First, though this page/commentary is lengthy, the Critical Essay assignment is something you can distill down--and will need to!--but it's important to read through and reflect upon the following observations/advice/process/ and also to consult the resources cited.
Assignment (due in class on April 2, 2015): Critical Essay on Richard III, or Cymbeline, or The Merchant of Venice, or Henry V, or As You Like It, or Hamlet, or Twelfth Night; 1600 words/six pages for main body of essay, double-spaced, with reference to at least two pieces of “instructor-specified” secondary criticism (that is, critical essays/materials in your Bblearn folders) beyond our assigned reading in the Norton edition and in McEvoy, according to selections posted on our class Bblearn folders for criticism on each play; that is, you must refer to/cite/draw upon at least two substantial article/book chapters from the Bblearn folder for the corresponding play. You also are encouraged to draw upon the Norton headnotes as well as McEvoy's book. The primary aims of this thesis-seeking/problem-posing exploratory essay assignment is to engage with the play and its critical interpretation/reception by identifying problems, developing claims and arguments, and enriching your literary understanding, interests, and commitments. Use/learn Modern Language Association format for any notes or works cited (see, for instance, link to MLA format guidelines further below, and the Norton Shakespeare's online resources/example of developing a research essay. Note: though I encourage that you avoid/choose not to write your critical essay on either of the plays that you wrote about for your midterm exam, you may do so with expectation that I will be looking for a substantially different and critically informed essay that differs from your relatively short essay for the midterm.
A first step, basic approach is to ask to what extent the play presents a question or problem that seems challenging to represent and to resolve (solve/answer) without being caught up in some kind of conflict or contradiction--typically conflicts/contradictions between a culturally/historically predominant way of valuing or understanding particular identities and relationships versus alternative (perhaps dissenting/oppositional/other) perspectives and arrangements. The play then explores and discloses a debate over how to understand its world via such conflicting desires (including desires for power, for stability or for transgressive change)--a debate over 'systems' of belief, over ideology. And an ideological debate over what characters and the audience should do and be (including, typically, a debate over what literature should do and be).
Consider, for example, that Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield ("History and Ideology") explain that the "principal strategy of ideology is to legitimate inequality and exploitation by representing the social order which perpetuates these things as immutable and unalterable--as decreed by God or simply natural" (211-12). They also observe that the "more ideology (necessarily) engages with the conflict and contradiction which it is its raison d'être to occlude, the more it becomes susceptible to incorporating them within itself. It faces the contradictory situation whereby to silence dissent one must first give it a voice, to misrepresent it one must first present it" (215).
Review some aspect of one of the plays in light of such an approach, and note that McEvoy and quite a few of the Norton editors also address Shakespeare’s drama from perspectives compatible with these views of Dollimore and Sinfield. Take care not to assume that we readily know what these plays mean, or what meanings are possible, given our assumptions about the time during which Shakespeare's plays were written and how we make sense of these texts and performance today. It is productive to inquire into the possibilities for meaning and for debate, rather than to foreclose such debate by assuming in advance that a play means something or that it could not possibly mean something that seems out of bounds, out of context. As always, given the advice below, you need to find ways to read closely and well, and to work from the evidence and arguments of the texts of the plays, of critics/scholars' research and arguments, and of your sense of the plays in performance.
For example, consider how these critics' comments on Twelfth Night invoke/refer to debates over (im)proper boundaries of gender-identity and desire as represented in that play.Valerie Traub states "The homoerotic energies of Viola, Olivia, and Orsino are displaced onto Antonio, whose relation to Sebastian is finally sacrificed for the maintenance of institutionalized heterosexuality and generational continuity. In other words, Twelfth Night closes down the possibility of homoerotic play initiated by the material presence of the transvestized boy actors. The fear expressed, however, is not of homoeroticism per se; homoerotic pleasure is explored and sustained until it collapses into fear of erotic exclusivity and its corollary: non-reproductive sexuality. The result is a more rigid dedication to the ideology of binarism, wherein gender and status inequalities are all the more forcefully reinscribed" (Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama p.123). Catherine Belsey observes that "If the speech acts in 1.5 are gendered, the gender in question fluctuates from moment to moment in a tantalizing display of discontinuity and deferral. This is not consistently either a straight or a drag act" (Why Shakespeare? 139). Bruce Smith sums up the play’s erotic confusions in this way: “Desire of male for female (Orsino for Olivia, Sebastian for Olivia), of female for male (Olivia for ‘Cesario,’ Viola for Orsino), of male for male (Antonio for Sebastian, Orsino for ‘Cesario’), of female for female (Olivia for Viola), of male for either, of female for either, of either for either: the love plots in Twelfth Night truly offer ‘what you will’” (Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts 15). In his introduction to the play, Greenblatt states that the "transforming power of costume unsettles fixed categories of gender and social class and allows characters to explore emotional territory that a culture officially hostile to same-sex desire and cross-class marriage would ordinarily have ruled out of bounds" (446 or 1762), which may lead to something "irreducibly strange about the marriages with which Twelfth Night ends" (449 or 1764). Jean Howard argues that the "play enacts . . . the containment of gender and class insurgency . . . . the play seems to me to applaud a crossdressed woman who does not aspire to the positions of power assigned men and to discipline a non-crossdressed woman who does” (The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England 112).
Much of the following advice also pertains to the Term Essay.
For example, you might explain the social dimensions or importance of a particular character's desires and relations to and for another (or to others, including a group or "category" of people or to/for some concept or principle or desired identity/achievement); your analysis may also speculate on the degrees of authority or power exercised or available to particular "figures" or "subjects" (characters) in the play; moreover, how are such identities or relationships represented and enacted (presented rhetorically in language and through narrative and dramatic structure and style), and to what extent are these desires and power relations and identities in flux, dramatized as being put into question or debate between different social/political/class/gender/ethnic/religious arrangements or configurations. And how do such meaning become presented in literature/text and also via performance?
Develop and support your ideas as clearly and as cogently as space allows, including brief citations of specific lines that illustrate your interpretation, and concise use of summary and paraphrase in support of your analysis. It may be helpful for your response to include a statement that makes a claim or presents a thesis with brief explanation and support (such as in the form of “One of Portia's main concerns is that she . . . because . . . . But her desire for . . . conflicts with . . ., and she must . . . in order to . . . . The play thus represents . . . in its depiction of . . . . Moreover, it is only through X's relationship to Y that Z can be realized or established or resolved, even though . . . .” This is just a partial and overstated (!) example of a structure that might inform your reasoning and writing for this assignment--the main advice is that you seek to explore a thesis for your analysis/essay.
Tory Young, for instance, offers this general schemata/structure for an essay that is concerned with argument and interpretation and analysis: (1) The issue; (2) the claim; (3) The supporting evidence; (4) The explanation that connects the evidence to the claim about the subject; (5) Rebuttals and qualifiers; ( 6) The explanation that connects them to the claim about the subject. Some of these stages or building blocks for the essay may be repeated (steps 2-6 or 3-6), and each stage should contribute to developing the argument and potential expressed in your thesis statement. As Young states, "Your thesis statement is a sentence-long summary of your argument . . . .Your thesis statement is an argument that you are going to examine with recourse to evidence from primary and secondary research" (106). Moreover, does each paragraph in the essay provide support for the argument or clearly analyze opposing views to the argument.
Katherine Acheson writes that "the task of a student assigned to write an essay about literature is to present a clearly written argument, based on evidence, about the meaning, power, or structure of the work or works" (7). She describes the task of writing such an essay as one in which you "produce a narrative that offers an explanation for the effects the work of literature has" (8)--these effects, for instance, are the ideas and feelings produced by the work of literature (produced through the things that are used to make it, the words). Acheson describes the thesis statement in this way: "The thesis statement describes the evidence you are using, states your interpretations of this evidence, and brings those insights together into a conclusion that is about the way the literature works, what it means, or how and why it has the emotional impact it does" (97). She also emphasizes that arguments in literary criticism analyze "examples in order to come to broader conclusions"--these arguments therefore demonstrate inductive reasoning that moves logically and persuasively from particular pieces of compelling evidence to broader generalizations that advance/deepen/enrich understanding.
Acheson notes, like Tory Young, that the paragraphs in the body of your essay "will each make a point contributing to your argument, and each will highlight the evidence that supports that point. The subject for each body paragraph is provided by your subtopic sentences" (111) and typically the concluding sentence in each paragraph "stipulates the relationship " of the paragraph "to the argument as a whole" and also "leads to the next paragraph." One's writing need not be so formulaic--you can depart from these guidelines--but this is sound general advice. Acheson offers an additional note: "The analytical reasons that a piece of evidence supports the argumentative contention of the paragraph are implicit in the choice you made to include that evidence in that category. But remember this important advice: your sentences must make those reasons explicit. Whenever you feel uncertain, return to two home bases: 1) your research and the evidence it has provided and 2) the thesis statement and the argument it articulates" (118).
William Whitla (The English Handbook: A Guide to Literary Studies, 2010) echoes such sentiments: "For an argument to be convincing, the relationship between generalizations or assertions and supporting evidence must be considered carefully. Many students have the most trouble at exactly this point: they either cannot qualify a generalization in the face of contradictory evidence and so ignore the exception, or they suppress that evidence and continue to assert a generalization. . . . An academic argument, then, is not a contest of absolute rights and wrongs, but rather is a structured statement of position that moves logically to persuade an audience of your views" (92).
Assume your audience is familiar with the play (and/or film version of the play), but take care to articulate clearly your understanding and interpretation of the material, especially problems or contradictions that seem difficult to resolve.
Keep in mind that your critical analysis should aim to supplement or to build upon our work; in short, don't simply repeat an argument we have already substantially discussed unless you were engaged substantially in that discussion.
Some writers use the first paragraph to describe an interpretative problem that arises in a specific passage or in a character (and the relations of that character to others or to the play's cultural context), or to present a conflict of critical approaches to a topic or issue that is pertinent to or evident in the play.
See these excerpts of advice and examples in the folder on Bblearn ( begin with the excerpts from Acheson, skim much of Young's advice but pay particular attention to pp. 104-117):
Advice on Writing Essays and on Discussion/Inquiry
Excerpts from Graff & Birk They Say I Say
Katherine Acheson on Writing Essays About Literature (2010)
Example of Research Paper on Austen's Mansfield Park (Modern Language Association)
Tory Young Essay Advice (see esp. p. 104-117)
William Whitla on writing essays (2010)
Graff and Birkenstein, As-He-Himself-Puts-It_ from They Say I Say (on integrating quotes)
Initial/General Criteria for Evaluating Critical Writing/Essays:
1. Strength and clarity of (hypo)thesis/focus/introduction
2. Intellectual/conceptual strength and persuasiveness of main claim and ensuing argument/logic/premises/critical method/theory/ideas;
3. Cohesive and coherent development, logical organization, including well structured paragraphs with clear points and compelling, specific support/evidence
4. Analysis of text’s/topic’s relevant cultural/historical contexts and if specified, related scholarship/criticism; Text’s rhetorical methods, structure
5. Topic’s depth/complexity, including recognition of conflicts/contradictions
6. Significance/ conclusion
8. Effective sentences, syntax, verbs, diction, punctuation, complexity, and suitable style: academic, critical, appropriate to your understanding of the materials/subjects
9. MLA style--parenthetical citation of sources, works cited; format; spelling ungraded but noted
Questions to Guide Review of Draft of Critical Essay:
1. Does the essay clarify and advance understanding of problem/topic/method/perspective related to the “literary” text’s purposes and rhetorical strategies and to the ‘student’ writer’s interpretation and understanding of the text?
2. Can one understand the writer’s approach and strategies for introducing and developing the critical essay?
3. Sum up the essay’s central idea, hypothesis or purpose in one sentence.
4. What might a reader like best about the essay? Where might the reader want to know more or to pose a critical question?
See and review several additional resources about writing, on the course Blackboard site, and also examples of students' writing on the main course website.
Lessons on Style (general advice/quited dated handout but perhaps worth looking over) [pdf]
Quick Advice on Punctuation (also dated) [pdf]
Online Writing Center Resources (from writing essays to grammar and usage advice):
http://web.mit.edu/writing/Resources/Writers/index.html
http://writingcenter.gmu.edu/resources/handouts.html
OWL Review Guide to Using MLA Style for Citing Sources
Desired learning outcomes in the context of the Department of English and its major:
1. Students can exhibit knowledge of the aesthetic qualities of literature.
2. Students can exhibit knowledge of the cultural and historical contexts of diverse literatures in English.
3. Students can write a well-focused essay that exhibits critical thinking and effective rhetorical strategies.
4. Students exhibit standard usage in their edited work.
5. Students can conduct research in accordance with professional conventions.
6. Students can integrate their knowledge and abilities so that they attain a level of competence sufficient for productive citizenship and sustained learning.
UI and Department of English Policy on Plagiarism (also applies to work in this course)
Flores: Review
of Initial Concepts from Critical Terms for Literary Study
Always Keep in Mind the Broader Contexts and Criteria for Learning at the University:
University level learning outcomes broadly describe expected and desired consequences of learning through integrated curricular and co-curricular experiences. The outcomes become an expression of the desired attributes of an educated person and guide coherent, integrated and intentional educational experiences. They provide us with a basis for ongoing assessment to continuously improve teaching and learning.
1. Learn and integrate - Through independent learning and collaborative study, attain, use and develop knowledge in the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences, with disciplinary specialization and the ability to integrate information across disciplines.
2. Think and create - Use multiple thinking strategies to examine real-world issues, explore creative avenues of expression, solve problems and make consequential decisions.
3. Communicate – Acquire, articulate, create and convey intended meaning using verbal and non-verbal methods of communication that demonstrate respect and understanding in a complex society.
4. Clarify purpose and perspective – Explore one's life purpose and meaning through transformational experiences that foster an understanding of self, relationships and diverse global perspectives.
5. Practice citizenship – Apply principles of ethical leadership, collaborative engagement, socially responsible behavior, respect for diversity in an interdependent world and a service-oriented commitment to advance and sustain local and global communities.
–University-Level Outcomes Affirmed by UI Faculty Council, October 3, 2006
Additonal Resources (from writing essays to grammar and usage advice and MLA format):
http://wiki.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/The_Craft_of_a_Literature_Paper
http://wiki.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/Thesis_Statement_Guide
Review Guide to Using MLA Style for Citing Sources