Your goal in this essay will be to weave together your observations of and ruminations on Calvino’s works into a coherent essay. To do that, you must quote three of the works we have read: Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and the memos from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, but you have two options for how you approach this task:

Option 1: Use two of Calvino’s values (“Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” “Multiplicity”) to help you write an interpretive essay on either Invisible Cities or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Your thesis should not name the individual values (though you may mention them in your introduction); a thesis that does that will tend to be superficial and resemble the dull and generic thesis statements common to five-paragraph essays. Instead, the thesis should focus on some theme of the book you are analyzing. The bulk of your analysis should consist of close reading of passages from that book supplemented by quotations from the memos that explain the values. Your goal is to use the values to help you analyze one of these two highly unusual works.

Option 2: Use both Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to make an argument about how one of Calvino’s values manifests itself in his work, and what that value contributes to his style. In this case, your essay’s focus should be the particular value. Your thesis should address the value and need not mention the other two works. You will most likely need to quote the memo in which he explains that value frequently in the essay, juxtaposing what he says about it with passages from the other two books that you think exemplify aspects of that value. Try to balance your use of the two books: quoting one five times and the other twice is not a good approach.

Do not try to write an essay in which you deal with both fictional works and more than one value. That is too much to handle in an essay of this length and will result in an unfocused essay.

Once again, you will need a strong thesis, rigorous argumentation, and carefully chosen support. The paper may be either open- or closed-form, which means the thesis may appear either at the end of the introduction or near the beginning of the conclusion; literary essays lend themselves to an open-form approach, but either form can be effective.

You should assume your readers have read (but not memorized) the two Calvino fictional texts, so do not spend any time summarizing the overall plot or structure of the books. Assume they also have a college-level vocabulary, and own a dictionary — thus you do not have to define words, unless the meaning Calvino intends is not the usual one.

To support your ideas, your primary evidence for your points must be the texts themselves. You should quote frequently. I expect that virtually every body paragraph will contain at least one quotation, and sometimes more. Generally, however, quotations are less effective in the introduction and conclusion.

As important as your sources are, remember that they do not make your case for you. They are evidence that you can use to support your points, but you still need to articulate those points clearly and make thoughtful connections between the evidence and your claims. The ratio of commentary to quotation is always key: too little textual evidence and your argument can become nebulous and hard to follow; too little commentary on a quotation and your essay becomes a collage and you disappear from it. To be valuable in your essay, quotations must always be mediated through your consciousness. In other words, you need to give your readers a reason to be glad that they are reading those quotations in your essay, rather than on their own.

Once you have identified the passages you wish to quote for support, you need both to set them up and comment on them so that they support the thesis. Your general approach should be to establish the point you are trying to make in the paragraph or the issue about which you are making a point — a point that supports the thesis — then introduce a quotation (and introduce means setting it up in a meaningful way, not just starting a paragraph with “Calvino says”), quote accurately, and then explain how the quotation supports the statement. You must both introduce the quotations and comment on them; as a result, you absolutely cannot either begin or end a paragraph with a quotation. Remember: the quotations cannot make your argument for you; you need to comment on everything you quote.

You may not use additional sources for this assignment.

You must quote and cite the sources properly according to MLA format. See the Quotations and Citations Guidelines and your writer’s handbook for help with formatting quotations and citations. Note that you will probably never need to put “Calvino” in a parenthetical citation, as that will be obvious, but you may (depending on how you set up the quotation) need to use the title of the memo or a shortened version of the book title (Cities) or (Traveler) in addition to the page number. Your works cited should cite the specific memo or memos you quote as distinct sources, not Six Memos for the Next Millennium as a single source.

Follow the Format Rules for the document.

The conclusion of your paper either states and develops the thesis while connecting it to the claims you have made so far (open-form), or it briefly re-connects the thesis to the points the essay has made without repeating them fully, and ideally makes one further point (closed-form) to make the reader glad you didn’t end one paragraph earlier. Just as you should not quote in your first paragraph, you should also not be quoting and analyzing quotations in your conclusion.

A complete draft of your essay is due on 29 April. Before class, e-mail the document to me. Note that this should not be a first, rough, or partial draft, but one that is complete and as persuasive as you can make it. It must have an appropriate thesis, an introduction, a conclusion, and a works cited page. You must quote and cite the texts frequently for support and cite the quotations properly. The writing should be clear and grammatical. I will then divide the class into peer response groups to which I will distribute the essay.. Your will then write up extensive responses to the essays so that you can all discuss them on 4 May.

After receiving your peers’ feedback, you will revise this essay and submit it to me by e-mail by Saturday, 9 May, before midnight. Along with the essay, you will submit a reflection in which you discuss the substantive changes you have made as a result of the peer response process, your sense of what the essay does particularly well, and what aspects of the essay you think still need improvement. This reflection should be a separate, properly formatted document that you attach to the same e-mail to which you attach the essay itself. It should be well-written and properly paragraphed, but the style may be informal. It does not need a title.

1250-1500 words of your own writing. Note that the word count should not include quotations, the Works Cited, the title and header, nor any other means of artificially extending the essay’s apparent length. The actual length will be longer (typically 1500-1800 words) due to all the quotations, which need to be plentiful. Use the Word Count function to calculate the count with and without quotations (but please leave out the header and Work Cited) and put the results at the bottom of the paper.

The separate reflection should be 350-400 words.

The quality of your understanding of and insights into the works and your use of quotations to support your ideas will determine your Content score. This score can be raised or lowered by the quality of your writing, including. your organization, grammar, style, concision, and adherence to the rules of citation and format. The Content Score (presuming the essay is of the proper length and responds to the assignment) can range from F (59) to A+ (100). The Style score can range from +5 (not just grammatically correct but concise and stylistically graceful) to -15 (extensive and varied problems). See the Style Score Guide document for further explanation.

To reward you for stylistic improvement, I will give you a bonus equal to one half the improvement you achieve on the Style score from your Close Reading essay to this one. In other words, if you lost 6 points on your first essay because of stylistic problems but on this essay you only lose 1, you will receive a 2.5 point bonus (6 – 1 = 5 ÷ 2 = 2.5).

Your reflection can earn you a bonus of up to 5 points on your final score. Failing to submit a reflection, however, will result in a 5 point deduction.