4106: Fiction as a Genre

Essay Assignment # 1

Wednesday, Sept. 9: Notes due. By now you should have settled on a topic and begun to sketch out ideas. Your “notes” (which must be typed) should include at least five passages from the novel that you think will be central to the questions you are exploring. 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 a paragraph. You’ll be turning these in; I’ll return them with comments.

Rough draft due Monday, Sept. 21: must be typed, double-spaced, and at least 4 pages long). In-class workshop.

Optional Outline: due Wed. Sept. 16. If you choose, you may turn in a detailed outline that maps out the logical progression of your argument; I’ll give you guidelines for structuring it. If you submit an outline, you’ll get it back with comments. It’s up to you.

Final draft due Wednesday, Sept. 28:  Turn in both drafts (failure to submit a satisfactory rough draft will lower your overall grade), a works cited page (MLA style), and a title page. Your title should be meaningful and specific; strive for originality. Use a standard 12 pt. font (I prefer Times New Roman or Palatino) and standard margins; there should be no fewer than 250 words per page (use the word count function to check this if you’re unsure). Manuscripts should be typed, double-spaced, and stapled fastened with a paper clip. Make sure your pages are numbered. Your paper must be at least five full pages; longer is fine. Proofread carefully.

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Your first essay will be a short (5 page) analytical essay. It is not a research paper, although you are welcome to introduce outside sources if you like. If you are so inclined, I encourage you to choose your own topic in accordance with the guidelines provided below. 

Keep the larger ideas of the course in mind as you develop your topic. Once you have an idea, bring it into focus as carefully as possible: there’s only so much you can accomplish in five pages, and it’s usually more effective to choose a narrowly defined topic you can explore in depth than a broad idea you can only touch the surface of. Most importantly, make sure you formulate a complex and compelling thesis—an argument that structures your entire essay. Work closely with whatever text(s) you choose, incorporating relevant quotations and careful textual analysis.

The topics offered below are fairly broad, so they allow you considerable freedom to shape your own angle and focus. The topics are meant to be suggestive, not prescriptive.

Suggested Topics

1. Jane Austen’s Emma abounds with representations of the act of reading—whether the literal scrutiny of written documents or the act of reading or interpreting faces, motives, situations. Choosing a key scene or a group of related scenes, analyze the function of this trope in the novel: how does it enact or reflect the novel’s larger concerns?  How might it position us as readers? How might it comment upon the relatively new genre of the novel and how it might be read or misread?

2.      In their influential book The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out that “[m]any critics have. . .noticed duplicity in the ‘happy endings’ of Austen’s novels in which she brings her couples to the brink of bliss in such haste, or with such unlikely coincidences, or with such sarcasm that the entire message seems undercut: the implication remains that a girl without the aid of a benevolent narrator would never find a way out of either her mortifications or her parents’ house” (169). Analyze the ending of Emma in this light, either illuminating how such duplicity operates in this particular novel through a close and insightful reading of the text or arguing against this way of characterizing Emma’s conclusion and offering an alternative way of reading the ending.

3. Michael McKeon argues that as the novel emerged at last as a stable genre, questions of “truth” and “virtue” became increasingly intertwined. He suggests that we can “conceive these correlations of truth and virtue also in terms of narrative form and content, so that the way the story is told, and what it is that is told, are implicitly understood to bear an integral relation to each other” (397). Examine one sense in which these seemingly separate concerns—form and content—are intertwined in Emma. How does this shape the novel itself, and what it ultimately has to say?
4. In our class discussions, we have repeatedly arrived at the conclusion that, in Emma, Austen leaves her small world essentially as we found in on the very first page: the social order, it seems, remains all too intact, in terms of both class and gender. Is there a way you might argue against this? Find a way to show that the novel poses more of a threat to the rigid social structure that organizes Highbury (and, by extension, early nineteenth-century England) than it seems. Is there some subtle shift in authority, whether on the level of class or of gender?

You’re welcome to be as adventurous as you like within the parameters of each topic; the questions listed are intended to be suggestive, not to provide a strict blueprint for your essay. You may focus on some and ignore others, or pose provocative questions of your own. Try to follow up on whatever has captured your intellectual interest or curiosity so far this semester. If you want to run a topic by me, feel free to email it to me or to come to my office. I’ll also be happy to discuss your drafts with you at any stage.