English 210.02 Fall 2004                                                                                Stephan Flores

Assignment: Explication of Passage from The Turn of the Screw

Due date: Thursday September 23, hard copy due in-class, double-spaced, titled

Explication (600 words, titled) of a short passage (fifteen lines or so/paragraph or two?) from James's novel The Turn of the Screw.  An explication presents a meticulous, thorough, and systematic close reading (annotation) or unfolding sentence by sentence, presenting your questioning sense of the text's meanings, methods, and implications.  The explication is not only explanatory and expository but implicitly argumentative: an occasion for you to discover, clarify, and account for your understanding and interpretative analysis of the passage and its function in context(s), including the contexts related to this course and its focus on literary theory (methods and practice).  This is also a chance to share your perceptions, enthusiasms, and even your doubts as you delve into the narrative's significance and purpose.  I encourage you to select a passage that you consider important, and one that you think may be useful to explore further through this assignment, perhaps in part because its meanings seem to demand some interpretation and "unpacking" or "excavation."

During the process of developing your explication, you may find it useful to draft/determine a paraphrase of the passage in question.  A paraphrase restates and translates the passage to provide the gist of the original, though this exercise may not only explain but inevitably distort meaning.  You may find some aspects of the passage difficult to paraphrase--this may be something to explore in your explication.  The process of paraphrase may also lead to discovering depths and possibilities that did not occur to you initially.  The paraphrase, however, is not required or expected as part of your explication, though you may end up drawing upon some aspect or part of a paraphrase, and you will include some degree of paraphrase in your explication.

Advice: In addition to the significance of the range of issues and theories that we have considered thus far in all our texts and discussions, you may wish to read ahead slightly so that at least you are familiar with the "A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw" section of our edition of James's novel. That said, no secondary criticism on the novel in support of your reading is expected, but if you choose to draw upon another critic's discussion, be sure to cite your source appropriately, both in the body of your commentary and in a Works Cited bibliography (MLA style).