Analytical Essay I
Three Ways of Looking at a Document

Write an five-to-seven-page essay analyzing a single document. Use and cite David Levy's book to talk about your chosen document not simply in terms of how it is written, designed and produced--the material or technological aspects that most people would first see--but as it functions in three ways:

• to claim possession,
• to express individual or group identity, and
• to memorialize some social experience.

Remember that you can choose a non-conventional document to consider. As David Levy points out, even an antelope in a zoo is a document because of what zoos do. What makes something a document isn't what it is, but how it works on people, consciously or not. You can also choose a document that you yourself created or have appropriated.

Be sure to quote and cite Levy using MLA format.

Claiming Possession

One of the important functions of documents is to enable us to claim possession of space, things or time. Think of the Door Plate you created, or the UMD T-shirt you bought, or a letter to the editor appearing in the newspaper protesting the closing of the local high school. If documents are "talking things," as Levy says, then what these things often say for us is "this is mine," or "here's our place," or "Property of..."

Identity

Identity is not at matter of who you really are ("being"), but how you are identified by others. Thus, identity isn't static and eternal, but perpetually being performed and negotiated socially.

These talking things that we create, buy or otherwise appropriate do much to establish our identities socially. Think of Levy's story about the commencement speech he made in college. To start with, the idea of David Levy created in the speech wasn't exactly the real David Levy--the existential crisis was mostly a youthful affectation, an imitation of a Dostoyevsy narrator. Then, as news of the speech and its effect spread through newspapers and radio, the David Levy of the speech came to represent still more identities: The New Generation, or These Spoiled Kids Today (depending on whether you got the story from the New York Times or the Paul Harvey show).

What starts out being an expression of an individual identity shades into a group identity and visa versa.

Memory

The power of documents, according to Levy, lies in the fact that they stay fixed. Life flows on, always changing, inexpressibly complex in its many layers and surfaces, but documents give us a snapshot (visual, verbal or material) of a single moment in time from a certain perspective.

In this sense, a souvenir rock that a tourist picks up on the Lakewalk is a way of documenting a memory. It's thing that will sit on the fireplace mantle at home and speak of that personal experience.

On the other hand, Levy's commencement speech comes out of a certain moment not only in his own life, but in the social history of the U.S.: as Levy remembers, "It was 1971 and the country was in turmoil. The Vietnam Way, racial unrest, and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had created a poisoned, oppositional climate" (xix). Even if the speech doesn't explicitly mention these events, the tone and substance of the speech resonates with the vibrations of the time. If you don't note these vibrations, you might think Levy was just a jerk.

What Interesting about Writing This Essay

• You're thinking about documents in a larger sense, looking beyond what the average person would see, expanding the definition. You might make a lot out of a little.
• You're looking at the same document through three lenses, and coming up with three different understandings.
• The essay is a chance to think about the context of a document, its social life.
• Since you're writing one essay and not three, you'll want to find a way to introduce and conclude the essay to bring together the three perspectives into a fuller, more informed understanding of how the document functions.