Assignments
Paper 1: literary analysis
For your first paper, you are charged with the following task: write a short (~1000 word) close reading of a passage from a work listed on the syllabus. Close readings are a hallmark of the study of fiction. They allow you to come to a deeper, richer understanding of a text. As you formulate your argument, narrow your focus to one particular issue. This issue can be almost anything but it should point to a particular pattern or syntax or suggestive imagery you find compelling. In any close reading or literary analysis, you should support your thesis by referencing specific details from your selected work to argue a point. This point should reference and explain the purpose or function of the issue at hand (the pattern, syntax, imagery, etc). For instance, you might argue that the author invokes, subverts, reflects, refracts, or revises some idea, theme, or aesthetic through the use of form, language, metaphor, or imagery (to put it broadly). Note: a close reading or textual analysis of this kind is more than just a summary of what you think the author is saying. It calls into question not just what the author says in a particular work, but how he or she is saying it and why he or she feels the need to make this particular statement, and perhaps what contemporary readers and/or readers of today might make of the text.
Paper 2: Comparative Essay or Research Essay
Comparative Essay
In an ~2000 word analytical essay, compare two texts selected from the syllabus, considering ways that a later writer might be responding to some earlier writer as in a kind of conversation—perhaps reinscribing, revising, or resisting the earlier writer—in terms of some aspect of form, style, or theme. Draw upon your experience of developing a close reading from paper 1 and expand that basic framework to consider and compare the two writers and their respective works. When you formulate your thesis, remember to be specific. Although two authors may both use humor or describe the same experience (say, the complexities of romantic relationships or domestic imprisonment), you must go beyond merely describing this commonality or radical departure in each author’s work. Consider how you might qualify or quantify such statements (X and Y are the same or different or something in between) by addressing how the two writers use some aspect of language, theme, form, context, imagery, or style; or how the two writers invoke notions of class, race, or gender in agreement or difference with one another to represent some aspect of human experience.
Another approach could involve considering the ways that the two writers address the ideals that have shaped human experience in contrast to its material realities. For instance, in ways do Edith Wharton (in House of Mirth) and Jane Austen (in Persuasion) address the problem of finding happiness in romantic relationships in a society rife with social and economic problems.
Research Essay
In an ~2000 word research essay explore one topic or theme in one of the texts we’ve read this semester. Incorporate at least two scholarly sources into your paper. Proper citation is a must!
Blogging: Writing about Art and Literature
Over the course of the semester, you will be required to find one image that relates to some aspect of the following one particular work of literature. This image should be historical–that is, a work of art contemporary (+/- 10 years) to the work of literature it addresses. You must post this image to our class’s digital website along with proper source information, artist, title, and where the work of art his currently housed, as well as where you got the image (with links, if appropriate), who created it, when it was made, etc.) and a caption (roughly 400 words) that explicates how this image relates to the given work. I recommend using a short passage to do this assignment. Find a meaningful paragraph or sentence and then find a work of art that relates to it somehow–resisting, reconciling or representing the particular issue the passage encapsulates. Be SPECIFIC! Use quotations and explain the significance of those quotations and how they relate to your chosen work of art.
Images Resources: ARTstor, Oxford Art Online, CAMIO: all available through our library website: www.lib.unc.edu
∞ Feel free to ask me questions in class or in office hours or via email about any of these assignments. I’m happy to hear ideas, give feedback, offer critiques and give encouragement as you develop your ideas about what fiction does, how it works and what contributions they make to the experience of being human.