∙ Essays should be of at least 1200 words.
∙ Essays may deal with any literary topic.
∙ Essays may take any critical or theoretical approach.
∙ Clean copies without instructors’ marks or comments, please.
∙ One essay per student.

The essay writer should attach a 3×5 index card with the essay’s title, name, E-number, address, EIU e-mail address, and phone number. The writer’s name should not appear on the essay. The essay and card should be marked “U” (undergraduate) or “G” (graduate).

Entries are due by 4:00 p.m., Friday, March 5, 2010. Please submit them to Professor Michael Leddy in person (Coleman 3741) or by mailbox (Coleman 3155).

Monetary prizes will be awarded at the English Department Awards Tea, April 14, 2010, 3:00 p.m.

On Monday and Tuesday, we’ll meet in my office to talk about any remaining challenges you face as you complete your final essay (and if you weren’t in on Thursday, you should come to my office and take a time slot from the schedule on my door).  By “challenges you face as you write your final draft,” of course, I don’t mean the challenge of figuring out a topic–we’ve been working on this essay for weeks now, so I assume this essay is already well underway, that you’ve been devising a set of close readings of moments from Passing, that you’ve been historicizing by spending a lot of quality time in the archive, etc.  All o this constitutes the (lengthy) process by which you figure out what you believe about the text, so of course I can’t simply give that to you in conference, even if that prospect weren’t antithetical to what being an English major means. So when you come to my office, I’m going to be asking you to talk a bit about what you’re arguing about the novel: to describe that signal moment from the novel you find so interesting, to talk about how that moment forms for you a larger problem to tackle in the essay itself, and how the scholars you’ve found weigh in upon that problem.

When we meet again as a class, we’ll talk about the short piece by Richard Rorty, available on e-reserves, called “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature.”  Rorty makes a set of contentions here about the state of our field, contentionseveryone in our class should now be equipped to engage and with which, perhaps, to argue.  Since you’ve got enough to do between now and then, I don’t want to ask you to blog about it, so this is it for our online chat.

But this online exchange, I want to point out, has born witness to a lot of growth for many of you as you’ve begun the process of re-inventing yourself as an English major.  Look back over these blogs over the past fifteen weeks and see for yourself.  At the beginning of the semester, the people I met were people who were interested in texts, readers who were already convinced that texts mean more than the literal story they tell.  Now, what I see are a group of English majors who know that getting at such meaning requires a close attention to form, and who understand all kinds of ways to examine that form.  I also see a group of accomplished historicists with strong theories about how literature and history intersect, and who know how to use the archive to locate and describe such intersections.  I see readers with no interest in generalizing, but with every interest in being receptive to detail.  More lately, I see you tackling complex scholarly arguments as a way to hone what it is you believe about texts.  Similarly, your academic style has developed, sounding much more like what will be expected of you in more advanced literature courses.  Take stock of these developments, students; they represent hard-won victories.  But don’t rest on your laurels–stay resolved to keep honing these crucial skills.

I’ll see you in conference, and then for our last class on Thursday, when you’ll hand in your final essay and when, before our discussion about Rorty, I’ll talk a bit about the final exam.

To prepare for this, write an entry here taking the form of a paragraph, the sort of paragraph that might appear in your final essay.  In this paragraph, you’ll be offering a really interesting close reading of a moment from Passing, and in the process, you’ll bring your own contention about that moment into conversation with another contention made by either Bromell, Rabinowitz, or that other Larsen scholar you’ve found on your own.  And also, you should bring copies of all three of those sources with you to class (along with your copy of Passing itself, of course).

As you write your paragraph, think about your own larger sense of Passing, and how your take on the novel diverges from the reading offered by the scholar whose work you’re reading.  Remember to do justice to what that scholar has written. You don’t need to summarize their whole argument , but you should depict them in a way that acknowledges their true position.

And remember, of course, all the stylistic qualities of academic writing we’ve worked on all semester.  Cite your sources accurately, of course, but also avoid the second person, use the first person judiciously, use present tense except when narrating past history, be concise and clear.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll be honing our essays on Nella Larsen’s Passing–essays that will not only draw upon your powers of close reading, and not only your abilities at placing that text in suggestive historical contexts, but that also indicate engagement with current criticism on the novel.

Over break, you should have located and read the two essays I’ve placed on the revised schedule, Nick Bromell’s “Reading Democratically: Pedagogies of Difference and Practices of Listening in The House of Mirth and Passing” (American Literature 81: 2 [June 2009]) and Peter Rabinowitz’s “Betraying the Sender: The Rhetoric and Ethics of Fragile Texts (Narrative 2: 3 [June 1994]).  For this blog entry, I’d like you to do two things to prepare for our discussion tomorrow:

First, you should write two well-developed sentences that capture the point of each argument.  Both of these essays develop nuanced positions that rely upon subtle readings of particular passages, but your job in these first two sentences is to capture–with as much precision as possible–exactly what each scholar’s particular point about Passing (in Bromell’s case, Passing and The House of Mirth) is.  One way to begin on the right foot here is to start with a phrase such as “In his essay ‘Reading Democratically,’ Nick Bromell argues that …”  One less effective way to start out is with a phrase such as “In his essay ‘Reading Democratically,’ Nick Bromell writes about …”  In other words, remember that your aim here is not merely to describe a topic or a set of concerns.  Each of these readers has a specific contention to make, an argument. Part of our job as English majors is to do justice to that argument, to both take in the writer’s larger point and assess the evidence through which he or she works toward that point.  So while this first sentence can’t take in many details in terms of how the argument unfolds, it should capture the “payoff,” the difference that argument ought to make in terms of how we understand the primary text(s) at hand.

Now the second thing I’d like you to do here is to focus on one of those essays, and further, upon a moment of argumentation that you find either particularly effective or particularly problematic.  Describe the way either Bromell or Rabinowitz makes some more particular point about Larsen’s novel, and offer your own assessment of the moves he makes.  The thing you should not do here is simply compliment either Bromell or Rabinowitz.  In other words, don’t summarize a moment from the essay and then offer something like, “Rabinowitz does a good job of showing such-and-such.”  That kind of thing can sound a bit empty or even pandering.  Instead, you should assess the moment you chose both in terms of the sense it makes as it unfolds (For instance, is the close reading a strong one?  Does it reveal something most readers may not have noticed, or place it in terms that genuinely show us something new?) and in terms of the essay’s larger aims (i.e., that first sentence you write back at the beginning–how does the moment you choose tend to help either Bromell or Rabinowitz work toward that larger point?).

If this sounds hard, well … it is.  Academic essays aren’t always easy to read, but cultivating these habits of engagement as you go (the literary theorist Roland Barthes called it the “writerly” mode of reading) can make the process easier.  And once again, part of our job as English majors is not only to develop our tools of analysis as we examine literary texts themselves, but also to keep abreast of what professional readers like Bromell and Rabinowitz have to say about the texts we study.  These are readers, after all, with whom you might either build points of agreement or from whom you might demur as you build your own argument about Passing.

And of course, we’re going to do a lot of close reading in class with Larsen on Tuesday.

If you weren’t in class today: Take up a moment from the selection from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, moment that seems to you to be ripe for close reading.  The two chapters we’re reading from that collection are now available through e-reserve, and–Lo!–O’Brien should be on campus any minute now.