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Hello, over the years I have lurked in TL, I was very impressed with the vast pool of knowledge that the TL community possess. I am from a science background (3rd year biol major) and have contributed over time topics revelevant to my field. However, this year I registered for an english literature class (late 18th century literature). The course was more than I expected, I did mediocre in the midterm. And now I have a final paper due in march 28th. Specifically, this is a final term paper worth 50% of the grade, but I have no idea of what to write on.
The instructions are:
Choose two novels from the syllabus and write an essay focusing on one of the following:
1. Characterization and style.
2. Literary modes: didacticism, the Gothic, etc.
3. Historical developments: i.e. the “war of ideas” of the 1790s.
Your essay should make both comparisons and contrasts between the two novels in question. You must consult and cite between three and five secondary sources. The paper needs to be 10-12 pages.
The books are:
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (Broadview)
Frances Burney, Evelina (Broadview)
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Broadview)
Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Broadview)
William Godwin, Caleb Williams (Broadview)
Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Broadview)
I have read books about how to write better essays, but I am still not sure what write. I looked up books on stylistics, but it was mostly about analyzing poems. I talked to the TA, but she recommended me to get a dicitionary of literary terms that I already have.
Could anyone give me some ideas about what's expected in a university level course essay about literature? And how to approach these topics.
In addition, any book recommendations would be helpful too.
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If your essay is open-ended - i.e. if you have to set your own question or thesis instead of responding to something assigned - probably the best place to start is to look at existing academic papers about these authors and works. Use JSTOR and Google Scholar. Some of the reading will be very dry, but it will help you brainstorm different approaches to the material.
Jot down the references: you never know if even minor points that the authors of these papers write will come in handy.
I was an honours English grad in a past life, and my approach to open-ended essay writing always looked something like this:
1. Browse existing academic papers, commentaries, and essays about the material to see what's been done and what hasn't.
2. Think of a pattern or theme that I want to look for in the text.
3. Skim the text (hope you've done your readings already!), mine quotes, jot down page numbers.
For many of my essays, what I basically did was take a list of quotations in my word processor, sort them into an order that makes for a coherent narrative, and turn them into paragraphs that explain what's going on. This works really well because if your explications of the selected quotations are good - i.e. if you defend them well and back them up with the secondary sources - it comes off as careful, meticulous close reading.
For 18th century material, you can get a lot of mileage out of looking at form and structure, because by now the structural conventions of the time (and the historical reasons they developed the way they did) are now well known and widely studied. Maybe less so for novels than for poetry, though.
If you're working with the Broadview editions, there's probably a great deal of supplementary material you can look at, no? Read them, pick out interesting points, and follow the citations or look up the authors who wrote the commentaries and introductions.
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4th year specialization in English here. Just make a thesis and prove it over and over for 10 pages and you will get a good mark. Try to structure it so that you have about three major reasons your thesis is true, and then spend the entire essay finding proof from the texts and from secondary sources that support those reasons.
Profs like close reading (in other words, analysis of why a specific word or literary device is used over another), but since you are being asked for sources (imo really annoying, but it happens), you'll need to draw on historical context to also help prove your claims.
I hope this is not too simple/vague. There really isn't much of a trick to writing essays. You just want to have a thesis which is interesting (ie not obviously true) and then go about proving it with as many examples from the text as you can. People usually lose marks by not elaborating enough on their examples, or making claims and not particularly proving them. Especially if you're the type of person who uses phrases like 'human nature' which is kind of a meaningless thing to say, that is where professors will groan. However, if you're specific and you can prove what you're trying to argue, you will get a decent mark. Obviously spelling and grammar are worth marks too, so check it over.
Ok, I hope this helps.
PS: It's called Arts for a reason, so there isn't really a step by step mechanical way to write a great essay. Literary criticism is itself an artistic skill, in that you're pulling things from the text the author probably didn't even realise were there... If you are creative you can do well in this, but it is certainly something that demands critical thought, as apposed to regurgitation of information. Do your best to show your prof that you've thought about the text and have invented something meaningful about it. Otherwise, it will be really bland.
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The best way to think about lit-crit essays, if you're fairly new to them, is that they're always looking at a mix of form/structure and history/context. (There's a lot of infighting and fashion-trending in literary studies about how the balance between the two should swing, but for the purposes of what you're doing you don't need to worry about this too much.) The more fluidly you make the two approaches click, the better.
To give you some more concrete examples here:
Let's say you wanted to tackle topic #3 - the one about the war of ideas in the 1790s. Evidently, the context here is the English reaction to what was going on in France. From an outlook of history and context, you absolutely want to look at whether the authors have a certain political position or bias that comes through in their body of work. With Samuel Johnson, for instance, you could look at some of the things he wrote in his famous dictionary, where he was known to write certain definitions as political jabs at people he didn't like and make snarky jokes about the Scots. (Yes, I know Johnson predates the revolution, so maybe this isn't the best example.)
Then you can look at the specific primary texts that you're supposed to write on, focus on very specific word choices, allusions, puns, and jokes, and talk about how they fit into the big picture of what that author was doing. From that point on, you can zoom out a step further and talk about how that author was like or unlike the other ones on your list, and how they all fit into the big picture.
Or let's say you wanted to look at #2 - modes like the didactic or the Gothic. Here are some things that would be helpful to know: who did these authors read? Who were they aware of? Which stuff was already popular at the time that they were writing? And who was their audience (i.e. who read their work)? For instance, if you're talking about English Gothic fiction after 1790, you probably want see if the author was interacting with the works of Ann Radcliffe (like The Mysteries of Udolpho), who was the blockbuster Gothic novelist of her day. It might sound like a lot of work, but skimming secondary sources and checking out their footnotes makes it easier, I promise.
Don't get trapped in the high-school mode of thinking that lit-crit is about looking for "hidden symbols" and so forth. The allusions, references, and historical jokes were usually out in the open for the readers of the time. Instead, think about the literary text as a piece of evidence. Evidence for what? It could be a lot of things: social prejudices, political movements, transformations in literary form.
As far as expectations go - seriously, papers on JSTOR and introductions or historical notes in good editions of the classics are the best place to look for inspiration. This isn't to say that you're expected to write at a PhD level, but scholarly criticism will give you a rough sketch of what a literary argument looks like.
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Thank you so much for the responses. I will probably be doing a literary mode compare and contrast between the 2 Gothic novels. The reason being, I have alot of books on the gothics. I have already read them ,but I don't get their points. =( But I will reread them with more vigor tomorrow.
Thank you Tanstaafl for the recommendation of the broadview analysis. I am hitting myself for forgetting this point. My first priority is to read these analysis, jot down quotes as you mentioned. Then I will hunt down these authors in the broadview edition that gave analysis for the text and find if they written anything else related on the subject.
Next, I will look up the journals (JSTOR?), and find relevant sources and also get an idea of what how an argument should look like.
Evidence for what? It could be a lot of things: social prejudices, political movements, transformations in literary form. Since I am writing about a literary mode, what would be an example of an argument that I can support for? That's what I am really confused about.
If your essay is open-ended - i.e. if you have to set your own question or thesis instead of responding to something assigned - probably the best place to start is to look at existing academic papers about these authors and works. Use JSTOR and Google Scholar. Some of the reading will be very dry, but it will help you brainstorm different approaches to the material.
I think my essay is open-ended. I wrote in the op, all the instructions given to me. So this means I have to make up my own question and then answer it with my evidence found. What type of questions should I ask in a literary essay?
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EPT
