# Assignments

Student work is available for this course.

## Essay Topics

Essays are designed to improve writing and research skills and allow students to develop critical interests. The essays, then, build toward a substantial research paper at the end of the term. Students will submit specific topics to me before the paper is due. The guidelines below give the basic structure and expectations for each assignment.

### Essay 1: Close Reading

(5 pages - due Lecture 10; submit topic by Lecture 9)

Choose a passage from one of the authors you have read so far, one that strikes you as particularly rich in terms of language and meaning. Analyze its stylistic peculiarities - diction, sentence patterns, use of voice, tone, and other auditory effects, imagery and figurative language, or any other special effects of prose style. Then develop a reading of the passage in which you use your analysis to support or complicate what you see as the author's aims in writing it. Although you are focusing on a single moment in the text, you may draw on what you know about the author and his or her choices elsewhere. Give your essay a specific thesis and use details from the passage to support your point.

### Essay 2: Single Author Research

(5 pages - due Lecture 17; submit topic by Lecture 15)

In preparation for your research paper at the end of the semester, choose an author and topic you would like to investigate through outside research in different sources, print and online (at least two of each). Your research may be biographical, historical, critical, cultural, and multimedia, or a combination of the above. A central aim of the essay is to identify useful sources and explore different ways of approaching a topic.

### Essay 3: Critical Essay

(10 pages - due Lecture 28; submit topic by Lecture 24)

This essay will allow you to develop a full-scale treatment of a single author, using multiple works, or to compare two or more authors from the term. Although your focus will be on literary issues - how authors use literary techniques to approach a (literary, social, thematic) problem - you may draw on research in any area you choose. Conference times will be available with me on Lecture 22 and Lecture 26 for discussion of your research, and you will receive class feedback as well during the reports in the week of Lecture 24.

## Examples of Student Work

- William Wells Brown and the Jefferson and Hemings Scandal. (PDF) (Courtesy of Kristin Hrabak. Used with permission.)
- Law and Slave Identity in Dred and Pudd'nhead Wilson. (PDF) (Courtesy of Kristin Hrabak. Used with permission.)