English 320

Spring 2011

Response to a Critical Essay

Due: Because so much will be going on in the remaining weeks of the class, you yourself will choose the deadline for this assignment. Look over your calendar for the rest of the semester carefully—not just for this class, but for all your classes—and decide when your schedule will permit you a few days to devote to this critical response. On April 11th, the day you hand in your abstract for the conference paper, you will also commit to a due date for this paper—by including, at the bottom of the page of your conference paper abstract, a brief note indicating when I can expect to see your critical response paper. The only requirement is that you agree to hand it in sometime between April 18th and May 11th. The earlier you hand it in, the more lavish and detailed my feedback will be; if you wait till exam week, I’ll have no time for comments whatsoever, and you’ll have to be satisfied with a grade alone. Remember that you’ll be working on the final draft of your conference paper during exam week, too, so it’s probably not a good idea to leave this till the bitter end. In any event,I will hold you to your self-scheduled deadline.

Over the next week, even after you’ve struggled to come up with an abstract foryour conference paper, we’ll continue to discuss in class the essays that will be the focus of this paper. Be sure to do the reading, take good notes, and come to class prepared for discussion; active participation will help you decide which essay to tackle.

Goals: We’ve all had the experience of being unconvinced by someone else’s “take” on a text that we’ve studied carefully and feel strongly about. The purpose of apaper like this is fairly straightforward, then: to join a critical conversation and to lay out some of your own ideas about a text (in this case, Heart of Darkness) in reference to someone else’s. As Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein argue in They Say, I Say, “the underlying structure of effective academic writing…resides not just in stating our own ideas but in listening closely to others around us, summarizing their views in a way that they will recognize, and responding with our own ideas in kind…[T]he best academic writing…is deeply engaged in some way with other people’s views.”

When someone else’s ideas are contained in a piece of dense academic prose, of course, it can be difficult to make them out, let alone to articulate a response. Rather than ask you to frame your response in the form of an essay, then, I’m asking you to complete a more formulaic exercise, one with a clear template and some “blanks” to fill in. It’s not college-level Mad Libs, exactly; the “blanks”will sometimes need to be filled with sentences or even paragraphs rather than words or phrases. But I hope that this will lower the degree of difficulty somewhat and make grappling with dense prose and difficult ideas more manageable.

How to proceed: for this assignment, then, you’ll choose one of the critical essays that we’re slated to read between April 11th and 20th—the essays by Miller, Smith, Brantlinger, and Said—and write a 4 to 6-page paper responding to it. (Note that Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” and David Denby’s “Jungle Fever” are not meant to be used for this assignment.)

Start by reading the essays carefully for class discussions: highlight and annotate each one, piece out the main lines of its argument(s), paraphrase key points, assess your own difficulties with the text, etc. Come to class, pay attention to what’s said, put in your own two cents, and take more notes. Then select an essay to work with. Choose one that genuinely interests, intrigues and/or infuriates you. Then:

  • Begin bymaking sure you have a solid grasp of the essay’s argument and purpose. Obviously, if you misinterpret or misrepresent what its author says, your response will be much less effective. Identify what you consider the thesis of the essay, then write short, one-sentence summaries of each of its paragraphs. (Read them through in sequence: can you in fact track an argument? And is it an argument that seems to support what you identified as the thesis? If the answer is no, then check your work: perhaps you’ve misconstrued the thesis and/or the point of one or more paragraphs.)
  • Considerthe nature of your response to the essay. You might refer back to Barnet and Cain’s prescription for a convincing interpretation. For instance: is the writer conveniently ignoring aspects of the novella that refute her or his thesis? Do you detect what you think are some logical inconsistencies or contradictions in the writer’s argument? Do you take issue with some of the premises of the overall critical or theoretical approach that the writer is employing? Or, on the other hand, are you sympathetic to the approach, and perhaps even to much of the argument, but take issue with some fairly specific details—i.e., would you in fact offer a modification or a supplement to the writer’s position, rather than a wholesale disagreement? Spend some time freewriting on those questions, turning your attention to what you see as key passages as well as to the argument as a whole, and referring to Heart of Darkness itself as your ultimate yardstick.

Then the exercise itself, which will consist of two parts:

  1. That paragraph-by-paragraph summary I was recommending? Do it for real. Enumerate your essay’s paragraphs and condense each one to a sentence or two. Occasionally you may find a sentence within a given paragraph that truly captures its essence; more often you will have to weed out what’s peripheral from what’s essential and put the core thought of the paragraph into your own words (aided, perhaps, by a short phrase of quoted text). All summaries inevitably adopt an evaluative point of view on whatever it is they’re summarizing, especially if their ultimate purpose is critique. Just the same, try to be as neutral and accurate as possible at this stage, and save any interpretive angle for later. A good of summary of a twenty-paragraph essay is likely to takeat least 2 double-spaced pages.
  1. Now construct a response according to the following model, which is keyed in large part to certain passages from They Say, I Say (see the online Course Reader). You may adapt or alter the specifics of the model, as necessary, for elegance of phrasing or to reflect your purposes:

In ______, X [argues/claims/asserts, etc.] that ______. More specifically, ______. As X himself puts it, “______.” While some might [object that/wonder whether, etc.] ______, X contends nevertheless that ______. In sum, ______.
[Next, choose from among the Templates for Disagreeing, with Reasons (p. 60), Templates for Agreeing (p. 62), or Templates for Agreeing and Disagreeing Simultaneously (pp. 65-66), and elaborate upon them as appropriate. Make use of formulas such as “For instance, ______” or “In addition, ______” and so on,if they serve your purposes.]
[Finally, employ some variation on the Templates for Entertaining Objections, Templates for Naming Your Naysayers, or Templates for Introducing Objections Informally (pp. 82-85). And finish this way:] Yet I would [argue/maintain/intend, etc.] that ______. Overall, then, I believe ______.

Again, you will sometimes need to fill these blanks or realize these templates with sentences or even whole paragraphs rather than words or phrases. This portion, too, will probably take at least 2 double-spaced pages.

You may be saying to yourself right now, “Who am I to argue with Mr. Big Shot Critic Patrick Brantlinger? I’m just a lowly undergrad;Bedford/St. Martin’s Presswill not be busting down my door to publish myviews any time soon!” But these guys are not the boss of you just because they’re published authors with Ph.Ds. Your own critical reading skills make you an authority on Heart of Darkness, too. Part of the business of criticism is engaging withother readings—not to dismiss them or to worship them, but to improve your own understanding of what happens in a text, and of how that text relates to the world we live in.