Essay 1: Applied Close Reading
Due date: Ses #7, in class
Length: 3 pages, double-spaced, 12 pt. font
Citation system: MLA
Penalty for lateness: 1% per working day
Consider either Disgrace or The Remains of the Day. Identify a short portion of text, from one sentence to a few brief paragraphs in length (not more than one page), which you find particularly compelling and wish to study more closely. Deploying the explication techniques we have developed in class, construct a compelling argument about the section you have chosen, relating it to the overall meaning of the work.
Recall the handout on close reading: “You will be dividing sentences and paragraphs up into little pieces, but not at the expense of some larger unity. Think of the book as a machine made up of many parts, or, if you like a less mechanistic vocabulary, as a gourmet meal made up of many courses. For it to function most perfectly, each part of the machine - or the meal - must relate to the whole of which it is, then, an integral part. Of course the ‘machine’ you are studying may be dysfunctional, in which case your argument might identify a problem you have located in the way it works.”
Please reproduce the passage on a separate sheet at the front of your paper. When you begin to write about it, try to resist making major conclusions and a focused argument right away. Slow down and pay attention to the details, identifying the aspects that you think are most significant. Rather than marshalling evidence to support some predetermined conclusion, close reading is about detailed analysis of the relationship between the small parts of a text and its larger goals and themes. Your argument, when you discover it, will come from the details.
Essay 2: Close Reading Version 2.0 (MAX)
Due date: Ses #14, by 5pm
Length: 4-5 pages, double-spaced, 12 pt. font
Citation system: MLA
Penalty for lateness: 1% per working day
Your first assignment asked you to apply your close reading skills to a short passage of text in either Disgrace or The Remains of the Day. For this assignment you will do something similar, but your focus will be relating your findings to one of the larger contexts for any of the novels we’ve studied to date.
How you define the relevant context for the work you are discussing is up to you, and will depend a lot on what passage you choose to analyze. You might consider larger cultural developments like postmodernism, or more local phenomena like Margaret Thatcher’s time as British Prime Minister in the 1980s, or the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, or the rise of the corporate wage slave in the 1970s and 80s, or the “saturated” “fractured” contemporary self, or urban poverty, or advertising culture, or the rise of the immoral but oddly appealing protagonist. Whatever your focus, remember to pay attention to the language of the passage as a feature of its content, and relate the specific details of the passage you are reading to the context that concerns you.
Your goal as a Close Reader Version 2.0 (MAX) is not to show simply that the work is an example of a certain development or a “reflection” of a specific thing in the world. What is the work’s position in relation to those things? What does it ask us to think about the context it relates to? Or, said differently, what sort of critical thinking about the larger world of culture and society does the passage make possible?
Above all, find your own voice / position and make an argument.
Good luck and have fun.
Final Paper
Due date: Ses #25, by email
Length: 8-10 pgs, double-spaced, 12 pt. font
Citation system: MLA
Penalty for lateness: 1% per working day
The syllabus for this course came from a list published in the Guardian newspaper, telling readers what the British literati took to be the best British / Commonwealth novels written in the last 25 years. This encompassed books written outside of Britain, and by non-British authors, but all the works were ones British readers identified as belonging to their own tradition, arising in specific opposition to a list of best American novels in the New York Times.
Having now read a significant number of the authors on that final list, you have a good sense of what characterizes celebrated contemporary literature for the British. Here are some of those characteristics, as we’ve discussed, represented in the form of our own unordered and partial list (all lists are partial):
- Features unsavory protagonists
- Emphasizes moral ambivalence or ambiguity
- Uses code switching between elevated literary language and “lower” forms, between high art and low art
- Deploys metafictional techniques to draw our attention to the work’s relationship (or non-relationship) to “reality”
- Emphasizes performative nature of our identities; they aren’t “true” or natural but just seem that way because they are consistent and persistent
- Emphasizes fragmentation in human experience of postmodern culture, and as an artistic strategy
- Breaks down our faith in the supremacy of the rational, scientific human being (e.g. comparisons between animals and humans and machines)
- Questions our ability to understand ourselves and our culture
- Questions omniscience by questioning our ability to accurately see reality
- Questions the link between language and reality (everything is a biased representation)
- Depicts border-crossing and migration as fundamental to human experience
- Emphasizes the permeability of old boundaries: between men and women; between the East and the West; between high and low culture
- Shows people struggling to find meaning in a world that doesn’t offer us the old assurances (of either faith or science)
Now, your task is to identify one of these characteristics, or a combination that you find persuasive, re-formulate it into your own words as you see fit, and make an argument about how it features in at least two of the novels we have studied in class. Do not simply reveal its appearance in the work. Develop a claim about its role in the texts. Your concern is always the construction of the work’s meaning and significance. And you must ask yourself: Who cares? You may choose to contrast and/or compare two works to show them using the same strategies, but you needn’t feel constrained to that format. Please be creative and write on however many texts you’d like. A few examples of beginning brainstorming topics: think about the role of the animal-human link in Disgrace as compared to Life of Pi or Money; think about the untrustworthy narrators in Life of Pi and Remains of the Day; think about the performative self in Money, Remains of the Day, and White Teeth; or, think about the presence and transgression of boundaries between genders in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Comfort of Strangers.
If you would like your paper returned to you, please tell me so when you email it to me and provide me with your address.
Presentation Guidelines
Presentation on a Critical Reading
Choose a critical reading that is about the novel we are discussing that class. Tell us about what the author argues, as well as about how the author arrives as his or her conclusions. For example, is evidence primarily derived from close reading of the text, or is there a lot of time devoted to situating the work within specific cultural contexts? Or both? You might want to indicate some representative passages from the text that illustrate the points made by the author of the piece you are describing. Then tell us your reaction to the critical argument you’ve described. Is it persuasive? Are there any grounds on which to question it? Are there other ways of thinking about things that you think should be addressed? Finally, open the discussion out to the larger group. Does this particular critical argument make you think about the text in a different way, one you’d like to discuss with everyone? Does it raise larger issues that we should consider in relation to contemporary culture more generally? Ask yourself these questions and develop whatever points for discussion that you think appropriate.
Leading Discussion
Come to class prepared to determine the course of our conversation that day. You needn’t spend a long time introducing what interests you (i.e. 10-15 minutes is fine), but you should feel prepared to determine our focus for a sustained period of time (make 30-40 minutes your goal). There is no particular way to do this, and you should feel free to be creative. You can have us read through and discuss a particular passage. You can have us look at some other document external to the text - a critical reading, a newspaper article, a photograph, a film clip. You might prepare by brainstorming a list of all your reactions to the text, and then think about how you’d most like to spend the class time that is your dedicated space for exploring those reactions with the larger group. While you should be sure to find ways to query your peers about their own thoughts, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t state your own opinions in strong terms. If you want to make a pointed argument, do it. If you want to relate the book to something you watched on TV last night, do it. If you want to throw the book across the room and curse the author, that’s okay too. Just tell us why. Feel free to consult with me in advance.
