Assignment Two
Criticism and Literature

Objective

To identify a key passage in John Keats's poetry or William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and analyze two different critical approaches to it.

Overview

The goal of this course is to examine the history of literary criticism and to apply it to the study of literature. In the first assignment, you had the opportunity to examine a particular passage from Lynn's Texts and Contexts. Now you will have an opportunity to consider approaches to Keats or Faulkner.

Procedure

1. Choose a passage from Keats's poetry or As I Lay Dying that interests you and that will allow you to elaborate the most effectively on how you prefer to analyze literature.

2. Read through at least two critical works applicable to that passage and take notes on the salient points as well as similarities and differences between related works.

3. Formulate a thesis statement that interprets the passage from the literary work and that allows you to consider ideas from the two chosen critical works.

4. Break the argument down into between two and four subtopics that are likewise arguable (three, of course, is the standard number of subtopics). Think about the most logical arrangement of subtopics for the structure of your argument.

5. Write a draft of your argument. Go back and reconsider your thesis statement. Revise it.

6. Bring the draft to class on November 20, 2012, for peer-editing. If you cannot attend class on that day, let me know. You can regain some of the points lost to an absence on peer-editing day if you can exchange papers with another classmate and edit it before turning in the final draft.

7. Be sure to include a Works Cited List on the last page of the paper.

8. Be sure the paper is at least six pages long. Six pages is the absolute minimum length, and papers under six pages will lose some points. That is, please write six full pages of text (not six pieces of paper with some writing on them).

9. Revise and proofread the paper over the weekend and turn in the final draft on December 4, 2012.

Writing Tips

I have based many of these tips on my comments to you on your previous papers.

1. In most cases, your first thesis statement will not be arguable enough. Keep revising it until you have a statement that truly arguable and truly interesting. Do not hesitate to revise it after you have written a complete draft of the paper. The thesis statement should directly address your chosen works.

2. Organize your paper around the thesis statement and be sure each part of your argument bears some clear relationship to the thesis statement. Do not leave it to your reader to figure out what each subtopic is doing in your paper.

   Turn each subtopic into a unified paragraph with supporting evidence in the form of quotations. If a paragraph gets too long, break it down into two paragraphs, but make careful use of transitional phrases to keep the logic clear to the reader.

3. Follow MLA format when using quotations or paraphrases to support the argument:

   1. Use blended quotations for quotations under four lines and block quotations for quotations over four lines. Remember the tricky punctuation rules for each type of quotation. If you have questions about this, ask me or look it up in a style manual such as Keys for Writers.

   2. Write a list of Works Cited at the end of the paper. The last name of the author comes first, then the title of the selection. Then, if applicable, the title of the book in which you found the work (i. e.: Keats's Poetry and Prose). Notice that you should italicize the name of a book whenever you mention it.

      Examples:

      Brooks, Cleanth. "Odyssey of the Bundrens." William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, CT: Yale U. P., 1963. 141-166. Rpt. in As I Lay Dying. Ed. Michael Gorra. New York: Norton, 2010. 248-262. Print.

      Homans, Margaret. "Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats." Studies in Romanticism 29 (Fall 1990): 341-370. Rpt. in Keats's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. New York: Norton, 2009. 563-572. Print.

      Keats, John. "Ode to Psyche." Keats's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. New York: Norton, 2009. 463-465. Print.

      Alphabetize works cited according to the author's last name. There are many other rules for MLA format for peculiar instances that will come up, but the above examples should serve as useful models for the vast majority of cases for this class. Do not hesitate to look these rules up. The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University offers an extremely helpful collection of guidelines for using the MLA Format, and you can find it at

      "http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/"

      Go to that website and click on "MLA Formatting and Style Guide" in the right-hand column.

4. Grammar points:

   1. Refer to events in a work of literature in the present tense. This may sound strange at first, but it is the convention for addressing literature. Notice that we tend to follow this rule in class discussion.

   2. Avoid contractions in academic writing. Contractions produce a casual tone and academic work tends to be more formal. The same rule applies to business letters. So, replace they're with they are and replace don't with do not.

   3. A grammatically complete sentence has at least one subject and one verb. If it is missing a subject or a verb, it is a sentence fragment (unless it is a command, but papers do not normally use commands). Sentence fragments are sometimes acceptable, but only if you mean to use them.

   4. The word it's (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of it is. The word its (without an apostrophe) is the possessive of it.

   5. Comma rules are complicated, so look them up in a style manual if you had trouble with them on the previous paper. A comma splice is what happens when you try to separate two grammatically complete sentences with only a comma. Comma splices are bad. Avoid them.

      Example:

      WRONG: Critics attacked Keats's working-class background, his father was an ostler.

      CORRECT: Critics attacked Keats's working-class background because his father was an ostler.

      ALSO CORRECT: Critics attacked Keats's working-class background. His father was an ostler.

   6. It is acceptable, on occasion, to use the first-person singular pronoun—I, me, my. However, in many cases, doing so makes your sentence redundant. Everything in your paper is something that you have thought. Thus, writing "I think" at the start of sentence adds nothing to that sentence.