Close reading, as we have learned, is the foundation of literary criticism.  For this essay, you need to employ your close reading skills in the service of an argument you wish to make about one of the first three novels we are reading this semester. You will construct an argument that explains one or more aspects (other than plot) of one of these novels — characterization, narrative, symbolism and other figurative language, structure, and so on — and its relationship to the novel’s theme.  Your focus should be on the inner workings of these works, the hows and whys, not the whats and whos.

No matter which novel you choose, the text you are working with is far too extensive to be examined fully in a paper of this length. One can conceivably perform a close reading of an entire poem; one cannot close read a novel.  All that one can do is define a topic, find the passages relevant to it, and read those passages painstakingly — while understanding the novel as a whole well enough, of course, that your specifically focused reading does not distort it.  Narrowing your focus and choosing relevant passages to quote are thus key to this assignment.

Close reading of portions of the text is essential to this essay.  However, you may also want to consider one or more kinds of context that you think are relevant.  If you do, just make sure that your examination of the context is the means to an end, not an end in itself.  In other words, your essay must still focus on the text and use context in order to help your reader understand it; the context must not become the focus of the essay.

Again, to help you with the process of this essay, you will submit a tentative thesis and several proposed quotations with explanations of how you plan to use them significantly before the actual essay is due so you can receive feed-back from me prior to submitting your work for a grade.

Again, a strong thesis, explicit argumentation, and carefully chosen support are key to this assignment. One could almost say that the narrower the thesis for this essay, the better.

You should assume your readers have a college-level vocabulary and own a dictionary (thus you do not have to define words, unless the meaning the author intends is not the usual one), and that they have read the relevant work and understand its plot.  You are writing an interpretive argument, not a plot summary, so do not waste time recounting what happens in the novel. instead, quote passages and discuss not only what they mean, but how the way that the author expresses those ideas reinforces or recapitulates that message

While you need to be even more selective in your quotations this time — these works are both obviously much longer than any option for the first essay — you should be just as diligent in grounding your arguments in quotations from the text.  I recommend that every paragraph in your essay (with the exceptions of the introduction and conclusion) contain at least one quotation from the text.

You may use secondary sources, provided you quote and cite them properly.  However, you must use them, not submit to them.  Quote and engage with a critical work by expanding on it, arguing with it, or applying it to a portion of the text the original critic did not; do not merely parrot what someone else has said.  Special rule:  you may not quote any critical work more than twice, and only one of those quotations can be long enough to be set-off.  Failing to cite critical quotations or quotations from the work itself will result in a low grade (no higher than .8) on the Style and Format portion of the evaluation.  Failing to include a Work Cited entry for every source will result in a .1 penalty to that grade.  See the Quotations and Citations Guidelines for help with formatting quotations and citations.

The paper may be either open- or closed-form.  Either way, you should have an introduction to the paper in which you establish either the issue you are exploring (open-form) or your thesis (closed-form).  You should not quote the work in your first paragraph. Again, the conclusion of your paper either states the thesis (open-form) or summarizes your argument and re-connects it to the thesis (closed-form).  Just as you should not quote in your first paragraph, you should also not be quoting and analyzing the poem in your conclusion.

See the Thesis Statements, Form, Introductions, and Conclusions and Conventions for Papers in the Humanities pages for help with various aspects of literary essays, including giving your essay an appropriate title.  Review the Types of Context Relevant to Literary Works to see what kinds of context might be relevant to the work you choose.  Follow the Format Rules and Quotation and Citation Guidelines exactly.  Carefully check your work against The Inexcusable Error List and Advice on Cutting Words.

By 8:00 p.m.the day marked on the Class Calendar, send me a Word document (doc or docx file extension, please) including

1) a tentative thesis statement (not just a topic but an actual thesis)
2) three properly formatted and cited quotations from the text that you plan to use in your essay; these may be any length, but each quotation must help you support one specific point
3) one sentence for each of the quotations explaining what specific point you believe that quotation will help you support; obviously, this point must have some connection to the essay’s thesis
4) if you plan to make use of any context in your essay, at least one quotation from a work that you think will help you make your point  

The due date varies according to the option chosen as shown above.  Please send your essay as a Word document (doc or docx file extension, please) to me directly by 8:00 p.m. on the day it is due. 

Between 1800 and 2200 words of your own work, which in 12 pt. Times New Roman with 1" margins means approximately 7 full pages of your own writing.  Note that the word count should not include quotations, the Works Cited, the title and header, nor any other means of artificially extending the paper’s apparent length.  The actual paper length should be 2000-2750 words due to all the quotations, which need to be plentiful.  Use the Word Count function to calculate the count with and without quotations (but please leave out the header and Work Cited) and put the results at the bottom of the essay.

The quality of your understanding of and insights into the work and your use of quotations to support your ideas will determine your Content score.  I will multiply that score by a Style and Format score that will be determined by the quality of your writing, including  your organization, grammar, style, concision, and adherence to the rules of citation and format.  The Content Score (presuming the essay is of the proper length and responds to the assignment) can range from F (55) to A+ (100).  The Style and Format Score can range from (unacceptable work) to 1.1 (exceptional work). Thus your final score for this essay can be as high as 110% of full credit.  Failing to send me your Preparatory Work on time will result in a two-grade deduction on the final essay grade.