Essay Guide

Hello Romanticists,

As we discussed in Thursday's class, please follow the guidelines below for your first essay. 

All best,
Prof. M.

Analytical Essays

Thesis

A thesis statement articulates the main point of your essay and should generally be one sentence located at the end of your first paragraph.  The entirety of your essay will develop this single point.  A thesis makes a specific, arguable, and important claim. 

Specific:  A good thesis statement is specific enough to be fully supported within the given

scope of your essay.  One way to add specificity is to narrow your topic, and to do this you must attend to your nouns.  Ex:  “In his poem ‘The Tyger,’ William Blake demonstrates that industrialism degrades civilization rather than elevates it.”  This is a good start, but surely the author is not thinking about all aspects of industrialism.  Swap such abstractions for specific examples or precise definitions.  Ex:  “In his poem ‘The Tyger,’ William Blake demonstrates that the dehumanizing process of mechanized labor de-civilizes workers by degrading them to the level of beasts.”

Arguable: A good thesis statement is arguable, which is to say it makes a claim that a reasonable person might disagree with.  A thesis is therefore not a fact about the text, which means not a summary of its content (“Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet examines the lives of star-crossed lovers.”), nor a statement of its themes (“James Joyce’s Ulysses explores the tension between cultural determinism and individual will”).  As above, these statements offer good starting points, but once you have identified a specific topic, you need to assert something about that topic.  This is where verbs come in.  The above thesis statements have no verbs other than “examines” and “explores,” which convey nothing particular.  By contrast, “de-civilizes” in the Blake thesis articulates precisely what industrial labor does to workers.

Important:  A good thesis says something about the text that the reader will care about.  Ex:  “Milton uses enjambment to forcefully juxtapose the light and dark imagery.”  This is a suggestive observation, but what is at stake?  Does the light/dark juxtaposition tell us something larger, more generally applicable?  Are light and dark linked to moral or aesthetic values?  Is Milton suggesting something about sharp contrast or uncertainty or ambivalence?

Evidence

Every claim you make must be supported by evidence that you will collect via close reading.  To “close read” means to examine a small section of text, attending to its various levels of composition.  Key to close reading is starting with the smallest and most basic components of a poem before larger and more abstract ones.  Below is a list of poetic components and some questions to guide your investigations.

1.      Sound and shape.  Determine meter and rhyme scheme.  Where do these patterns vary (slant rhymes, metric substitutions)?  How many stanzas are there?  How many lines per stanza?  Can you identify the poem as belonging to a discrete genre (sonnet, ballad, etc.)?

2.      Words and Phrases.  Is the vocabulary informal or elevated?  Are there any unusual or archaic words?  Words with double meanings or hidden connotations?  Where is the syntax unusual or confusing?  Which words or phrases repeat?  What parts of speech are used?  For example, is the author piling up adjectives or avoiding action verbs?

3.      Figurative Language and Rhetorical Devices.  Do you see metaphor or synecdoche or personification?  What does using non-literal description allow the author to do?  Do you see anaphora or epistrophe; hyperbole, meiosis, or litotes?  What effects do these compositional structures have?

4.      description.  What kind of imagery is presented?  Are there sensory details offered?  Do objects or people being described seem to carry symbolic weight?

5.      Speaker.  Whose point of view you are receiving?  Is the speaker a particular individual or an abstract voice?  Is the poet overtly distancing herself from the speaker, or connecting herself to the speaker?  Does the speaker address the reader?

6.      Theme and Argument.  What is the object or concept the poem examines and what does the poet say about it?  Does the poem present an argument or opinion?  Is it a meditation without a clear conclusion?  Does it narrate a series of events?  Does it aim to arouse certain emotions?  Look for tension, climax, contrast, ambiguity.

As you read, consider how these various observations relate to each other.   Broadly, what is the relation between form and content?  Look at the rhyme, meter, enjambment, caesuras: how does the sound of the language relate to its meaning?  Does the form allow you to read quickly or does it delay your comprehension?  Does the form emphasize certain words?  Do all the parts of the poem (lines, stanzas) flow together or do they seem fragmented?

Once you have collected your textual observations, explain them clearly to your reader.  In particular, show your reader the chain or thought that led you from a passage to your interpretation of it.  It is not enough simply to jam a quotation up against your claim.  Ex:

In the line “that‘s as good/As if thou [God] hadst sealed my pardon with thy blood,” Donne lowers god to the humble level of common mortal life.

In order to make the analytical work clear, the writer needs to explain which specific elements of the quotation support the point, and how they do so:

The eye-rhyme of “…that‘s as good/As if thou [God] hadst sealed my pardon with thy blood,” associates the utterly prosaic word “good” with the truly miraculous concept of God’s blood, conflating god with the mundane terminology of everyday speech.

Things to Avoid

o   Filler.  Cut out meaningless words such as “indeed,” “quite,” “rather.”  Cut out modifiers that are not vital.  Cut out observations or quotations that do not directly relate to your thesis.  The more you streamline your essay, the more precise and elegant it will be.

o   Meandering and dilution.  State your argument at the beginning of your essay and your main point at the beginning of each paragraph.  Do not stumble upon your claims at the end of a long wander.  State your argument with conviction; do not dilute it by with “Perhaps…” or “It’s as if…”

o   Ready-made language.  Clichés, idioms, common metaphors: these are so dull and imprecise that they obscure rather than convey meaning.

o   Passive voice.  Passive voice obscures the subject.  Ex: “Simon Lee is considered an outsider.”  Who exactly thinks this? 

o   Imprecise terms.  Any literary voice is a speaker; only a voice recounting a series of events is a narrator.  A poem with blocks of lines separated by blank spaces has stanzas (Italian for “rooms”); a poem whose sections are divided by indentation only has verse paragraphs (ex: “Crossing the Alps”).