These responses will be fodder for class discussions and for papers. Each student should print all the responses for each class and mark potential comments or questions. I might collect your copies of the responses occasionally to see how well this process is working.

Shorter Paper

The shorter paper (5-7 pages, 1500-2000 words, to be turned in any time before spring break) should fulfill the following assignment: At some point during the semester, you will inevitably find that we as a class have not discussed a particular text in the ways that you think it needs to be discussed. We will have ignored an aspect of the text that interests you, or misread it, or simply approached it from an angle different from the one you would like to explore. You might have raised the issue in class or in a listserv response, only to find that the discussion went elsewhere. Your assignment is to write an essay in which you situate your own viewpoint in relation to this class discussion--one in which you attempt to show the class another, better way of reading this text. How does reading this particular text from your angle change what that text means or can mean? For example, perhaps we have failed in discussion to notice a set of metaphors or references that illuminates the text. How does noticing that information change the way we read the text?

This assignment is designed to make you identify a discussion that is already--or has already--taken place and to situate your own interpretation and argument in relation to that discussion. The goal of your essay, then, should be to intervene in our discussion--to describe that critical conversation, to explain (in relation to it) what you want us to see, and then to show us how to see it and argue why you want us to see it. Your Essay should at least do the following:

Describe what particular class conversation to which you are responding. You need especially to explain what blind spot or deficiency in that critical conversation that you are seeking to address and transform;

Analyze in detail the aspect of, approach to, or angle on, the text that you are interested in, spending time demonstrating how it works and what its larger function is within the text;

Demonstrate how your analysis illuminates the text and forces us to change our stance on the text or this issue; in other words, you will need to spend your last several paragraphs explaining how your analysis challenges the meanings that we produced in our class discussion, and even transforms it. This means that you will need to justify the value of your insights.

Paper Prospectus

Your paper prospectus will be a one-page prose sketch of your plans for the paper; before doing this, you should obviously read the sections below. We will use this document as the starting point for a pre-paper discussion early the following week.

Annotated Bibliography

The annotated bibliography assignment is meant to help you synthesize the early part of your paper research before you move on to the last stages of writing. It should include a cover statement that summarizes what you have found (300 words or so) and a list of about ten sources in MLA format, each followed by a brief paragraph describing the author's argument. You will probably look at more than ten sources; I want to see a selection of the most interesting and appropriate ones for your project.

Final Paper

This essay should be at least 4000 words. You should consider it to be just like the articles that you read during the semester, and you should follow the conventions of critical articles. It is probably best to conceptualize this essay as a longer version of the short essay (see above), except that you will be intervening in a current, real, existing discussion occurring between literary critics in print out there. This means that the aim of this essay is still to challenge and transform existing interpretations of your text in question, but that those existing interpretations will be gathered from recent published literary criticism. Therefore, you will need to acquaint yourself with the critical literature out there that concerns itself with your texts or issues, and that you should make yourself an expert in your texts' reception and production. You should think of your audience, then, as no longer your classmates but rather as the very critics out there whom you are reading, and who are therefore interested in the same issues that you are.

For both the short and the long essay, you'll find critical articles to be helpful as models, since critical essays usually go about their business in the same way that I have outlined above for the short essay assignment. You may find it a good exercise to read critical articles with an eye to writing your own essays. What problem is a given critic re-examining? Why? How is that critic intervening in an already-existing critical conversation? How does that critic wish to transform that critical conversation and/or the poem at hand? Therefore, I strongly suggest that you find a critical writer whom you like and emulate that critic's way of setting up (framing) a problem. This is very different from plagiarizing someone's argument or content; instead, I mean that you should study a writer or an article that you find both persuasive and beautifully written, and try to understand how that writer structures arguments and makes points.