I suggest that you consider some of the problems, premises, and questions posed during our discussions and readings as a guide in helping you to develop a specific focus and issue to address in your journal entry. You might think of the entry as a scaled down, succinct, and sharply focused critical or analytical response, one that contains the kernel of a hypothesis and topic that might serve as the cornerstone or shaping idea for a longer essay.
It may be helpful for you to quote, summarize, or paraphrase, though very briefly, from the text under to help you frame the topic or problem or rhetorical strategy that you want to explore, explain, and comment upon. Assume your audience is familiar with the text, 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 supplement or 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 text's cultural context), or to present a conflict of critical approaches to the work. Here are some more ways to question and to explore the functions and effects of these texts.
In what ways, for example, does one of the texts represent a particular cultural (social, political, economic, class, religion, gender) perspective, problem, or conflict?
Recent cultural and historical criticism often turns upon debate over whether the texts represent (instantiate, produce?) efforts to subvert or resist dominant ideology, or whether the texts' final effects work to contain, appropriate, or even reproduce such efforts, thus sustaining the power of the dominant order of things. Consider the utility of this opposition between subversion and containment in relation to specific conflicts and contradictions in the work under discussion. Moreover, when does the this polarized opposition seem less useful and incisive? Are there ways to negotiate the seeming impasse?
What kinds of solutions does the work offer to the problems it articulates? Why?
To what extent do you agree with a particular essay/theoretical approach to the text and why? Can you extend or further illustrate the critical insights and arguments to other aspects of the work or to another text?
Is there something about your own cultural/personal position and history that you want to explore in relation to your interpretation?
How would you direct a particular scene in a play? What are a director's responsibilities/opportunities?
Explore the relation between a text's "style" (its language, structure, diction, figurative language) and what it represents or produces (performs, effects, function).
Consider, perhaps in relation to a specific literary text, these statements by J. Hillis Miller: "Seen from this point of view, fictions may be said to have tremendous importance not as the accurate reflectors of a culture but as the makers of that culture and as the unostentatious, but therefore all the more effective, policemen of that culture" ("Narrative" Critical Terms for Literary Study 69); "Stories, however perfectly conceived and powerfully written, however moving, do not accomplish successfully their allotted function" (72).
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