Assignment One
Passage Analysis

Due Dates: Requirements:
Working Draft—February 9th, 2011 Final Draft—October 21st, 2011	3-5 typed pages MLA Format

Objective

To construct a persuasive argument about the meaning of a brief passage from a selected work of literary criticism. The argument should be based on a close reading of the text in question and your application of the critical work to literature.

Passage Choices

The fault of the book, if fault it have, is the almost morbid intensity with which the characters are realized, and the consequent lack of sufficient geniality in the delineation. A portion of the pain of the author's own heart is communicated to the reader, and although there is great pleasure received while reading the volume, the general impression left by it is not satisfying to the artistic sense. Beauty bends to power throughout the work, and therefore the power displayed is no always beautiful. (Edwin Percy Whipple, From Graham's Magazine, 36.5 May 1850, pp. 345-346, in The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Leland S. Person. New York: Norton, 2005, pp. 239-240)

Mr. Hawthorne also mistakes entirely the effect of Christian pardon upon the interior state of the sinner. He seems entirely ignorant of the religion that can restore peace to the sinner,—true, inward peace, we mean. He would persuade us, that Hester had found pardon, and yet he shows us that she had found no inward peace. Something like this is common among popular Protestant writers, who, in speaking of great sinners among Catholics that have made themselves monks or hermits to expiate their sins by devoting themselves to prayer, and mortification, and the duties of religion, represent them as always devoured by remorse, and suffering in their interior agony almost the pains of the damned. An instance of this is the Hermit of Engeddi in Sir Walter Scott's Talisman. These men know nothing either of true remorse, or of the effect of Divine pardon. They draw from their imagination, enlightened, or rather darkened, by their own experience. (Orestes Brownson, From Brownson's Quarterly, 4, October 1850, pp. 528-532, in The Scarlet Letter, ed. Leland S. Person, New York: Norton, 2005, pp. 250-253)

But of course there are no Puritan categories for this ambiguity. There is no way for Hester to say to herself that her action had been naturally perfect and yet had introduced an element of profound social disharmony. And no way for the Puritan mind to treat her evident unwillingness fully to disown and un-will the affections and natural motions which caused the disorder as anything but evidence of unregenerated natural depravity. She evidently loves her sin, and theocrats in the business of inferring the ultimate moral quality of the self from the prevailing outward signs can reach only one conclusion. And, thus, when the Puritan establishment moves from the fact that Hester has sinned to the conclusion that she in essence is sinful, her rich and ambiguous personality has no life-saving recourse to begin a career of antinomian speculation, of internal resistance to all Puritan categories. (Michael J. Colacurcio, "The Context of The Scarlet Letter," in The Scarlet Letter, ed. Leland S. Person, New York: Norton, 2005, pp. 304-331)

If evocative power and openness to interpretation distinguish the novel from position papers of any kind, boundedness, narrative closure, and moral inflection mark fiction's difference from most discursive forms of law. In juxtaposing law and literature, writers have sometimes imaged law as the kind of fixed text that determines and closes down the process of interpretation, while literature offers an openness to interpretation derived from its imaginative complexity. Such dichotomies, though useful, erase important continuities connecting the two discourses. What is significant is that legal texts, whether statute, constitutional provision or judicial decision, are necessarily part of an ongoing process of interpretation as the language of impersonal rules and previous interpretations is applied in specific, often unforeseeable cases. (Laura Hanft Korobkin, "The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice," in The Scarlet Letter, ed. Leland S. Person, New York: Norton, 2005, pp. 250-253)

Procedure

Choose one of the above passages.
Take notes including specific details in the passage that explain its meaning and significance. Such details include word choice, comparison/contrast, punctuation, context in the larger work, critical approach and anything else the author has used in order to make his or her meaning clear to an audience. (It may not be possible to find an example of each of these elements.) Focus on those that are the most useful in explaining the meaning of the passage.
Formulate a thesis statement summing up the meaning and importance of the chosen passage and whether you find it to be a persuasive interpretation of The Scarlet Letter. This thesis will undoubtedly change as you write your paper, but at least it will give you a starting point. A good thesis is arguable rather than obvious.
Write a draft of your argument about the passage in question. Refer to specific words and phrases in the selected passage in order to support the points in your argument. You may also refer to other quotations in the larger work, as long as you maintain your focus on the passage in question.
Bring a word-processed, correctly formatted draft of this paper to class on February 9th, 2011, for peer editing. Include the entire chosen quotation at the top of the first page.
After considering feedback you received from peer editors and reconsidering your own argument, revise your paper.
Proofread your draft to identify and correct spelling and grammatical errors.
Turn in the completed final draft along with a peer-edited working draft in class on February 21st, 2011.

Close Reading

Close reading means paying careful attention to details in a written work. Since you will be looking more closely at this passage than most people who read it, your paper can offer perspectives on its meaning that will engage your audience challenging its expectations. In analyzing a brief passage, you might ask yourself the following questions:

What, literally, does the passage attempt to argue?

Where in the larger work does the passage occur?

How is this passage different from any other passage in the text?

How might the argument in this passage apply to works of literature that you have read? How does it apply to what you experienced while studying literature at various levels of your education?

What will make this paper interesting to an audience consisting of your classmates, your teacher and yourself? You will want to tell them something new—that would not otherwise have occurred to them after reading this passage.

Writing Tips

I have based the following writing tips on common difficulties that students encounter when writing papers for this class.