English
398: Critical Writing
This assignment is designed to
familiarize you with New
Criticism; the assignment asks you to bring techniques of close reading
to bear on Ibsen's
A Doll's House (read pp. 537-540
and 819-878 of
Landy and Allen). To complete this assignment, choose a scene from
Ibsen's play that you find particularly
significant (for example, because of its content, themes, imagery,
symbolism, etc.) and develop a 1,000-word close reading of the scene
and
its significance in the context of the play. Please double-space your
essay
and use your computer's word-count function to check the exact number
of words. List the number of words at the end of your essay, making
sure that it is within 10% of the target length (900-1,000 words).
Because our focus in the first part of the course is on how to use the
approach known as New Criticism to develop interpretations of texts,
you should go back and reread chapter 3 of Lynn's Texts and Contexts before starting
on your essay. Pay especially close attention to pages 46-55 of the
chapter, where Lynn walks you through the process of writing about a
literary text using key New Critical ideas. In particular, I'd like you
to focus on the three steps he discusses on page 46. Further, I'd
suggest that you try to pursue these steps in one of two ways.
One way is to look for complexities of the kind Lynn describes
(tensions, ironies, paradoxes, oppositions, ambiguities) in the scene
itself, and then discuss how the larger idea or ideas unifying the play
as a whole allow us to resolve those tensions. Here you would be
discussing how the complexities evident in the scene help illuminate
the larger idea(s) of the play as a whole, while also showing how the
larger idea(s) help us put the scene's complexities or internal
tensions into a broader context and make sense of them as parts of that
context. The other way to follow the steps would be to explore tensions
between the play taken as a whole and the specific scene that you are
examining. In other words, does the scene itself seem to conflict with
or be in tension with the play's other parts? Does something that
happens in the scene (or something that one of the characters says)
seem to stand in a paradoxical relation to what goes on in the rest of
the play? If so, can you identify in the work as a whole a larger idea
or unifying theme that allows you to resolve this apparent conflict or
tension, and to interpret the scene you are discussing as a part
connected organically to Ibsen's larger design?