Victorian Literature & Globalization Essay 1
Victorian Literature & Globalization // Essay 1
Due Tuesday, April 16, at the beginning of class, in hard copy
From the syllabus:
Two analytical essays. (4-5 pages, normal-looking font)Conventional essays for an English Lit. class. In other words: these are sharp, sustained, and formal engagements with one or more texts covered in class. I will hand out prompts for these papers but you are free, always, to break from my strictures and compose your own questions and topics and then formulate clear hypotheses about them. These analytical efforts should be grounded in close and sustained acts of reading.
Further directions:
Do not begin writing this paper the night before it’s due. Please construct a well-organized, revised, proofread essay of no fewer than four full pages on one of the following topics. You may also create your own topic, or (perhaps best of all) take a swerve on one of the topics I’ve provided, turning it toward your own intellectual purpose. Remember that a successful essay will make a point or interlocked series of points (i.e. an argument), then use evidence (close, local readings of specific moments in the text, logical transitions, and sound analysis) to argue in support of those points.
Note: If your paper does not have an argument, it will be returned ungraded; if your paper does not deal actively with specifics of the text itself, it will be returned ungraded.
Tips on writing:
Eliminate all extraneous words. Argue fearlessly. Support creatively. Edit mercilessly. Shine your prose to a glistening polish. The soul of writing is in active verbs. Mark Twain: “If you catch an adverb, kill it.”
SUGGESTION FOR PROCESS: Pick an idea or a topic (not yet an argument); Go through the novel and note passages and moments that relate somehow to this topic; pick several especially relevant ones and read them closely; then work from these particulars upward into an argument. Do not start with your argument: end with it. Then write the essay.
POSSIBLE TOPICS. Note that these are not questions nor yet are they arguments; your task is to take these topics and transform them into arguments.
1. Unhistoric acts. What is an unhistoric act? How does the novel imagine such limited actions, quiet doings, or moments of circumscribed agency as relating to the larger forces charted in the novel – Reform, scientific advancement, and ethical expansion? You might consider picking one small action and trace its ripple-effect through the novel.
2. Relatedly: is independent action possible in Middlemarch? What does independence mean in the novel’s densely interconnected web, and is it always an illusion? A necessary illusion? An error? A myth? Again, start small (a scene, a relationship, one decision) and open up to these larger questions.
3. Relatedly: approach the problem of action in the novel from the point of view of gender. In what sense do male characters have the power to act? How about the female ones? Or are both sexes mired in webs of connection that make action difficult? Start small, go big.
4. Pick one short passage and use a hyper-specific close reading of it to open up an argument about what you take to be one of the novel’s larger conceptual problems: connection/disconnection, sympathy/egoism, archaic/modern, past/future, Tory/Whig, town/country, aristocrat/bourgeois, etc.
5. Given that the novel is framed retrospectively, there’s a way to consider all of Middlemarch as being concerned with historical process. How do things change, or do they? Is progress possible. In the context of Victorian ideologies of progress from people like Prince Albert, is the novel’s understanding of historical motion progressive, regressive, static, or something else? What is the novel’s understanding of time? Another way of asking the question: is this ending a happy one? Is ie even an ending? Start small, go big.
6. Write an essay that focuses on one or two specific people in the novel – and specific scenes featuring them-- to show why the question “who is the main character of Middlemarch” is the wrong question to ask.
7. Examine the role of gossip in Middlemarch: explain how this generalized or networked speech effects what the narrator calls “the medium” of the community. Do not just tell us how gossip works, show us, using a close reading of one section of “viral speech” to explain how gossip works on a syntactic and formal level.
8. Write an essay that takes seriously the metaphors of microscopes, lenses, and vision to show how Middlemarch works on a micro-level in analogous ways to its operation on a macro-level. This will of course require close attention to a single moment of prose.
9. Drawing on our reading of Jameson, Said, and/or Wallerstein, explain how Middlemarch engages the dynamics of core and periphery structuring (one or more of) those accounts. This too requires close attention to minute passages.
10. Focusing on one or at most two small moments, show how the novel uses POINT OF VIEW to engage with the central ethical question of sympathy in the book. As ever, be specific.
11. Pick one chapter and examine in detail the relationship between its epigram and the main content of the chapter. In a novel prefaced by a parable about a historical person, how does this semi-related historical fragment reflect on the “main” content that follows it?
12. More broadly: write an essay that uses precise observations to discuss the relationship of the novel’s content to its form. This can focus on any aspect of form (free indirect discourse, chapter breaks, syntactic form, point of view) and any aspect of content.
13. In what senses is the narrator a character in this novel, and in what senses is she or he not a character? Or is this question not the right one to ask of this disembodied intelligence? You will need to develop an understanding of what constitutes a “character” to take this on.
14. The novel is filled with characters who engage on hopeless quests. Are they hopeless? (I.e. does the novel seem to suggest they are?)
15. Middlemarch is a kind of massive media technology for reorienting the minds of its readers. Meditate on the experience of reading Middlemarch and consider this experience in the light of a kind of mental or ethical training. How if at all has this vast world sought to change you, and in what senses might this ethical training of us be modeled in the plots that transpire with the characters?
16. PLEASE DEVISE ALTERNATE TOPICS IF YOU WISH. Really. Let me know how I can help.