During the semester, you will write two essays. One must focus on a prose work, while another must focus on poetry. Also, one must be a Close Reading Essay, in which you analyze some combination of theme and technique in a single work; the other must be an Literary Context Essay, in which you examine how the ideas current during the American Renaissance, as expressed in Emerson’s essays, manifest themselves in a particular work. Finally, you must submit one of the two essays during the first half of the semester and the other during the last half. The specific due dates (listed on the calendar) depend upon which work you are writing about. As long as you meet these requirements, you may submit the two essays in either order.

Essay topic choices, first half of the semester, with due dates:

Author	Work or Works	Due Date
Nathaniel Hawthorne	“Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter”	26 September
Nathaniel Hawthorne	The Scarlet Letter	3 October
Herman Melville	Benito Cereno	10 October
Walt Whitman	Any poem or poems from the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass	24 October

Essay topic choices, second half of the semester, with due dates:

Author	Work or Works	Due Date
Walt Whitman	Any poem or poems from later editions of Leaves of Grass	1 November
Walt Whitman	Specimen Days	1 November
Herman Melville	Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale	21 November
Emily Dickinson	Any poem or poems	12 December

Neither essay asks you to perform research. Focus on the primary text or texts in question. You may use any information or analysis discussed in class freely, without attribution.

Reading a text can provide one type of understanding. Reading a text while considering its place in a larger context provides another. As we have discussed, examining various types of context can increase our understanding of a work. These types of context include biographical context, socio-historical context, philosophical context, literary context, and critical context. For this essay, I want you to focus on philosophical and literary context. Specifically, I want you to make connections between the work or works you are examining and the ideas expressed in one of Emerson’s essays. Your goal should be to use Emerson to help you explain some theme you find in the work.

While I have assigned particular essays alongside other specific authors, you do not need to restrict yourself only to those combinations. You may use any of Emerson’s essays to discuss any of the other works.

Note: I am not asking you to argue for direct influence. As we have discussed, Emerson was the leading intellectual figure of his era, and it is quite likely that any author you choose to write about read him. Indeed, we know that all of the other authors we are discussing read Emerson extensively. But even if an author did not read a particular essay, Emerson’s ideas were such an important part of the intellectual life of the era that they will manifest themselves in these works even if the author was not consciously thinking of Emerson at the time. In other words, the point here isn’t to be a kind of literary detective and discover proof that Melville was thinking of Emerson when he wrote Moby-Dick or Dickinson was thinking of Emerson when she wrote a particular poem. Rather, the point is make a thematic connection, and to use Emerson to improve your readers’ understanding of a particular work.

To write an effective paper of this kind, you need a strong thesis, rigorous argumentation, and carefully chosen textual support.

Again, you may not use secondary sources for this assignment. That means no research. I am not interested in your ability to look up what someone else thinks of a work or what connection someone else has made between Emerson and, for example, Dickinson. I am only interested in your ability to read discerningly and argue persuasively. Using outside sources for this essay would be a violation of the Honor Code.

You should assume your readers are familiar with the work. Therefore, you should never bother with summarizing any part of it. At most, a short phrase or sentence to orient the reader when you are about to examine a particular passage. For example, you might say something like “The scene in which Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest offers some of the clearest evidence of Pearl’s strangeness.” Then you would analyze one or more passages from that chapter.

You should also assume your readers have a college-level vocabulary and own a dictionary. Thus you do not have to define words, unless the meaning the poet intends is other than the usual one. The phrase “Webster’s Dictionary defines” does not belong in a college-level essay.

On the other hand, you should not assume your readers are familiar with the Emerson essay you think is relevant. You must therefore thoroughly explain the relevant ideas from that essay. Do not, however, attempt to summarize the entire essay or discuss multiple arguments Emerson makes in it.

The thesis should make a connection between an idea you Emerson develops in one of his essays and a theme you find in the work or works you are examining. However, you need not mention Emerson in the thesis.

Remember that your subject for this essay is the poem (or poems), short story, or novel you are analyzing. Emerson’s essay should provide context; in a sense, it should be provide a key you use to unlock some aspect of the work. As a result, you should not divide your essay equally between Emerson and your subject. While you will certainly quote both, most of the quotations should be from the work on which you are focusing, not the Emerson essay you use to discuss it.

Much of this essay should involve juxtaposing Emerson’s ideas with those you find in the particular work, but you cannot simply note a similarity and then stop. Exploring that connection in detail is essential to making an effective argument. Of course, it will also provide you with content.

Choose your quotations with your supporting arguments in mind. Quote only enough of any passage so that you can support your point effectively. A good general rule is that if you quote it, you need to comment on it. If you quote four sentences in a story or essay or six lines in a poem but only comment on the last two, something is wrong. Of course, the quotation needs to make sense out-of-context, but in general students begin by quoting too much, or quoting in too big chunks. That said, you should probably quote the work at least once in every paragraph except for the introduction and conclusion.

Once you have identified the best passages to use 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 — not the whole thesis, but a point that supports it — then introduce a quotation (and introduce means setting it up in a meaningful way, not just starting a paragraph with “Then Hawthorne writes”), 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. The listserv posts have been opportunities to practice this.

For poems, do not automatically quote only whole lines of poetry. Sometimes starting or ending your quotation in the middle of a line is necessary in order for the quotation to make sense. However, again you must be careful that your quotations make sense out of context, or that you set them up in a way that makes the meaning clear. Quotations of a single word or merely a two- or three-word phrase are almost never useful.

The paper may be either open- or closed-form; literary essays lend themselves to an open-form approach but either form can be effective. (See the description and examples of open-form and closed-form linked from the “Resources” page if you do not know what these are.) Either way, you should have an introduction to the paper in which you establish either the issue you are exploring (open-form), or the issue and your thesis (closed-form). You should not quote the work in your first paragraph. 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 (especially if the essay is 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 the poem in your conclusion. If you could swap the positions of your introductory and concluding paragraphs, and they would still make sense, your conclusion is poor.

You must quote and cite the work properly according to MLA format. See the Quotations and Citations Guidelines and your writer’s handbook for help with formatting quotations and citations.

Follow the Format Rules for the document.

The due date varies according to the option chosen as shown above. Please submit your essay as a Word document by midnight on the day it is due. Send it directly to me, not to the listserv. Name the file [your last name]-lc[author name]; for example, if your last name is Williams and you are writing about Whitman, the file name should be Williams-lcWhitman.docx (or doc).

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 1450-1750 words) due to 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 quality of your understanding of and insights into the work, the way you integrate your analysis of Emerson with your argument, 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 +3 (not just grammatically correct but concise and stylistically graceful) to -10 (extensive and varied problems). See the Style Score Guide for further explanation.