This paper gives you the opportunity to showcase your close reading skills. You will choose a passage from one of the texts we’ve read this semester, and from a careful, attentive analysis of it, you will develop an argument about that text’s meaning.
Available texts are: Beowulf parts I-XII (Lines 1-836), Beowulf parts XIII-XXXI (lines 837-2220), Beowulf part XIII–end, Sir Gawain Parts I-III, Sir Gawain Part IV, Journal of the Plague Year (through page 75), Journal of the Plague Year (to the end), Frankenstein, Volume I (through page 68), Frankenstein, through Volume II, Chapter VIII (page 118), Frankenstein (to the end)
So what is a passage? It’s a broad notion, but for our purposes, it’s something like the quotations you often see on lecture slides. There’s often some conceptual unity tying together the concerns of that section of text. Ultimately, “passage” is an arbitrary designation—what matters is how you demonstrate that textual moment to function in its immediate context (where it occurs in the book) and in its broader context (the book’s larger meaning, how it fits into our concerns for this course, etc.). In more practical terms, your passage should be no longer than 100 words.
Instructions: First, choose a passage. You can base your decision on a number of things, but I’d suggest you attend to at least these two factors:
1) the passage should be intriguing to you in some way (why write a paper about something that doesn’t interest you?)
2) the passage should have plenty of grist for the analytical mill (if you choose something that’s utterly straightforward and devoid of significance, then it’ll be more difficult to produce a sustained analysis).
Once you’ve chosen your passage, get ready to analyze! Here are things your analysis should do:
Goals:
1) Show your close reading abilities.This means giving full attention to the nuances of form and content—how the passage’s figurative language, diction, structure, and other aspects of form help to shape our understanding of the text’s meaning. For example, Defoe’s wordplay on the “tokens” of plague serves as a reminder that economic exchange is one of the text’s social concerns explored through the crisis of representation that the plague poses. The key here is to take things that are present implicitlyin the texture of the language, and then through the process of close reading make the implicit explicit.
2) Show your ability to move from textual details to argument. By argument I mean your claim(s) about what the text means, about what the text does and how it does it, and about what effects it produces. Let’s say your passage is this bit from the end of Defoe’s book: “N. B. The Author of this Journal, lyes buried in that very Ground, being at his own Desire, his Sister having been buried there a few Years before.” You might proceed from significant details in this passage to make an argument about how the text as a whole links writing and death, meaning and bodies, etc.
3) Express yourself with effective language and clear structure.How your argument develops will relate to how well you move between ideas, illustrations, and claims. There are many effective ways to organize a paper, but howsoever you choose to do so, you will need to signal your transitions across paragraphs. The best transitions do more than simply document the passing of time (“And then this happened in the poem. Let me tell you about it”). Instead, they create webs of association and causality (“While the first quatrain sets up the reader to expect a similar recurrence of the initial idea, the second quatrain shatters those pre-conceived notions with an emphatic “No” to begin line 4, its suddenness reinforced by the departure from our expected iamb”). Intimately connected with the larger organization and structure, clarity of expression also emerges from the small scale (i.e. well-chosen words, sentence structures, and movements between sentences). If overall organization is like the blueprint for the house, then clarity of expression is like the finely wrought crown molding.
Details: The paper should be around 1000–1200 words.You should include your exact passage at the beginning of the essay, but those words (again, not more than 100 of them) will not count toward the overall word total. Use a sensible font (like Times New Roman 12, or my personal fave, Garamond 13). Use one-inch margins, double-spaced text, and page numbers. Come up with a title! Make it one that describes the actual content of your essay (i.e. NOT just something like “Paper #1”—I already know that much).
A note on sources: I do not expect (or even desire) you to consult any outside sources for this assignment. If you do consult other sources, cite them properly. I strongly suggest that you do not begin your work on this paper by googling “[poem title] analysis” or something like that. Try to imagine that while writing your essay, you live in a pre-Google world.
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