Specs: 1000 word, double spaced, in reasonable 12-poing font.
Goal: Write a comparative analysis of two texts we’ve read so far; that reading should focus on an aspect of our course (change, social change, gender, race, &c.) discussed or expressed in that text. To make some of the things the class has been talking about, and you have been thinking about, concrete
How to Do It: You should hazard a theory (i.e. thesis) about your text and then back it up and/or complicate that thesis with careful close readings of the language of one or two key passages. Please also gesture towards how those close readings might lead us a step beyond the claim made in the thesis.
Tip (specific): As we’ve learned in discussion the ways that literature represents, expresses or interacts with the world are multiple. A text might explicitly “say” one thing about a particular theme or experience but enact, express or covertly endorse–(a book might say art for art’s sake but actually engage you the reader in political action). There is, similarly, a difference between the time of the text and the time of the telling or reading–a single moment can take up several pages of prose.
Point being: keep in mind, and keep in the reader’s mind, the fact that literary texts aren’t neutral representations of inner or outer reality but are themselves complex things complexly related to other things (readers, reading conventions, historical events, cultural contexts, and so on).
Tips (general): 1. Pay careful attention to multiple meanings and word origins. 2. Read the passages you’re writing about at least a dozen times, memorize as much as you can, even with prose, and think about each word in them and why it’s placed where it is. Literature is about language calling attention to itself and semantic economy—squeezing meaning into small spaces. 3. Try out weaving quotations into you sentences.
0 comments