Literary criticism requires us to engage not only with primary source material (a poem, novel, or play, for example), but also with the discourse (conversation) around that source material. This secondary material may help provide context or offer other interpretations of a text against which our own readings take shape. For this assignment, you will practice finding, reading, and using a work of criticism in your own writing about a text. The primary purpose of the assignment is not to offer your own interpretation of a primary text, but to clearly convey the essence of another writer’s argument.
Find a peer-reviewed essay on one of the texts that we have read in class this semester: the short fiction by Kincaid, Saunders, Davis, Carver, Bambara, Barthelme; or the play by Beckett. You can search for such an essay using the electronic databases available through the UMass Library. Project Muse and JSTOR are repositories for academic journals and you can easily search their holdings by title and author to find critical essays on these texts. Please pick a scholarly essay that focuses on your chosen text, not a review of the story/play, and not one that only addresses the text briefly. (You will find many more essays on Samuel Beckett’s play than the short stories, so you may want to focus your energies in that direction.) Read the essay and summarize its contents in a 2-3 page paper.
This paper should do the following:
-The first paragraph should introduce the main thesis of the essay you have read and show how it relates to its source text.
-Divide the argument of the essay into its major points and devote a paragraph in the main body of your paper to each aspect of the argument or stage in its development.
-At points, you will need to paraphrase the argument of the essay. At other points, you will use quotations from the essay where the phrasing is significant and only those portions that are necessary to your own representation of the argument. Please have at least two quotations in your paper, but do not let quotations take up more than 1/3 of your writing.
– Incorporate quoted passages into your own writing, both stylistically and using proper citation and reference as outlined in the MLA style guide (for an overview see https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_style_introduction.html). For more on how to successfully work with quotations in literary analysis, see this helpful website: https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/assignments/quoliterature/
-In your final paragraph, please reiterate the argument of the larger essay. Please also point toward anything that the essay overlooks or suggest areas for further research or consideration that the essay opens up. Here is a good place for you to bring your own ideas into conversation with the ideas of the author of the essay.
Essay that I have chosen:Toni Cade Bambara’s Use of African American Vernacular English in “The Lesson”
Janet Ruth Heller: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.37.3.279?searchText=The+lesson+Toni+Cade+Bambara&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DThe%2Blesson%2BToni%2BCade%2BBambara&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A2d11c5f7bc0ded87ea0cc16fe3b4c871&seq=1
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