Primary Assignments

Assignments for ENGL 207–American Literature Survey

In this class, you will have three primary assignments in addition to our two exams and more frequent quizzes and in-class writing. Individual assignment sheets will be posted and discussed in class well before the assignment is due. Below, you can find a broader description of these three assignments.

Assignment 1: Exploded Analysis (length varies): This assignment asks you to select a single text and offer what I call an exploded analysis by “showing  your work,” to borrow a term you might be more familiar with in math or science courses. Critical and close reading is a complex task, and we can break it down into distinct parts: paraphrase, observation, contextualization, analysis, and argumentation. This assignment will be organized not as a formal paper, but as brief paragraphs and bullet points, concluding with a final thesis. Review this example and use it as a guide.

1. Paraphrase: if dealing with a shorter work (e.g. a poem), offer a line-by-line (or sentence by sentence) paraphrase that re-states, in your own words, the factual content of the poem. This means that you will have to translate flowery poetic tropes and archaic references into sensible prosaic meaning. If you are dealing with a longer prose work, offer a 2-3 paragraph summary of that work. Note that a direct paraphrase sticks closely with the language as it unfolds, whereas a summary captures the broader contours of a text, emphasizing the main points. In both cases, please also offer a broader, encapsulating sentence or two that describes the rhetorical situation (who is the speaker, who is the audience, and what is the textual mode or genre).
2. Observe: The first step focused on the content of the text–the “what”. This second step will focus on the “how”. Not what a poem or paragraph says, but how it makes its meaning. Carefully re-reading your chosen text, identify 4-6 aspects of the text that catch your attention–metaphors, tropes, conceits, descriptive details, thematic elements, qualities of language, moments of humor or pathos, images, structural patterns, changes in rhythm or tone, etc.–of the poem’s language that help express or shape its meaning or meanings. Just list them here as bullets–you don’t meet to explain them yet.
3. Contextualize: Review the author headnote and main section and sub-section introductions. Drawing on these materials along with anything that you’ve picked up in class, note 4 pieces of contextual information–historical, social, cultural, political and/or biographical–that you think  contributes an informed understanding of the chosen text, especially in relation to your observations above.  You only need to note the contextual backdrop here, and again you can use bullets as in the previous step.
4. Select and Analyze: After assembling a broader map of the formal, thematic, and historical qualities of the text, reflect upon which qualities seem to speak to one another most powerfully–the way two formal qualities interact, for example, or the way a formal quality aligns with or contradicts a broader contextual observation. Identify three such pairings. This is a process of working from a broader map of many things that happen in a text, to more streamlined account of items that relate in interesting ways. A good rhetorical analysis, which this assignment prepares you for, is something like an argumentative story: an argument in which the pieces of evidence build upon and speak to one another in interesting ways. After listing three of the most interesting and related combos from #2 and #3 above, write 2-3 sentences  for each describing why you identified that specific combination as being particularly important or meaningful to the broader meaning of a text. Once again, you can use bullets.
5. Argue: Having paraphrased/summarized, observed, contextualized, and analyzed to some extent, articulate a complex thesis that you think offers a map and mirror for a paper that you might write in light of the prep-work you’ve done here. The thesis should be focused, and should anticipate the kinds of evidence you would use in the paper. Think of your thesis as a complex and complete map and mirror for the (hypothetical) paper that follows. (2-3 sentences). This thesis might emerge from just one of the items developed in #4, or from some combination of them.

Assignment 2: Rhetorical Analysis (3-4 pages): This assignment assumes, as a pre-condition, the kind of work you did in Assignment One (“Exploded Analysis”), but instead of “showing your work” as you move through these five important steps, you will offer only your “answer” in the form of 4-page, well-structured argumentative essay that is driven by a specific and focused thesis about a single of your choosing and supports that claim with evidence from the text. Your thesis should not focus on the “what” of a text (simply stating facts or anticipating a summary of the text) but about the “how” and “why” of a text. You might say that “The Yellow Wallpaper” is about a woman’s forced descent into madness due to a misinformed and patriarchal medical establishment,” but that’s more about the “what” of the text. It’s not a great thesis because it doesn’t really have any legs, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Also, it’s not very arguable. You want to articulate a thesis with which reasonable people might agree.

In order to focus your thesis, you can begin to ask questions about the “what” statements that always seem to come up at the start.  “What kind of details signal her descent into madness?” and “is the protagonist really ‘mad’ at all?” are questions that send us more deeply into the text–into its details and resolutions (or lack thereof). Our thesis should eventually be pithed as an answer to some of those “how” and “why” questions–questions that not only get at the literary details, but also the ramifications of those details for their own society (the author and her contemporaries) or for ours.

Don’t worry about following a certain “approach” to literature. This assignment is rooted in your own observations–what you find compelling or interesting or problematic about a given text.

This essay should have an introduction that engages the reader and strategically introduces the work (think thumbnail summary), and offers a specific and focused thesis. After the introduction, think of your body paragraphs as units of evidence that hone in on key moments in the text that, together, tell a compelling argumentative story about your text and what it accomplishes or fails to accomplish. Conclusions are up to you: I prefer that you take your reader somewhere new, or note some broader implications of your argument. You might even conclude with a great final piece of evidence. Whatever you do, don’t repeat yourself. It’s such a short paper, and concision is key.

Assignment 3: Contextual Analysis (4-5 pages): This assignment is very closely related structure to the Rhetorical Analysis assignment: you will have a strategic introduction, a carefully developed thesis statement that is both focused and argumentative;  1-2 initial body paragraphs that work with the “framing” or secondary text (see “strategies and structures” below; body paragraphs that move strategically through units of quoted evidence and analysis; and a conclusion that takes the reader somewhere new. In the contextual analysis, however, you will be working more closely with a secondary text as well–one that sheds light on or aptly frames your primary text. The argumentative focus should still be on that main text, but you will be using that secondary text as a way to access or off-set or illuminate that primary text.

I’m not calling this a “compare & contrast” essay for a reason. I view the “compare & contrast” genre as something much simpler that asks you to draw more basic comparisons based on surface observations rooted in what happens in a story rather than the how and the why of those happenings (the formal qualities, the broader informing themes).

I encourage each of you to develop your own ideas, but the anthology–viewing both the literary texts and the many statements, speeches, political documents, and essays we read in the “context” sections–seems to present many viable options:

• Pound’s essay on Imagisme as secondary text with a poem or two by H.D. as the primary text
• Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as the secondary text with Ginsberg’s “Howl” as the primary text
• Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity as the secondary text with Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” as the primary text
• Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” or (W.E.B Du Bois, or Booker T. Washington) as the secondary text with Ellison’s “The Invisible Man” as the primary text
• Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as the secondary text with Langston Hughes’s “Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “I, Too” as the primary texts.

Strategies and Structures for the Contextual Analysis:

The contextual analysis asks you to choose a primary text from the anthology that you will analyze, as well as a secondary text that you will use to frame the primary text. Adding a secondary text deepens the rhetorical analysis by giving the primary text something to push back against, or to be in dialog with. The rhetorical analysis assignment treated texts almost as though they existed in a vacuum: sure, we made some gestures to informing contexts, but we didn’t have sources to flesh out that context. In the contextual analysis, you get to choose a source that aptly frames your primary text in some way (see all the examples above). The secondary text, to use another metaphor, is a light you use to illuminate the primary text, or a lever you use to access it in new ways. The paper is really about the primary text. But you’re using the secondary text as a way into that primary text. Here are some structural tips for organizing your paper:

• Intro: Your intro strategy will be motivated by the connection–thematic, formal, historical, etc.–that you draw between your two texts. The intro should help the reader make sense of that broader connection and provide a clear path into the two texts. Draw on information in the section and sub-section introductions and / or author bios to craft the introduction.

• Your first 1-2 body paragraphs should reflect on the secondary text, establishing it as a “frame” that will drive the rhetorical analysis of the primary text. If you are pairing Winthrop and Emerson, for example, you would reflect on the ways in which Winthrop’s text articulates core attributes of Puritan thought / theology, using evidence as you go. Note that the work you do with the framing or secondary text draws out it’s main features. You aren’t analyzing the secondary text, but just setting it up as a frame to explore the primary text. So, instead of analyzing the tensions and ambiguities within Winthrop’s own text, or relating it to its own historical context, you would engage it more objectively, using quoted evidence to capture core aspects of puritan thought. Your work with the secondary text isn’t meant to be original or exciting or inventive: you’re only articulating what most reasonably people would agree a given text is about.  The secondary text, presented in a clear, uncontroversial way, aids in the analysis of the primary text, and helps you dig deeper.
• Subsequent body paragraphs will resemble the rhetorical analysis paragraphs: each one should address a key piece of quoted evidence that is expertly introduced, well-integrated, and sensitively analyzed. These body paragraphs will, at times, refer back to the secondary text, but the focus of these body paragraphs should be on building a dynamic argumentative story by connecting key pieces of evidence from the primary text with engaging transitions.
• As always, the conclusion should be a place of experimentation and big-thinking: you can re-cast the thesis, but don’t make repetition the conclusion’s only reason for being. Take the reader somewhere new. Add a fresh piece of analysis that didn’t quite fit in the paper itself; reflect on the main idea of the paper in the context of  today’s world; answer the “so what” question. Take the reader somewhere new and interesting!