Essay 2: Two Views of One Text

Essay 2 Proposal Due: Tuesday, 17 December (format will be discussed in class)
Essay 2 Final Draft Due: Sunday, 11 January (via E-class)
Length and Format: 2000-2200 words (not including the Works Cited), Times New Roman 12 point font, double-spaced, and MLA formatted
Primary Text: Shelly Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, or
Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller
Lens text (secondary text): One of the theoretical texts from our reader: Benjamin, Althusser, Woolf, Freud, Baudrillard. If you wish to use another text, then you must propose such use and receive approval from me prior to the due date of the Essay 2 Proposal.

Your text should cite no other texts apart from the primary object of study and the lens.

The Assignment
Essay two asks you to interpret either Calvino or Jackson’s novel in two ways, using a lens to construct your second interpretation. Your preliminary interpretation will be an interpretation of the text’s commentary about a specific subject (love, death, loneliness, etc.). It should not be a summary, but a close reading of the text. Your second interpretation will use the lens (a concept drawn from your secondary text) to reinterpret the text’s commentary about that subject, thereby adjusting and evolving your preliminary thesis.

The subject of both interpretations should be the same. If your first interpretation concerns what Calvino has to say about “love,” then your second interpretation should too. The difference will be that the lens will complicate either what you interpret the text as saying about that subject, or where and how you see it going about making that commentary.

Approaching the assignment
For those less familiar, we will discuss the basics of lens-use in class. In short, though, there are four things to keep in mind when writing such a paper:

1) The thesis of the paper should incorporate both the preliminary and evolved thesis. Your main goal is to demonstrate how the theoretical lens transforms a reader’s understanding of the text. Thus, you want your thesis to address how the lens will evolve the thesis right from the start. This should appear in the introduction.

2) The preliminary analysis (beginning with the first body paragraph) will necessarily be shorter than the second, lens-driven analysis. In many ways, the preliminary analysis can be used just to give the reader a “general” reading of the text—something that will help highlight the distinction of your lens-driven reading—and so could be very, very brief. It should still be a competent reading of the text. Here your practice on response papers should help with concision.

3) The lens-driven reading should mainly cover the same evidence as the preliminary reading. The reason for this is that the lens should allow you to see the same words, passages, images, and events differently. The lens, however, may encourage you to also look at areas of the text that you neglected before. It is for these reasons—that you are going back and comparing this new interpretation to the preliminary one, while adding new evidence—that the lens-driven interpretation will take more space in your text than will the first.

4) Just like Essay 1, this is not a compare/contrast paper. At no point will you be analyzing the theoretical text. Instead, you will be taking a single idea from said text and applying it to a novel.