What Papers
for English Classes Do
1
Comment On The Language Of The Text Itself.
Besides quoting to illustrate a point, it often enhances a paper to comment on how the language itself furthers that point. Analyze the language in detail. Be specific, and don't be afraid to be inventive. For example, consider the following quote from Hamlet. A student cited it while discussing how Polonius, the speaker, warns Ophelia not to accept Hamlet's wooing:
Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers,
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits
Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds,
The better to beguile.
Words like "brokers" and investments," for example, highlight the way that Ophelia is an object to be exchanged between men. Or, in another register, "brokers" sounds a lot like "broken" (as in promises and hearts). Similarly, there is some word play set up by using the word "dye" (used to stain cloth) not long before characterizing Hamlet's "suits" (ostensibly, Hamlet's request for love, but also, because of the mention of dye, a pun on suits of clothing). Hamlet's suits of love have the same ambiguity as the "trappings and the suits of woe" Hamlet mentions earlier. Are they real, or are they mere appearances of sincere love?
2
Reflect On The Significance Of What You
Describe.
When you advance a point in your argument, how
can you relate it to your readers' interests or larger points about the
text, or even (with care not to overstate your point) society?
For example, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," a woman subjected to a "rest cure" and forced to remain in bed, apparently goes insane (the text is unclear). We might argue that the woman is, in fact, insane because she "gnaws on the bedstead, evidently in an attempt to escape some sort of bondage," and that she "has the unusual habit of crawling around the perimeter of her room, keeping her shoulder to the wall to guide her way." While these are fine examples of madness, we could go further in examining the method to this madness. Given that the woman is mad, what do these actions have to do with the specific way that her madness exhibits itself? What do they say about the issues that underlie her madness? Does she view the bed as a kind of bondage because she associates it with the rest cure, or perhaps because she associates it with sex and childbirth? Similarly, why does she creep as she does? Does it signify how she experiences being a woman? Or is it related to her eventual merging with the woman in the wallpaper? Granted that she might be mad, but what is the significance of her madness?
Note that doing any of these things requires looking carefully at the specific
language of the text. The idea is to enrich your interpretation by complicating
and elaborating your thesis.
3
Comment On Deep Assumptions Behind A Work Of Art,
Passage, Or Idea Within A Piece Of Literature.
For example, one student wrote of the "unavoidable duty of reproduction" that the narrator in a story faces. What does this tell us about how women's bodies were viewed at the time, or about how the stress laid on motherhood can seem imprisoning? Are these still issues today, in a post-contraceptive, closer-to-equal-wages world?
4
Make Contentions And Interpretations That Aren't
Readily Apparent To Someone Who Has Read The Story or Poem.
Then quote and interpret to support your contentions. We read essays not to discover what we already know, but to find out things and consider viewpoints that are new to us.
For example, one student argued that the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" only imagined creeping along the side of the wall, which caught my attention because I had never heard that interpretation before. To an English professor, a new interpretation isn't "wrong" (unless it is really, really, really implausible) but interesting and exciting because it enriches his or her sense of the text. Once you've made such an interpretation, however, the important thing to do is go back to the text and support it at length with quotations and commentary.
5
Use The Text To Complicate, Critique, Or Question
Accepted Critical Assumptions.
You may not be doing this a great deal as undergraduates, but this is what a lot of professors' writing attempts to do. The model to keep in mind is not so much the iconoclast as someone who notices a problem and develops it. Literary criticism, like any other discipline, works as a kind of problem-solving. Typically, people notice anomalies in texts or in critical assumptions, and explore those anomalies. Either the anomaly can be reconciled with the existing ideas, or the ideas must be modified, changed, or even discarded because it can't account for the anomaly. The basic heuristic is "if x is true, then how do we account for y?"
6
Some words to avoid: "universal,"
"natural," and "normal."
These words send up red flags for many professors because what is seen as universal, natural, or normal tends to change over time. For example, "universal" values often turn out to be the values of a particular perspective writ large. What seems universal and normal from 20th century Oregon may seem bizarre in 8th century New Guinea. It's also very easy to prove something isn't universal, because all you need is one example of where it doesn't apply. Similarly, during the eighteenth century, most people thought it was "natural" to have slaves, and "abnormal" for women to want an education. Anyway, these are dangerous words because they tend to distract our attention from what's culturally and historically specific in a text.
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