Our first set of readings—Langston Hughes’s “Harlem” (1951), Gwendolyn Brooks’s
“kitchenette building” (1945), and Ralph Ellison’s “Harlem is Nowhere” (1948)—
addresses the various effects and consequences of deferred dreams as well as the
relationship that deferred dreams have to material reality, the way in which material
reality restricts as well as confuses dreams. For your first essay, write a personal essay in
which you discuss how your experience of a particular dream either in the past or present
compares and/or contrasts with how one of these texts represents the effects of deferred
dreams and their relationship to reality. Questions to consider and answer as you both
develop your topic and write your paper are the following: What is your dream? Has it
been deferred, or restricted, in the way that your chosen text describes? How so and why
do you think this is the case? How does your dream relate to the material reality of your
life and experience? Was your dream influenced (either deferred or not) by material
conditions? Did material conditions, or some aspect of reality, hold back your dream?
Did they, in contrast, help your dream? Finally, was your dream achieved or not? What
is the significance of this achievement, or the lack thereof? In other words, what do you
think is the reason for the state of your specific experience as it concerns your dream?
In terms of the organization of your essay, you should use your first paragraph to do two
things: 1) introduce and summarize what your chosen text is saying about deferred
dreams and their relationship to reality and 2) state your argument about how your
experience relates to this text (either compares, contrasts, or both compares and contrasts
to the text); note that your argument should come near the end of your introduction and it
should be as specific as possible. After your introduction, you should spend the rest of
your paper illustrating and proving your argument about your experience, providing
specific details and examples from your experience to back up your argument as well as
citing from the text to contextualize your experience and explain how it compares to or
contrasts with the text.
To get started, I would brainstorm and free write responses to the questions above, with
an eye toward nailing down a specific dream to focus on and figuring out how to relate it
to one of the texts. I would also review the work you’ve done in the reading and writing
assignments we have done on these texts to help you, too. Then, work to organize your
pre-writing ideas and previous work into a clear argument and outline the examples you
will use to illustrate and prove your argument as well as how you will tie your examples
to the text. Finally, bring these points together in a coherent argument and narrative about
your personal experience of your dream. Have fun, and feel free to get in touch if you
have questions. I’m always here to help!
What is a personal essay? A personal essay is a narrative in which you tell a story about
a particular topic from your own perspective. In other words, it is your story. Because of
the personal nature of this writing, you will want to use the first-person pronoun, “I,” as
well as possessive words like “me,” “mine,” and “my.” Personal essays often include
informal, everyday language and, likewise, can be more relaxed in tone than more formal
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academic essays, although they must still be logical and clearly organized narratives.
Keep this in mind as you write your paper. As with all of the papers we will be writing
this quarter, your personal essay needs to contain the three elements common to all
academic papers: 1) an introduction that presents your paper’s main topic and culminates
in a clear, focused statement of your paper’s argument, or thesis statement; 2) evidence in
support of your argument/thesis; 3) a conclusion that addresses the stakes, or “point,” of
your argument/thesis. In your personal essay, you will support your argument by
carefully selecting details of your experience that prove and illustrate your argument, or
main focus. Your “evidence” for your argument, then, is your own experience. Be sure
to be as specific and detailed as possible; the more detailed the better the personal essay.
You will also want to choose some quotes from one of our course texts to contextualize
your personal narrative and explain your dream and its relationship to reality. Your
conclusion is the place where you will want to think about and discuss what your own
experience might mean in a broader social and political context.
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