English
398: Critical Writing
Assignment
for Paper #3 (due Tuesday, December 5, at 3:30 p.m.; please bring a
hard copy of your essay with you and turn it in when you come to class
for our final exam).
This essay assignment is designed to
familiarize you with the methods of interpretation discussed by Lynn in
chapter 6 of Texts and Contexts:
"Connecting the Text: Historical, Postcolonial, and Cultural Studies."
Given the focus of the assignment, you will need to consult some
sources other than those on our course syllabus. Specifically, drawing
on those sources and on the ideas discussed in Lynn's chapter, you will
need to connect McEwan's novel Atonement
to cultural and historical contexts that are relevant for interpreting
the novel. The following are some suggested contexts to investigate in
this connection, but you may well identify other contexts that you
would prefer to write about:
--The class system in 1930s England
--Educational and career opportunities for women in 1930s England
--The battle of Dunkirk, and the retreat leading up to it
--Companies or individuals that may have profited by supplying
provisions to troops in WWII
--Prisoners in England whose sentences were commuted in return for
service in the military during WWII
--The experiences of nurses who served in the early days of WWII
--The bombing of the Balham underground station in London in 1940
As we will discuss in class, the New Historicists and practitioners of
Cultural Studies have contrasted their approaches with that used by the
"old historicists," who think of literary texts as mere reflections or
mirrors of the historical contexts from which they emerged. The newer
historical approaches instead envision texts and contexts as being
situated on the same plane: representations of characters and events
may alter the way we think about history, just as placing a text in its
historical situation can illuminate that text in new ways. Accordingly,
in completing this assignment you should not merely note the historical
details to which McEwan alludes in his novel. Rather, you should focus
on how McEwan places his novel in dialogue with history. What aspects
of the historical record does the novel foreground, and what aspects
does it background? Why, for that matter, has McEwan chosen to set his
novel in this particular period? How does the historical setting relate
to (complement, underscore, complicate, undercut) the major themes
developed in the novel? How might historically or culturally oriented
approaches like the ones Lynn discusses in chapter 6 need to be
modified or adjusted when it comes to historically self-aware texts
like McEwan's? In other words, McEwan's novel is in a sense already
engaged in an active reinterpretation of history itself. How does that
affect our own attempts to interpret the novel?
In researching this assignment you should use at least 4 outside
sources, at least two of which should be articles in scholarly
journals. As we learned from our library instructional skills session,
not only will the library catalog enable you to search for books
relevant to the topic you wish to explore; what is more, the library's
databases allow you to get the content of scholarly articles right on
your desktops. Other articles may be publicly available on the
internet. Wherever you scout out your sources, please do your best to
make sure that the
sources are authoritative and reliable (see Lynn, pp. 257-58, and
Hacker, pp. 103-110, for strategies you can use to evaluate the
reliability of online sources). And you should also feel free to ask a
reference librarian if you need additional assistance.
Please provide a list of Works Cited formatted in MLA or Modern
Language Association style (described by Hacker in her chaper on MLA
papers; you can also find details about MLA formatting online). Note:
your Works Cited page need not be included in your total word count.