Essay-writing

Choose a topic

• Identify a knowledge deficit (“no one has looked at x before”)

• Identify a shortcoming in the scholarship (“scholars have interpreted x inadequately”)

• Identify a controversy (“scholars have debated this issue…”)

• Identify a rich, compelling, mysterious aspect of the text that demands to be interpreted (“the trope of x is ubiquitous in his work…..What does it mean?”)

Find out about the critical conversation

• Using the MLA Bibliography database, search for terms key to your topic, i.e. the title or author of the text, and a theme or issue

• Examine the full entries for each relevant article, deciding among them, based on their keywords, which will be the most useful to you.

• Print or photocopy these articles.

Read and Summarize the Critical Conversation

• Take notes that summarize the key arguments of the articles, especially if you disagree or want to complicate these arguments

• Do the articles indicate a “knowledge deficit”, a “controversy”, a “shortcoming of the scholarship” or inspire you to address a mysterious aspect of the text itself?

• Most recent scholarship on [ ] argues that [ ] but no one has argued [ ] (knowledge deficit)

• Although scholars have outlined the significance of [ ], they have missed the importance of [ ]. (shortcoming)

• Scholars are divided on the significance of [ ]. Psychoanalytic critic Joanne Blow says [ ] while Hawthorne scholar John Doe suggests that [ ]”. (controversy)

• I would like to investigate the significance of the recurring tropes of [ ]. (mysterious aspect of the text)

Establish yourself in relation to the Critics

Disagreement • Rather than read [ ] as Joanne Blow does, as a

“blahblahblah”, I will argue that …..

Qualified agreement• While Joanne Blow makes several good points, she does

not go far enough in [ ]…. OR I will build on Smith’s thesis…

A compromise position between two extremes• While scholars such as x and y have viewed Benito

Cereno as upholding racial hierarchies, and scholars such as a and b have argued that it rejects these hierarchies, I will argue [a third way].