ENGL 4371: Age of Empire

Spring 2005

Essay Assignment #1: Understanding and Applying Literary Criticism

Background: Academic writing about literature is informed by the conversations that have preceded it. A reader might respond to an interpretation made by another reader in order to reject or refine it. Or, a reader might borrow a method or theoretical orientation used for another work and apply it to the text at hand. This first assignment is not a typical essay question. Rather, it is an exercise designed to introduce you to reading secondary critical analyses of literary texts and to the challenges academic writers encounter when applying such secondary criticism to one’s own reading of a text.

Although in most situations you will have the freedom to choose which works of secondary criticism you want to use to support your reading of a particular text, for this exercise I have chosen one for you. You have read “Why Categories Thrive,” the concluding chapter of Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life, in which the authors claim that “a revolution in reading habits during the eighteenth century changed the notion of what it meant to be English.” They argue that this change meant that English speakers ceased to locate their identity exclusively in the ruling English aristocracy. “Instead,” they write, “the survival of respectable people and the perpetuation of their domestic way of life began to matter” (202). The relevance of this chapter to our course is apparent. Armstrong and Tennenhouse trace the cause of this remarkable shift to two texts we have read in this class: Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Most of this chapter consists of their explanation for why these two texts are so important.

Imagine that you were going to write a paper for this class and you were considering whether or not to use Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s argument as part of your own analysis. First, of course, you would need to make sure that you understood precisely what they were claiming in their argument. Second, you would want to investigate how they arrived at their conclusions. What examples did they look at? How did they use that evidence to support their claims? Third, you would evaluate whether their argument is convincing by testing the quality of their evidence and the logic of their reasoning.

Assignment: Write a four-page paper in which you do two things: 1) summarize and explain Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s argument in “Why Categories Thrive” and 2) evaluate the persuasiveness of their argument, supporting your assessment by using evidence from any one of the four texts we have read thus far in class: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, or Pamela. When evaluating their argument, do not simply repeat the evidence they use. Instead, look at passages or textual features they ignore or that could be understood differently.

Tackle these two tasks in sections of roughly equal length. Part 2 will likely take one of the following three forms:

• you might use textual examples to verify the utility and validity of Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s thesis, exploring the implications of their argument to reveal something surprising and new
• you might use textual examples to expose a flaw in Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s reasoning or an inadequacy of its explanatory power, developing a counter-thesis to replace it
• you might use textual examples to verify the utility and validity of some aspect(s) of Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s thesis, while at the same time exposing some of its weaknesses, in the process proposing a refinement that makes for a better argument.

Your paper should have an identifiable thesis, a coherent argument logically organized into paragraphs, supporting evidence in the form of logically and grammatically integrated (as well as properly cited) quotations, all written and formatted according to the conventions of standard written English and MLA style guidelines. Your paper should by typed, double-spaced, with one-inch margins in a font similar to this one.

Please bring FOUR COPIES of your COMPLETE working draft to class Wednesday 2/9.

Final drafts are due Wednesday 2/16.