Hebdomadal 4

Topic 1: A Tantalizing Preview

Choose the essay topic you intend to pursue, and write out a sophisticated thesis statement or thesis question. (It's perfectly fair to pose your project in terms of a strong, analytical question: "To what end does Faulkner incorporate animal imagery into Vardaman's and Darl's narratives? In particular, do the images of fish, horse, and vulture underscore or undermine the mythic quest narrative of As I Lay Dying?")

For whatever remains of your 250 to 500 words, outline how your essay will pursue this thesis or this question. On what short section of the text will you concentrate? What details do you see in that section, and how do you anticipate associating those details with your larger argument? If you've begun to develop an outline, I invite you to share it.

However, bear in mind that your hebdomadal must demonstrate close reading and analysis and cannot simply be disconnected meditations on your topic.

Are you a little unsure what a college-level literary analysis essay looks like? Here's the full text of a fantastic paper I received last semester. Pay particular attention to its thesis statement: notice how it builds from a close reading of a single textual symbol (a mirror in Middlemarch) to a foundation for analyzing the text in a larger sense.

Topic 2: Thirteen Ways of Reading Wallace Stevens

You've probably at least heard of Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which we are sadly not reading this semester. However, we can always channel its spirit!

Pick one of the Stevens poems we are reading for class this week ("Sunday Morning" is probably ideal for this) and write thirteen short claims you can make about the poem. Example: The equation of trees with serafin and the mention of the "heavenly fellowship" of the druids at the end of "Sunday Morning" suggests not that Stevens is abnegating Christian spirituality but rather that he is displacing the focus of worship from an abstract God to a material Earth. In other words, mix a bit of close reading in with a bit of analysis, and do it thirteen times just so you can play with different ways of approaching the poem without having to worry as much about obsessively close reading or forming a single, fluid argument.