Assignments

Advice on Writing

General

For each essay, pick one of the questions and respond to it in an essay of 7-8 pages. Make sure to have a thesis, and to flesh out your argument and support it with examples from the text. Refer to the “Advice for Writing” section for guidelines.

Papers must be submitted in a 12-type font (preferably Times New Roman or Arial); your essays must also be double-spaced. Use the MLA guidelines for citation (For more on the MLA format, see MLA Formatting and Style Guide).

For essays 1 and 2, you have two days to decide if you’d like to revise your essay, after it is returned. You will then have a week to submit your revision. You must revise at least one of your first two papers.

Essay 1

Do you think we live in an enlightened age, or in an age of enlightenment? Discuss, using Kant’s definitions of enlightenment.
Why does the device of the outsider commenting upon French culture prove irresistible to both Montesquieu and Diderot? What sorts of discussions does it enable? How does the choice of ‘outsider’ in each text mediate in the subject matter that each author chooses to focus on?
In Chapter 1, the following poem appears, on p. 51:

Pages full of idle words
Penned with hot and bitter tears:
All men call the author fool;
None his secret message hears.

Given that we know that these chapters were written belatedly, why do you think Cao Xueqin embedded this poem into the text? What do you think is the author’s “secret message”? Do you find the book to be dominated by bitter sadness, as the poem suggests? And why do you think Cao Xueqin describes his work as “pages full of idle words”, as if disappointed by his literary experiment?

Essay 2

Both Marx and Engels and Adam Smith bring up the idea of globalization, of economies opening up to the world. Summarize each argument, and then compare and contrast them. Which thinker’s influence is more apparent in the world around you today?
What do you think of John Stuart Mill’s ideas of tolerance? Do you consider that you live in a tolerant or an intolerant society? How do you think Freud would respond to Mill’s vision of society?
Describe the relationship between the individual and society explored in Beyond Good and Evil and in Civilization and its Discontents.

Final Essay

Both The Broken Nest and Girl tell the stories of young women. After reading them and The Second Sex, do you think that women’s experiences are universal, or are they specific to a country and a culture?
Salih’s novel discusses Africans’ encounters with Europe, and the consequences of Africa’s colonial past, which is portrayed in Heart of Darkness. How do these texts speak to each other? Is Moustafa Said, as Lalami suggests in the introduction, the counterpart to Kurtz? If so, is the unnamed narrator Marlow? Where does this analogy work, and where does it break down?
Do you think that Said’s three definitions of Orientalism are separate or related? Which do you find the most convincing?
Do you agree with Said and Foucault’s assertion that knowledge is power? Using examples from Orientalism and Discipline and Punish, make the case for your argument.
Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil and Foucault’s ideas about discipline and punishment seem to find their echoes in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Do you find their implications disturbing? If so, why/if not, why not? Do you think there is anything that can be done about this?

Many of us probably think that writing works this way: you “have an idea” and then you “write it down.” I want you to question that assumption. In an important sense, you don’t really know what your ideas are until you’ve written them down and phrased them just right. Writing can be a process of discovering what it is you have to say, not just of communicating a prefabricated idea that’s sitting up there in your brain. As long as it’s up there in your brain, the idea doesn’t really exist in any form communicable to another person—which is the point of writing, after all. It exists, at best, in potential, but it hasn’t been subjected to the rigorous test of enunciating it. So use your writing to figure out what you want to say and how you should link each thought to the next. This may mean that, rather than making a complete outline of your argument and then filling it in with your prose, you simply start writing and see where you go. As you proceed, you may find (you’re likely to find) that you actually want to move in directions different from the one you originally imagined yourself taking. That’s fine. But when you’re done, go back to the beginning and make sure the introduction of the essay fits the directions you actually wound up taking.
Don’t assume that you can’t use the first-person voice. “I think” or “it seems to me” is OK, as long as you have reasons to back up what you think. I’d rather have you sound like a distinct individual than an impersonal bureaucratic committee. This advice also applies to the passive voice: make active voice constructions your default ones, and reserve passive for the rare times it really comes in handy.
Begin your work process by saying to yourself, “In order to assemble a persuasive argument about this topic, the passages in the work I’m writing about that would really need to be looked at are … .” In other words, make a list of all the potentially useful passages in the work that address the question you’re trying to answer. Then prioritize your list to focus on those that seem most important, i.e., least permissible to omit from a 7-plus page essay. This exercise provides training in qualitative assessment of information. It can also help safeguard you against the criticism that you have omitted passages that might seem to contradict your argument.
Quote from and/or paraphrase portions of the text to support your claims as much as possible. Don’t think of your task as one of arriving at the tersest statement of a book’s “meaning”; think of it as one of engaging with some issue raised by the book in sufficiently satisfying detail. Occam’s razor doesn’t apply here. Back up and/or illustrate your assertions by showing how they are borne out by the work you’re discussing. More richly detailed essays, those that take the trouble to respond very fully to the text and to the questions posed in the assignment, will receive higher marks than those that give minimal or very general responses. And it never hurts to write more than the minimum number of pages required.
Many of you may have been taught the model of the “5-paragraph essay” (opening paragraph, 3 paragraphs of “body,” closing paragraph). That was fine then. College-level work, and above, takes on more complex subjects or looks more deeply into subjects you may have encountered earlier. This means that the 5-paragraph model, rather than helpfully providing structure, can become a cage, involving a boredom-inducing level of repetition (here’s what I will say, here I am saying it, here’s what I have said). You want to persuade your readers, not hit them over the head. Acknowledge the greater sophistication of your material, your approach, and your imagined audience by bidding the 5-paragraph model a grateful farewell.
Don’t write for the professor. Write for an imaginary reader who is somewhat familiar with the text you’re discussing but needs some reminding about what happens when and so forth. When you discuss a particular passage or incident in the text, make sure to contextualize it for this imaginary reader. When you move from one part of the text to another, help the reader move with you by providing a sufficient transition. Always be asking yourself if what you’re saying will be clear and persuasive to the imaginary reader.
Keep your opening paragraph focused on the specific claim your paper is making. Don’t begin with vast generalizations (e.g. “Throughout the history of Western literature”) when your real subject is something specific about a particular text.
People often think that academic writing is unlike the kind of writing they might need to do in the “real world.” But one way in which the writing in this class is exactly like the writing you might do in a professional context is that it is being read by someone busy who has a lot of other things to read and who will hold you responsible for what you present.
Speaking of what you present, how you present your work is very important. Make sure to use a 12-point font of some legible type (Times New Roman or Arial are the easiest to read). Make sure to always have a title for your essay, and to always number the pages.

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Foundations of World Culture II: World Literatures and Texts