Midterm Project
Due 3/24 in class via email
Our midterm assignment can take one of two forms, both of which I'll elaborate below. The first is aimed at helping you make connections among the texts in a given unit or across units. The second emphasizes something different: the ways in which the abstractions of "theory" might be leveraged in practical ways to strengthen, deepen, and broaden your literary critical arguments. In each case, you will write about 1500-2500 words and need not use full-blown MLA format: since we're all reading the same texts from the same editions, you can simply give parentetical page citations for each reference to a theorist.
Choice 1:
As I hope you noticed, each unit of the course is structured around a seminal thinker or thinkers who originated a new discourse. In a well-considered essay, take Marx or Saussure** and explain a) the fundamental structures/concepts they originated and b) the way subsequent thinkers developed and/or contested this discourse over the course of the 20th/21st centuries. Be specific, cite the texts we read together with parenthetical references to pages, and show points of implied agreement and disagreement between thinkers.
**You could start with Nietzsche instead, since his essay appears prior to Saussure’s work. But de Saussure gives the fullest sense of a new discourse for my money and is thus the best jumping-off point for most writers.
Choice 2:
Take a literary critical essay you've written in the past and explore some ways you could revise it in light of what you're read so far this term. I don't want you to actually revise the essay; instead, I'd like to you describe what such a revision might look like, beginning with changes to the "thesis" or frame of the argument and proceeding through other moments of the text that you ignored before but seem more pressing in light of X or Y theory, more research that might be required on the "paratext" (Genette), a "distant reading" of a genre (Moretti), an "ideological" reading (Marx, Althusser), etc. You will submit two things: a) a copy of the original essay you imagine revising; and b) an essay of 1500-2500 words that describes your new approach.
