG2850 Essay 1.

3-5 pages – 12pt. type, double-spaced

In a thoughtful, well-organized analytical essay, grounding your response in a close, detailed reading of the text at hand, please address one of the following topics.  These topics pose general, theme-based questions.  In formulating your essay topic, you will want to articulate your topic in the form of a more specific question about the text you’ve chosen to work with.  You may use any of the texts we’ve read beginning with “Du Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger” and continuing through the poems by William Blake.

1.Concentrating on any one of the readings we’ve done so far, consider the relationship between appearances and reality. In answering this question, you might want to consider: What is the difference between how things seem and how they actually are? How are appearances used to deceive or to manipulate? What does this text seem to be saying about the difference between what we think we perceive and what is actually true? How do characters use masks (real or figurative) to deceive those around them?

2.Discuss the theme of passion as it relates to any one of the texts we’ve read thus far. Here you can focus either on passion in the context of romantic love or on passion in the sense of any strong feeling or emotion. What does your text seem to be saying about passion, particularly when passion is in conflict with other more rational values?

3.Choose any one of the texts we’ve read thus far, and identify what you consider to be its central message with respect to human destiny. In several of the texts we’ve read, characters or authors appear to be struggling to determine their purpose in life or to chart their own course.   What does freedom look like in your text?  How does your text balance human agency with the idea of a pre-ordained fate.

4. Wild Card:  If none of these prompts is calling to you, you may create your own topic.  To to this, please submit a focused question to me for approval by Monday, October 10th.

5.  Even More Wild:  In lieu of an analytical essay, submit a creative work that responds directly to one of our readings.  If you go this route, your creation should share the same genre and thematic concerns as the text you’re responding to.  (i.e. if you’re responding to Tartuffe, your creative project would be take a dramatic form.)  Accompany your creative work with a brief introduction explaining it’s relation to the “source text”.

General Guidelines 

Please read these carefully! This list contains information that will be essential to you in writing this essay.

• All successful papers will illustrate their claims by quoting directly from the text. When you include a quotation, be sure to explain its significance.
• Quotations should include parenthetical citations, providing page or line number as necessary.
• Assume that your reader is familiar with the text and does not require any plot summary.
• Always use the present tense when writing about literature.
• Your essay should have a title. Use your title as an opportunity to let your reader know what your paper is about!
• As a general rule, the question that you find genuinely perplexing will yield a stronger paper than the question whose answer seems readily apparent to you, so resist the impulse to shy away from tough topics.
• My prompts are meant to be suggestive, not prescriptive. Use my questions as a guide to thinking about your subject, but don’t feel that you have to address every question I raise in an essay prompt.
• You should be able to articulate your paper topic in the form of a question. Be sure that the question will yield a thoughtful, complex response – rather than a yes or no answer.
• Test your main idea or central claim (a.k.a. your thesis) by asking the following: “Could a reasonable reader conceivably disagree?” If the answer is “No, no reasonable reader could conceivably disagree with what I’m saying in this paper,” then you need to do more work to refine your thesis. You want to be staking out an interpretive claim that someone else might disagree with; otherwise you’re simply articulating ideas that are readily available to any reader of the text.
• The opening paragraph of your paper should introduce your topic to the reader (i.e. what question are you asking?), and it should also tell the reader where you’re going to be going in order to answer your question. In that way, even without necessarily spelling out a thesis, your introduction acts as a road map for the rest of the paper. For this reason, you might find it useful to go back and rewrite your introduction after you’ve completed a first draft of the paper.
• Your introduction should lead the reader straight to your topic without resorting to any kind of sweeping generalizations or universal claims.
• Rather than simply restating your introduction, your conclusion should both summarize the important interpretive claim you’ve made in the paper and indicate how your analysis might help readers to understand the text in question.