Essay 1 – ENGL 4165

Spring 2012

The first assignment is a literary analysis of Graham Swift’s Waterland. It must be 6-8 full pages, stapled, typed, double-spaced, in 12 point Times New Roman font, with one- inch margins. Use correct MLA format, include a Works Cited page, and proofread carefully.

You are not required to do research for this paper, but if you choose to incorporate secondary materials, you must credit them accurately. You may find Linda Hutcheon’s “The Pastime of Past Time” (the reading for Thurs. Jan. 26) particularly useful.

You can access the departmental grading rubric for upper-level courses here: http://www.westga.edu/~engdept/fr/Ruby.doc

I encourage you to visit office hours to consult about the paper, at any stage of its development and as often as you wish. Bring drafts, partial drafts, notes, whatever you’ve got.

Topics:

You are free to devise your own topic or to select one of the following prompts. You may also combine more than one prompt. In either case, you must develop your own argument, supported by persuasive textual evidence and insightful analysis. Since the prompts listed here are very broad, you will need to narrow them down significantly in order to assert a claim appropriate for a 6-8-page paper.

1. Analyze the novel’s portrayal of the relationship between fiction and history. This could involve a number of approaches, including:

-          How does Swift complicate conventional assumptions about what history is or does?

-          How does he blur the boundary between history and fiction, and to what end(s)?

-          What are the functions, or goals, of narrating history? To what extent are these goals contradictory? To what extent do they feed one another? Are they ultimately valuable or harmful (or both)? Are they achievable?

-          etc.

2. Identify and analyze an opposition significant to the novel (ex. “fairy tale” vs. …; “Here and Now” vs. …). You might consider the following:

- Are there only two terms in the opposition, or is one concept, such as “fairy tale,” opposed to multiple terms?

- Does the novel privilege one term over the other? Consistently?

- Do the terms remain opposites, or do the distinctions between them collapse?

- What does Swift’s treatment of this opposition signify? How is it important to the novel as a whole?

- etc.

3. Drawing on the homework assignment you did for Tues. Jan. 17, analyze the significance of a recurring term or a series of recurring synonyms in the novel.

4. As noted above, you are welcome (indeed, encouraged) to devise your own essay topic on the novel.

Important dates (note: failure to meet these requirements in full and on time will result in forfeiting the option to revise and resubmit after the essay has been graded):

Tuesday January 31: Notes due. I will collect these and return them to you with comments.

By this point, you will need to have chosen a topic and to have started developing your ideas. At the top of the notes, state your working thesis, or at least the key question(s) that you are hoping to answer (this should not be simply a restatement of the essay prompt, but at the very least, a thoughtful reframing or narrowing).

Type out a minimum of 5 passages from the novel that you think will be central to your argument. Follow up each quotation with at least 5 numbered ideas (these could be tentative interpretations of specific language, questions the passage raises, contradictions it suggests, theoretical links, brilliant insights—anything that might be useful to you as you move in the direction of formulating an argument). These numbered “ideas” should be articulated in complete sentences, and might even stretch into paragraphs.

Tuesday February 7: You must bring a typed draft of minimally 6 full pages (double-spaced). This will be a workshopping day.

Thursday February 9: Essay due.