Essay 1: A debriefing

I have to begin bluntly: this first round of essays wasn't up to my expectations of what you could achieve. Many of the essays I've been reading for the last two weeks offered facile glosses of texts rather than substantial and creative interrogations of these texts and their place in the modernist canon. With that as my umbrella remark, I would like to explore a few compositional and analytical problems that arose at least frequently if not universally in these essays:

• Vague, uninteresting introductions. The introduction to a lit crit should (1) establish the question your essay will be answering, and (2) present a hint of why that question is interesting and/or important. Your introduction should cut directly to the text at the heart of your analysis and should focus your reader's attention on the textual crux you will be addressing. Here is an example of beautiful, direct opening sentences:

  In lecture, Professor Wolfe explained historical and political modernity in the context of the Communist Manifesto, expressing that “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relationships with his kind.” Yeats embraces this modernist concept in the poem, “When You Are Old,” by reflecting on his relationship with Maude Gonne, an Irish nationalist, who he was in love with for the majority of his life.

  The writer here begins with a clear statement of a specific context (modernity; relationships), and, in her second sentence, immediately identifies the poem with which she will be working and situates it precisely in that context.

• Three-headed monsters. The three-headed form is the deadly legacy of the five-paragraph essay, in which your three body paragraphs all grow out of your main thesis but have no real connection to one another. This structure is forgivable in exam essays, for which you have only 30 minutes to craft a response to difficult questions, but I expect essays which you have two weeks to put together to be a little more tightly integrated. That is to say, there should be a visible accumulation of information in your body paragraphs: your ideas should build off one another, and your topic sentences should reveal specific, interesting relationships between your readings.

  One unfortunately common manifestation of the three-headed monster in this essay was the line-by-line analysis of poetry. If you decide to go through a poem in order, you should be looking closely at the way the sequence of ideas in that poem adds to its meaning; usually, it is far more effective to prosecute a reading thematically -- beginning, say, with rhetoric and symobilsm, proceeding to formal idiosyncracies, and ending with an evaluation of the poem's ideological context and argument.

• Stylistical clumsiness or laziness. Although I welcome conversational prose, I expect the structure and tone of your essay to reveal the care you have taken to think through the text you are reading and your own analysis of that text; essays that make it sound like you are first thinking through your argument at the exact moment you are writing it down don't impress me. I'm hesitant to suggest an exact way you might distribute the time you spend writing essays, but at a minimum you should spend an hour closely interrogating the stanza on which you will be writing, and then you should spend another hour brainstorming, mapping, or outlining the argument you will make about that stanza. If you do end up discovering new readings in the middle of writing your essay -- and you almost inevitably will -- work to integrate these new ideas smoothly into your larger argument by previewing them in your introduction and adding linking sentences to connect new ideas to older ones.

• Don't listen to what we say, just listen to how we say it. Lecture and discussion aren't there to dump information into your brains: literary analysis isn't memorizable knowledge; it is a learned skill. Essays shouldn't echo the readings that Prof. Wolfe presents in lecture or that I suggest in discussion; if you decide to build your argument off of these readings, carefully position them as mere starting points and carry your argument far beyond their bounds.

  Some of the best essays I read this time around essentially said "This is how you / Prof. Wolfe read this text; I think you're wrong and here's why." One of the most fruitful things to practice when you are first learning literary analysis -- and perhaps this will be the next hebdomadal topic -- is how to argue with others' readings of texts.

• Keeping things clear: apostrophes, commas, and paragraph breaks. I'm not a huge stickler for grammar, honestly, although it is generally to your advantage to pay attention to the mechanics of writing if only to be sure that your reader understands what you're saying. That said, I saw some of the most egregious offenses against apostrophes in these essays: if my link to Bob the Angry Flower's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe hasn't helped you out, you might want to grab a copy of Strunk & White's Elements of Style from the library and look at their section on apostrophes. And commas. And paragraph breaks.

• Spelling authors' names correctly: really, this should be the easy part. Eliot. One L. Seriously. Maybe 75% of you spelled his name Elliot, and this is exactly what happened last semester when I was teaching George Eliot. Why does this happen? Is there some famous pop culture Elliot whom I should know about?