Prof. McMahand
English Composition
Constructing
a Nonfiction Analysis
Below is a set of guidelines and
stipulations you must follow in building your analysis of nonfiction.
Your heading should follow MLA rules (check your WR handbook).
Your title must contain a brief, condensed description of your thesis
idea, the author’s name, and the nonfiction’s title. Since the nonfiction is a short work, put its
title in quotation marks.
Constructing
the Introductory (Opening) Paragraph
Begin with
general remarks about the subject. Give
the framing ideas that contextualize the author, the essay, and its
publication. Mention the author’s full
name, the title of the nonfiction work, and comment on the position of the work
in the writer’s canon, the period of literature, and the larger canon(s) to
which it belongs. You may also remark on the essay’s devices—its use of logos, ethos,
pathos, or any other rhetorical technique you find interesting. Lastly, posit your thesis, which must link
theme and context or theme and technique.
An Example:
In “Minimal Selves” and “New
Ethnicities,” two seminal postcolonial texts, Stuart Hall addresses the
fluctuating state of race relations in present-day British culture. Underlying much of Hall’s
description of the two phases of black British politics—the first characterized
by collective resistance and the latter marked by political difference—is a provocative
sense of irresolution. How does one win
social justice without totalizing the identity of the oppressed? Can there not
exist a middle space, one that combines resistance and hybridity? No less
relevant to this discussion is the recognition of those individuals and groups
that purposely seek sameness against a perceived onslaught of hybrid or
hegemonic influences. Black British
politics in the 1970s used solidarity to strengthen its resistance. The present loss of solidarity has occasioned
new anxieties about identity and has generated new exertions to essentialize
black culture.
Constructing
Body Paragraphs
The first body
paragraph should clearly and thoughtfully explain the position of the essay in
its literary era. Next, you should
explore the ways in which the essay illustrates its points
All body paragraphs must then conform
to the following
pattern: The Three Is: Identify, Illustrate, and
Interpret.
Identify the claim: Begin with
an argumentative statement (a
smaller claim) that
refers back to a part of
the thesis.
Illustrate: Provide examples (textual evidence from
the nonfiction work) to support the claim you have
just
made.
Interpret: Offer an interpretation
of the evidence you have given. This process may mean
drawing upon a
discussion of other rhetorical strategies or points in the essay.
An example:
In these two essays, Hall discusses just how these
paradigms continually overlap, one informing (and distressing) the other. Nevertheless, in the short piece “Cultural
Identity and Diaspora,” Hall boldly tips his hat toward the second phase as
“the fate of the modern world” (401). His statement here highlights his general
attitude in “Minimal Selves” and “New Ethnicities” and the hyperbolic strain of
his argument. Both the point he makes
and the rhetoric he employs stress that to return en masse to a base of
solidarity agendas would enact a willful disregard to the new dialogic space
Hall perceives opening up in Great Britain and elsewhere around the world. At the same time, two critical forces
challenge the formation of cultural dialogism: the persistence of black
essentialism and the pirating away, or co-opting, of that essentialist black
culture.
Other Uses for Body Paragraphs
You may also use the body paragraphs to evaluate the
quality, effectiveness, and density of the author’s ideas. Does the author
provide a fair, convincing, provocative, and representative depiction of the
literary era or of cultural issues?
An example:
How, then, do some blacks uncouple themselves
from fixed notions of race, while others do not, or do not as readily? Because of these conversations and encounters
abroad and here in the States, I am inclined to attribute black fixedness to
boundaries of class and to anxious struggles for identity control. Even while largely disenfranchised and
confined to the lower echelons of a class-based society, African descended
cultures in Britain and America have begun to reject nationalistic ideas of
non-white identity as essentially “other.”
Hall begins “Minimal Selves” commenting on London’s black youth: “[t]hey
look as if they own the territory” (114).
Classic Marxist theorists remind us, as Hall himself admits, that these
people, as marginalized subjects, can make no material claim on the territory. What is left to them, then, but their own identities,
their very bodies, which they control and ultimately possess?
Hall’s essays privilege the politics of difference over essentialism, describing the development of a new space for a politics of dispersed identity and contingent closures of the self (“Minimal Selves” 117-18). Ultimately, I agree with Hall’s assessment that this new ethnic specificity and conjuncture offer an opportunity for change in Britain’s present and future cultural landscape. But hiccups are bound to interrupt the breathing in and breathing out of new political life. Even in this time of revolutionary identity, basic economic barriers continue to threaten cross-cultural dialogue. Deep, substantive cultural exchange happens slowly and without any recognizable continuity of movement.
Constructing a Concluding Paragraph
Your conclusion needs to begin smoothly without the perfunctory
“In summary” or “In summation” phrases. Begin the paragraph as you would any
other body paragraphs. Recapitulate in
different words your thesis and major points, and, if possible, add a new path
of interpretation or discussion.
An example:
A two-fold
trajectory, involving racial division and ethnic exchange, seems to be in
motion: white British transmutability and the loss of a solid, categorically
resistant black identity. The expressions “keeping it real” and “It’s a black
thing” illustrate attempts at mobilizing solidarity, but they also persist in
reducing identity to prescribed ideas of ethnic validity and correctness. While
whiteness, in its transmutations into non-white ethnicities, indicates
recognition of and exchange with other cultures, the shift reads too often like
reassertions of stereotype. Any encoding
or performance of other cultures that inherently depends on fetishized imagery
and manner will inevitably yield a closed and truncated cultural dialogue.
Be sure to read and reread your work before turning it in. Look for your usual errors in grammar,
mechanics, and citations.